What China Can Teach Europe - Daniel Bell via NYTimes.com

Daniel Bell tells us that we shouldn’t think of China as a conventional Westphalian nation-state. It might be more profitable to think of China as a network of competing — and cooperating — semi-autonomous cities. And these cities might be a harbinger of what other cities elsewhere need to become:

Daniel Bell via NYTimes.com
[…] when it comes to economics, China is more a thin political union composed of semiautonomous cities — some with as many inhabitants as a European country — than an all-powerful centralized government that uniformly imposes its will on the whole country.
And competition among these huge cities is an important reason for China’s economic dynamism. The similar look of China’s megacities masks a rivalry as fierce as that among European countries.

China’s urban economic boom began in the late 1970s as an experiment with market reforms in China’s coastal cities. Shenzhen, the first “special economic zone,” has grown from a small fishing village in 1979 into a booming metropolis of 10 million today. Many other cities, from Guangzhou to Tianjin, soon followed the path of market reforms.

Today, cities vie ruthlessly for competitive advantage using tax breaks and other incentives that draw foreign and domestic investors. Smaller cities specialize in particular products, while larger ones flaunt their educational capacity and cultural appeal. It has led to the most rapid urban “economic miracle” in history.

Bell contrasts two very different cities — Chongqing, the size of Austria and with 33 million citizens, 23 million of which are registered as farmers, and Chengdu, 14 million people in the heart of Sichuan — stating that Chengdu has worked on a bottom-up basis with very clear property rights and Chongqing the reverse, with sweeping land grabs displacing millions.

China, it seems, is trying out different models: an evolutionary experiment. Bell fails to mention that Chengdu was the last city held by Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang before fleeing to Taiwan. The Kuomintang had brought a large number of business people to the area as the slowly were pushed out of other regions in China, so it makes sense that the city would be a locale to test a ‘gentle’ approach to urbanization’s dislocations.