Despite the consensus that urbanization is the inevitable path for China to further its progress toward a stronger and more prosperous nation, a roadmap is yet to be drawn up to ensure it is a healthy process conducive to sustainable development.

Premier Li Keqiang said that urbanization is a complicated process and different opinions must be solicited for the drawing up of a desirable plan after he listened to the opinions of academicians from the academies of sciences and engineering recently who had conducted surveys and research on the issue in the past year.

The process should not just be the expansion of small cities into big ones and big ones into mega ones. Neither should it be a process just to build urban homes for villagers turned workers and turn arable fields into land for construction purposes.

Among other things, the most worrying aspect of urbanization is that it may become a pretext for local governments to randomly expand local towns and cities.

Early this year, more than 100 county governments proposed expanding their counties into cities, which means the expansion of their county seats and the occupation of more arable land for non-agricultural purposes.

Instead of taking into consideration the questions of how to improve the quality of life for villagers, how to optimize the infrastructure of existing counties and how to make efforts for the coordinated and substantial progress of both rural and urban areas, they are obsessed with sales of land for fat local revenues.

Whatever the roadmap for China's urbanization, its success depends, to a large extent, on whether local government leaders are willing to let the process bring real benefits to both urban and rural residents. It is also important that they have a vision for sustainable development at both the local and national levels.

For example, urbanization at the expense of agriculture would never be healthy and sustainable. Rather it would be disastrous. Nor would a process that rapidly expands the gap of the haves and have-nots. And neither would the practice that causes unbearable environmental pollution.

Urgent as urbanization is for continuous economic growth, the central authorities must be cautious in mapping out policies for every stage of the strategy so that urbanization will develop in the right direction.

(China Daily 09/09/2013 page8)