Migrants alter Chinese city for good, bad

Many leaving rural villages for a better life strain Chongqing

CHONGQING, CHINA — A damp rat lumbered into the darkness beneath a bed that rents for 24 cents a night.

Cobwebs and wires dangled overhead. The air was tangy with sweat and pepper oil. Burrowing three stories underground, the basement boarding house is a world away from the skyscrapers above. But the men who crowd it have come to a city they hope will change their lives.

These migrants are part of an epic human tide that is redrawing the map of China, just as migration transformed the American heartland. Job-seekers from the countryside have made a national test case for urbanization out of Chongqing, often compared to the 19th Century Chicago that Mark Twain found always to be "contriving and achieving new impossibilities."

The 21st century heirs to America's meatpacking migrants are laborers such as Jiang Taiping, a brawny father of two who returns, each day, to the boarding house after sunset.

"Home," he whispered and put down the bamboo shoulder-pole that earns him $12 a day as a human delivery truck.

Village exodus

The march to China's cities is part of a global sea change. Sometime next year, the U.N. predicts, the planet will pass a major milestone, when the world's population becomes more urban than rural for the first time in the history of the species.

Leading that change is China's 1.3 billion people, whose village exodus has the potential to alter the nation as dramatically as its free-market revolution. And the impact on the rest of world spans everything from how fast diseases spread to the price of seafood.

For China, the magnetism of its cities reaches well beyond the desperate. It is as close as today's Chinese citizens come to a national religion — the rare idea that speaks to both an impoverished farmer like Jiang and a restaurateur who has parlayed a rural storefront into a national chain with 17,000 employees.

"These will be five-star hotel rooms. Every room will have a private garden," announced Yan Qi, marching through a new luxury restaurant-and-hotel complex she is building in a lush district of Chongqing.

A half-century ago, Mao Tse-tung mobilized the countryside to his peasant revolution. Today, the instinct that drew Jiang from his farm and Yan into business inspires hundreds of millions of other rural Chinese. They are united less by their income levels than by a daily, unending quest for something better: a nicer car, a bigger meal, a finer education, a higher status.

Bustling mega-city

Even among China's infant mega-cities, Chongqing sizzles with ambition. As recently as a decade ago, it was still best known, perhaps, by its World War II-era title, Chungking, the base where U.S. Gen. "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell coordinated U.S. and Chinese troops against Japanese forces. Until recently, the only highlight of downtown was an eight-story monument to the city's liberation from the Japanese.

Today, a crescent of new skyscrapers fills the horizon, including a copy of New York City's Chrysler Building. The fast-moving Yangtze and Jialing rivers are flush with barges and cruise ships. Eight bridges, eight highways and eight rail lines have been built in just the past five years.

Downside of growth

City development chiefs boast that they are spending $1 billion a month on new ports, airport terminals, skyscrapers and government offices. And they plan to sustain that pace for a decade.

Chongqing is already, technically, one of the world's largest cities, with 31 million people and territory the size of Maine, though that boundary encompasses a vast rural area. Even so, the city proper is ballooning. It is on pace to absorb 5 million new arrivals in the next decade, the equivalent of every resident of Washington, D.C., picking up and moving here — every year.

It's easy to see why: City residents in Chongqing can expect to earn an average of $1,470 a year, nearly four times the amount in nearby rural areas, and the gap is widening.

The rising standard of living comes at an unmistakable price.

"This is called 'Clear Water Stream,'" said local environmentalist Wu Dengming, standing on a bridge over a murky, sluggish gulley in northwest Chongqing.

Indeed, this model city is buckling under its own waste. Water-treatment plants are overwhelmed, sending tens of thousands of tons of raw sludge into rivers everyday.

Chongqing is sunless most days, blanketed in smog that stands out even by modern China's standards.

The mounting strain on the land is just one of the new tensions produced by China's urban rise. The country is more prosperous than at any time in history, but the gap between haves and have-nots has surpassed the U.S. and is approaching the yawning divides associated with Latin America.