Chongqing: Socialism in One City - Nation

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by Robert Dreyfuss

I'm writing today from Chongqing, a vast city in central China that is China's gateway to its western regions. By some accounts, Chongqing is the largest city in the world, a muncipality of 32 million people, but that, I've learned, is misleading, since that number includes the population of a handful of satellite cities and a rural population of 20 million. A few years ago, however, China carved Chongqing and its 32 million people out of Szechuan province and made it a municipality of its own, and today the Chongqing is a pilot project for the most important thing happening in China, and perhaps the world: the urbanization of as many as half a billion people from rural farms and villages into newly constructed cities. "Chongqinq," says Wen Tianping, the city's spokesman, "is a microcosm of China itself."

The scale of the enterprise is staggering. In Chongqing, each year for the indefinite future, the plan is to move 500,000 people from rural to urban life. That means that Chongqinq must plan, ready, and construct the equivalent of a city the size of Atlanta, Georgia, every year, providing jobs, roads, housing, infrastructure, schools, hospitals and more. It's a project that has been going on in China for the past 20 years, during which 200 million people have already been urbanized, and over the next generation another 200 to 300 million people will follow in their footsteps.

"We have plans, timetables, goals," says Qian Lee, the director of Chongqing's comprehensive business promotion project. "You can't have a plan for everything. But we don't make plans to be abandoned. We make plans to be accomplished. You do it scientifically, as we always say in China."

And the thing is, in China, plans work.

In Chongqinq, the population itself has been steady for many years, but the entire municipality is shifting from rural to urban. The city center houses 5-6 million people, satellite cities of up to 1 million or more are popping up around it, and urban townships ot 200,000 to 500,000 are springing up like mushrooms around those. "We've planned six regional centers of 1 million each," says Qian Lee. As people leave the farms and villages, some of the land is converted to industrial use, and some it is combined into more efficient, industrialized farming. "Chongqinq will become what we call a ‘dragon's head' economic engine for the upper Yangtze River region, and the model for balanced, urban-rural areas."

As an inland center, Chongqing was a bit less vulnerable to the economic downturn that followed the financial crisis of 2008. That's because unlike the cities of southern China and Shanghai, for instance, Chongqinq is less dependent on exports of manufactured goods to Europe and the United States. So when the U.S. financial collapse spread around the world, and the economy cratered, the drop in demand for Chinese-made goods didn't impact Chongqing as strongly as other parts of China. Even so, 12 percent of Chongqinq's economy is export-related, so when the crisis hit unemployment in Chongqing – and across China – spiked.

China launched a stimulus of its own, whose size is pretty much unknown. According to Stephen Green of Standard and Chartered Bank, who I met in Shanghai, China's domestic stimulus likely dwarfed the American version. Officially, he says, it was as least $600 billion, but it may have been as much as $3.5 trillion, especially if you count the provincial-level stimulus provided by cities and provinces such as Chongqinq.

"When the financial crisis hit us, a lot of factories closed," says Wen Tianping. Chongqing launched its Warm Winter stimulus plan, spending vast sums, including credit programs to allow many of the 3.5 million unemployed workers to start their own businesses, providing loans and credit guarantees to small business, launching start-up industrial parks, providing direct subsidies to 1,500 businesses, and, of course, using China's ace-in-the-hole: the fact that it is still a communist country with a huge panoply of SOEs (state owned enterprises) that control all of the most important sectors of the economy. The SOE's, says Wen, "were instructed by the government not to cut jobs." Now, not only has Chongqinq recovered fully, but it is currently experiencing a 13 percent growth rate.

In the United States, there is a widely shared perception that China has abandoned socialism and that it has become a Wild West-style, capitalist free-for-all. That's wrong. True, US multinationals, among others, are sidling up cheek by jowl to invest and build factories in China, both for export and to supply China's 1.3 billion consumers. (More than a hundred US Fortune 500 companies operate in Chongqinq already, including Hewlett-Packard, whose laptop assembly plant here will produce 10 million computers a year, Chongqing officials say.) But the fact remains that in China, all of the key industries are government-owned: banks, energy, oil, transport, telecommunications (including China's huge cell phone company, which will soon have its 500 millionth subscriber). China's banking system – which includes four or five giant national banks, 17 mid-sized commercial banks, and about 140 city commercial banks – sailed serenely through the worldwide crisis of 2008-2009. Virtually none of it was exposed to the bad debt and high-flying securities speculation bubble that collapsed AIG, Lehman, and countless other players.

From what I've seen so far, there's no likelihood in the near future that China intends to privatize its core industries. And it's centralized planning system is humming along.

Urban Animal Husbandry

Nigerian dwarf goats grow to only 21 in. tall, about equal to a medium-size dog. "But they have giant udders," says Novella Carpenter. She should know: she has six goats that together provide a quart of milk a day, which she drinks and uses to make cheese and butter. And when the bleating beauties are not grazing in her 1,000-sq.-ft. yard, they're hanging out on the porch of her second-floor apartment in the middle of Oakland, Calif.

