Aussies are wise to avoid building anything approaching the overcrowded hellhole. Sydney/Melbourne already too big and have traffic probs.
From NewsCorp: IT’S called a megaregion, and, as the name suggests, it’s really big.
Jing-Jin-Ji in China is so big it’s estimated to be the size of 17 Sydneys and, once complete, will be home to 130 million people.
But this megalopolis is not a new supercity that has organically emerged from the Chinese countryside. It’s actually three very large cities that are being forced to merge together to, bizarrely, reduce the size of one of them: Beijing.
While the massive project, which will see Beijing, the port city of Tianjin and the Hebei hinterland region connected by high speed rail, began two years ago, Chinese authorities have been talking about creating it for more than a decade.
China already has two megaregions, the Yangtze River Delta (south of the Yangtze River) and the Pearl River Delta (which comprises of nine cities including Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau), and has plans to create ten more, but Jing-Jin-Ji (“Jing” for Beijing, “Jin” for Tianjin and “Ji,” the traditional name for Hebei Province) is considered different because it was born out of political pressure rather than economic prosperity.
Over population, traffic congestion and high levels of air pollution have forced Chinese authorities to devise a new way of dealing with the growing problems, according to University of Sydney associate professor Duanfang Lu.
“Beijing actually wants to make itself smaller — it has more than 20 million people — and the traffic is really bad as well as pollution,” Dr Lu explained. “Because the air pollution has become so bad, it has become a political issue for the central government. Pollution is a health issue and a lot of people are very concerned about it.”
RIO Price at posting:
$51.20 Sentiment: Sell Disclosure: Held
