Quote Originally Posted by jape View Post
It will be interesting to see how the Chinese overcome the Mumbai ghetto type problems of even more country dwellers moving into cities, the ghetto suburbs of Washington USA, and the unrest of the muddle eyast.
Jape, though I hate such terminology, I'm about as "liberal" as they come. I believe society (though not necessarily government) should do its utmost to provide a safety net that provides services and care for all, while protecting our freedoms to pursue the life and work of our choosing. I don't believe in Darwinian solutions to socioeconomic inequality. But ensuring health care and education and maybe even minimal nutrition to all, even/especially the the most unfortunate, is a far cry from enshrining a right for every citizen to own and operate a car without society's agreement that this is indeed a reasonable and rational thing to do.

Furthermore, I'm very leery of the idea that Beijing's licensing system is intended to prevent some kind of automotive disenfranchisement of the poor. More likely it's about automotive disenfranchisement of the middle class and rich, who in just a very few short years have become accustomed to measuring their social status by what kind of car they drive. These are the people who work in the ministries and who could be expected to revolt if suddenly a license plate cost the equivalent of several months' salary.

As for how China is dealing with rapid urbanization, well, that's an act in progress, and very hard to fully grasp. There are 300 or 400 million migrant workers sloshing around urban China, and it's largely they who build the flash skyscrapers and bullet trains, yet they have almost no legal status in the cities where they work. They cannot bring their families, or enroll their children in schools, or participate in the urban workers' health insurance schemes, etc. They live mainly at their worksites, crammed 6 or 8 to a room in modular housing, or if they've lost their job they indeed gravitate into what anywhere else would be called slums or ghettos.

And it's not only blue collar workers in this situation. Over the past decade, the number of university places and graduates has climbed five-fold or more, so that now there are more than 7 million fresh graduates pouring into the job market every year -- only to find that there are maybe only 1 million new jobs. They too are gathering in slums and ghettos. And when a slum gets slummy enough, causing the authorities to lose sleep over possible unrest, orders are issued and the slummy slum disappears overnight, and untold tens of thousands of disenfranchised workers and graduates scramble to find new dwellings -- like so many ants when their ant hill is kicked asunder.

Here are a couple of interesting and well-written newspaper stories from recent months, one covering the "ant tribe" and another on migrant labor.