When I first toured the US in the 1980s, I was impressed not by the skyscrapers, but by the cleanliness of the suburbs and rural areas — more so than the downtowns. In China, it is the opposite. The closer a place is to the center of a city, and the bigger the city, the cleaner it usually is. In the old days, only a few metropolises and a few boulevards were presentable. Nowadays many second- and third-tier cities are sprucing up.
If you venture out to the far outskirts of a city or visit a small town, you will instantly know that street cleaning is not a daily activity. Whenever I go back to my hometown, which is a small place in a very prosperous province, I get the feeling that keeping the streets and public spaces clean is a somewhat foreign notion reserved for big occasions. Had the littering in the Beijing subway car happened in my hometown, nobody would have batted an eye, let alone posted a critical blog complete with photos and mockery.
As lately as a few decades ago, the great bulk of China's population lived in rural areas. They were not allowed to search for jobs in cities. In the most stringent era, they had to obtain special permits to visit a city. Now more than half the nation is made up of urbanites. The countryside is increasingly romanticized, from a backwater of poverty to a sanctuary of Zen living. Given the pace of urbanization and the context of all the dizzying changes, it is almost a miracle that China's cities, big and medium-sized, are relatively dirt free and crime free — except for the smothering smog, that is.
But urban management has the unenviable job of making a city livable while most of the forces affecting it are beyond its control. The central government makes decisions and allocates resources that disproportionately go to big cities, which, in turn, create jobs and attract an endless flow of migrant workers. The go-west campaign in the past decade has increased the attractiveness of the hinterlands and slowed down the human flow. But still, everything being equal, young people would prefer to live in cities, and usually the bigger the city the better.
In a way, cities have to tip the scale to keep the inflow in check. For example, cities like Beijing have imposed a restriction for minimum space per renter as a safety measure in case of fire, which has in effect raised rents and made the city unaffordable for the "ants tribe", the army of job seekers eking out a living in squalid basements. But is it fair? It depends on whether you are part of the middle class or still struggling at the bottom of the social ladder.
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