My work on a new phase of urbanization in China is published this week in Le Figaro Magazine, one of France’s respected general news publications.
This story started out as a front-page assignment for the New York Times a few years ago. Since the Time’s publication, I continued shooting the theme on my own as I traveled around China, resulting in the current expanded work.
Faced with shrinking exports and slowing growth, Chinese Communist leaders are pushing ahead with a gigantic, historic plan to uproot hundreds of millions of farmers and turn their fields into urban dwellings in six years – to 2020 — to create a giant new middle class, boost demand, and re-shape the country’s infrastructure.
China’s rural diaspora began decades ago, and as a young news correspondent at the end of the 1990s I wrote about people leaving their villages for factory work in cities. Now, the government, not individuals, dictates this period of resettlement. As apartment blocks are erected on farmland, villagers turn – willingly or not – into local urbanites. People call this “warehousing”, because farmers are stacked vertically to free up land for commercial use. Some pop-up cities are already inhabited, while others are little more than blueprints. China says it aims to create one billion urbanites by year 2030.
I look at this with the perspective of both a questioning outsider and a concerned citizen. As I crisscross the country talking with farmers swept up by these abrupt changes, I come to the realization Beijing has gotten the maths right and, with brutal efficiency, created a massive consumptive class out of millions of peasants with a social engineering project the world has not seen.
Visit my personal website for the full text and photo story in English.