Carpenter, a city dweller who in recent years has tried her hand at raising turkeys (she got three day-old poults for $2 each) and pigs (which she fattened to 300 lb.) for dinner, says she turned to milk-producing goats because "I decided I needed a more long-term relationship." The author of the new Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, she is eager to help others get into what she describes as a "hobby that involves sex and birth and death and life." (See pictures of an apartment outfitted for goat-milking.)

There have been lots of stories lately about chicken coops' becoming a new urban and suburban accessory. But Carpenter considers the squawking hen "the urban-farming gateway animal," the first occupant of a big metropolitan menagerie. Among eco-foodies, the hottest urban livestock bleat, quack, gobble, oink, buzz and ... well, whatever noise rabbits make. Just ask the folks at Seattle Tilth, a composting and gardening nonprofit that this summer added goat sheds and pens to its long-standing local chicken-coop tour. Or ask the participants in Detroit's Garden Resource Program, which recently launched beekeeping classes and saw them fill up immediately. Even the so-called Chicken Whisperer, a.k.a. Andy Schneider, who hosts an urbane chicken radio show six days a week from suburban Atlanta, is branching out. He is planning an episode on turkeys after fielding so many questions about them from listeners. (Watch TIME's video "Barnyard Animals in Back Yards.")

The growing popularity of raising barnyard animals in backyards — or indoors (at least two companies, ChickenDiapers.com and MyPetChicken.com sell nappies to people who want their birds to bunk with them) — has forced many municipalities across the country to statutorily reckon with allowing livestock within city limits. But legal or not, urban animal husbandry is gaining cachet. That's not only because of the desire to eat local and organic but also because the shaky economy has more people wanting to be more self-sufficient. Says Seattle Tilth garden educator Carey Thornton: "Food you raise yourself just tastes better."

Most newbies keep chickens for eggs. Schneider's organization, Backyard Poultry, has groups in 19 cities in the U.S. and four outside the country; of the 700 members in Atlanta, for example, only five raise hens for consumption. Miniature goats are usually kept for milk and weed-eating; bees, for honey and pollination.

But the truly hard-core urban farmers are plumping their animals for meat, shortening the food-supply chain and being responsible carnivores. "It's empowering," says Carpenter, who is nurturing 10 bunnies to eat. "People want to own their meat-eating."

See pictures of urban farming around the world.

See TIME's photoessay "Cow-Pooling."

Of course, not everyone wants to get that close to their food sources. Dwarf goats in particular have been a point of contention. They smell bad and can wreak havoc if they escape, opponents say; some also worry that allowing goats will pave the way for legalizing llamas and cows in cities. Goat advocates, who note that only horned males emit musk, say the ruminants are gentle enough to be walked on a leash and that they generate high-quality manure, which can be used as fertilizer.

The movement has led to heated debates in city-council meetings over the definitions of livestock, small animals and farm animals. The result: a hodgepodge of animal-ownership laws across the nation and even within a state. This spring in North Carolina, for example, Asheville voted to allow temporary permits for goats to clear vegetation, while Charlotte banned them from properties smaller than a quarter of an acre — despite supporters showing up at a city-council meeting with signs reading I LOVE MY PYGMY GOAT.

Those enthusiasts may have taken a page from the godmother of goat lovers, Jennie Grant, owner of Brownie and Snowflake, who founded the Goat Justice League two years ago while pushing Seattle to legalize miniature goats. It is now permissible to have three on a 5,000-sq.-ft. lot, and some city departments have hired goats to clear blackberry brambles. "Part of my lobbying effort included bringing fresh chèvre to city-council members' offices," she says.

Locavore yuppies and suburban soccer moms aren't the only ones committing to animal husbandry. Catherine Ferguson Academy, a Detroit high school for teens who are pregnant or have already become mothers, has for years had a working farm adjacent to campus. The school considers gardening and raising animals integral to its curriculum. Under the tutelage of life-sciences teacher Paul Weertz, the young women built a barn one year and provide daily care for rabbits, horses, goats, chickens, ducks, turkeys and peacocks. The students recently acquired a pig and, says principal Asenath Andrews, they're going to eat it.

Andrews hopes farming teaches the girls to be more entrepreneurial, well-rounded moms. "Breast-feeding, which is definitely not a popular adolescent activity, is looked on differently by the girls who experience the lessons with baby rabbits," she says. A teachable moment happened the day students broke open an egg containing what appeared to be a viable chick, which the girls frantically tried to save, even calling in the school nurse. The chick died, but the episode sparked a thoughtful conversation about premature human babies, the risks they face and the possibility that saving ailing preemies isn't always merciful. It was one of her most fulfilling days as an educator, Andrews says. "If we have one of those discussions a year, it's worth having a goat — or 10 goats — at the school."

Of course, which animal is most valuable to the downtown farmer depends on whom you ask. "[Rabbits] are the ideal urban farm animal," says Carpenter, because "they can feed almost exclusively on Dumpstered items like lettuce, stale bread, etc." Seattle Tilth's Thornton thinks that ducks are better for gardens than chickens and that they provide tastier eggs. "I think the duck is the future," she says. Game on, chicken lovers.