Radical change in Chongqing

Across the Yangtze from Chongqing, with its spiky skyline stretching east and west as far as the eye can see, our bus picks its way through the muddy streets of old Jiangbei Town. It looks like a London neighbourhood during the Blitz. The buildings, a mix of 1950s Russian-style apartment blocks and older wooden houses, are partially demolished, as if the crew had just stopped for lunch. And yet, like every nook and cranny in this city, the place is swarming with people. Old couples sit together in houses without doors or windows. A dozen ragged people bend over steaming bowls at a street kitchen. A woman perches on a heap of rubble hacking mortar off bricks.

There used to be 35,000 people living here. In fact it has been a community for thousands of years. But in twelve months, 90% of them have been cleared off to make way for a 200-hectare, £2bn development designed to give this rambling industrial megalopolis a shiny new commercial heart.

The man behind this unsettling transformation is Liu Gong, vice general manager of the municipal development organ charged with delivering the Jiangbei Central Business District (CBD). He is also Chair of the West China Branch of the CIOB.

For a moment, forget Beijing. Forget Shanghai. Places like Chongqing form the meat and potatoes of China’s booming construction market. Called the largest city in the world, it covers 84,000 square km, is home to 31m people and is growing faster than the national average (13% last year). Once it was just a big, industrial city in the provinces. But in 1997 the central government turned it into a municipal city, making it the fourth in China under the state’s direct control (Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin are the others). Bumped up in status, Chongqing veered onto the development superhighway. The government plans to spend more than £650m per year on transport and other infrastructure there.

And the Jiangbei Town CBD is the jewel in Chongqing’s crown. The government is spending billions on bridges and roads to plug the CBD into Chongqing’s existing commercial bloodstream. It’s like a new City of London shooting up in the centre of Bradford.

But where will the investment come from?

“Ah,” says Liu Gong. “That’s a good question.”

They need investors. The land, owned by the government, will be cut up into 156 parcels and sold to developers. None have sold yet though Liu says there is strong interest from several quarters. Liu says they also need western expertise, from the basic (producing brightly coloured macadam) to the strategic (using PFI).

Back in the project office, a promotional video majors on caressing angles of two towers at the centre of the CBD while an eight-bar techspirational soundtrack loops in the background. A portentous American-accented voice explains that the twin themes of the development will be Memory and Future, but for the people clinging to the neighbourhood, their home belongs to the past. Liu admits it has been tough to move them. There has been resistance, but the government sorts it. They built a new town for them 10km away and bussed them over to see it. Wouldn’t you rather live here, they asked? Private toilets? Children’s playgrounds?

Most agreed, but clearly some haven’t. They had better get moving, though. Demolition is scheduled to start in earnest soon and will be over in a few months.

In the UK it would be impossible to shift 35,000 people in a year to make way for a speculative stab at, say, a new Canary Wharf. But in China, grand uprootings are par for the course. And this is small fry. Upriver, two million people have been shifted to accommodate the Three Gorges Dam project, undertaken to provide power and to control the flooding that has killed thousands in the past. It’s a sensitive topic. Forced evictions sparked by wildfire property development around the country have caused the most significant rash of public dissent since Tiananmen Square in 1989. One Westerner based in China says that while we may find the state’s decisions distasteful, they are not daft. From Liu’s perspective, while Jiangbei Town may have been home to 35,000, it sits on a patch of ground officials believe is strategically imperative to a thousand times more people.