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| Land market forces and government’s role in sprawl: T Zhang
from the agriculture department whose basic responsibility is to ensure sufficient food provision; cultivated land preservation is thus tied directly to its own interest. While worrying about expenditures on food imports, public expenditure departments in the central government at the same time also want to gain more from land revenue for other national programs and projects, especially major infrastructure projects such as railroad and highway construction. However, there is a debate on the provision of infrastructure in the metropolitan region. It has been a local responsibility so far, but local government has asked for central sub- sidies since local land tax is shared with the central government. On the other hand, because agricultural and food import programs are less a responsibility of local municipalities, both local revenue collection and pub- lic spending bureaus desire leasing more land in order for funding local programs. In addition, under the pressure of fund cutting from the central government, local public spending departments rely more on local budgets, which “forces” local decision makers to sup- port the two groups in drawing more money from land development. In the public sector, besides the agriculture depart- ment, only land administration departments (land bureaus and planning bureaus) are truly concerned with the negative consequences of urban sprawl. As the administrative body in charge of long term devel- opment, the department of planning pursues a com- prehensive sustainable growth strategy. The main responsibility of land bureaus is to prevent cultivated land loss. The two departments are playing key roles in the fight against sprawl. However, even within this group, debate about sprawl continues. The central planning department supports sprawl control, but it argues that a certain degree of urban expansion is necessary for Chinese cities. Planners have listed several reasons. First, almost all Chinese cities are overcrowded. The den- sity in central areas is so high that basic open space is very limited, not to mention heavy air pollution in cities. Second, there are millions of “liudong renkou” (“floating population”) meaning temporary rural– urban migrants in cities after the economic reforms. Shanghai alone has more than two million “floating population”, in addition to its nine million members of the “official urban population” in 1995 (from inter- view, 1997). To house and provide basic services to those “temporary urban residents” requires land. Third, infrastructure systems in Chinese cities are so under-invested and out-of-date they can no longer bear loads. Funding for infrastructure improvement projects depends heavily upon land revenue. In addition, these projects themselves need land. Last and most importantly, China’s economic development needs foreign investment, and land availability is a must in attracting foreign investors. Some Chinese scholars believe that China’s urban expansion is a 133 “healthy urban growth” different from sprawl in the US, because urban expansion does not cause central city decline in China (Zhou and Meng, 1998). Since decentralization, local planning bureaus have enjoyed power over land use regulation. They would not like to see control over land use, such as a land quota system, imposed again by a higher government. To them, the re-centralization of land use power entails a large loss. Moreover, local municipal governments, for whom the planners work, desire more land revenue in general. These decision makers often support land growth projects even in the face of planners’ opposition to sprawl. Land bureaus of the central and local governments, together with the agriculture departments, are the backbone of any control policy. For land bureaus, a hidden motivation in designing a new land use policy (such as the Land Act of 1988) is to take urban land use control power from planning bureaus at various levels. Here a conflict exists between two institutions within the same interest group. Also, local land administrators work under local governments; just as local planners, they have little to do if the local government does not want to stop growth. Because the control policy was initiated and implemented only recently, there is no solid data to examine the performance of the policy. Most planners and officials interviewed believed that the policy has some positive impacts on cultivated land loss, especially in showing the central government’s deter- mination. However, local implementation of the pol- icy is problematic. Scholars point out that local government and local planning bureaus are still leas- ing land to firms, especially foreign investors who are looking for land. One example is Shenzhen. The city has developed from a village of 1,200 residents to a mega city of 3.5 million in 19 years. Although the whole city is new, several district governments are actively engaging in “new area” development pro- jects. Some district officers said that the existing downtown is “too old to be attractive to investors”, so “new development projects in ‘newer downtown’ and edge areas are necessary in speeding up the city’s economic development”; the implication leads to acquiring more land (based on the author’s interview, June 1998). Another example is a city government in Hainan province. Although the 1998 Land Act asks for higher acquisition charges to reduce land demand, the city government of Haikou, capital of the Hainan prov- ince, announced in August, 1998, that it would reduce land acquisition costs to investors in the city. The pur- pose is again “to attract more investment and speed up economic development” (People’s Daily, August 31, 1998). tải về 149.87 Kb. 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