Drunk with the recent success of combining capitalism with her “communist” political structure, the Chinese government has embarked on a grand scale of central planning—China plans to build the largest megacity in the world!
This from the Telegraph,
China is planning to create the world's biggest mega city by merging nine cities to create a metropolis twice the size of Wales with a population of 42 million.
City planners in south China have laid out an ambitious plan to merge together the nine cities that lie around the Pearl River Delta.
The "Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One" scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales.
The new mega-city will cover a large part of China's manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing. Together, they account for nearly a tenth of the Chinese economy.
Over the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together, at a cost of some 2 trillion yuan (£190 billion). An express rail line will also connect the hub with nearby Hong Kong.
China’s government seems increasingly manifesting signs of overconfidence, a harbinger of bubble bust.
As previously explained in China’s Bubble and the Austrian Business Cycle, imploding bubbles are frequently highlighted or foreordained by “grand” braggadocio (mostly real estate) projects, but instead of the private sector, this time the symptom could emerge from the government.
In addition, while many experts have been obsessed with the supposed certainty of the “deepening” of urbanization trends, I am not one of them. That’s because I see technology as a pivotal offsetting force that leads not to concentration but to decentralization. And technology induced decentralization should apply to most social activities which includes politics, economics, demographics and others.
This is one aspect, which I think, central planners in China or elsewhere seems to have overlooked. Of course, substituting their “expert” knowledge over people’s preferences is another major factor, as exhibited by some of China’s existing ghost cities
