Shanghai: China’s new capital?

A recent op-ed piece in the Chinese edition of the Financial Times made the bold suggestion that China would be better off casting aside centuries of history and shifting its seat of government away from Beijing. The author, a researcher at the Ministry of Commerce, suggested that Beijing’s location in the arid, dusty north, its lack of water resources, meaning that it has to divert water from nearby provinces to feed its thirst, and the fact that it is bordered on two sides by mountains, thereby trapping in the pollution, means that it simply doesn’t make sense to keep encouraging growth in a city with such an unfavourable location and that doing so will hold back China’s development.

Provocative? Yes. Preposterous? Perhaps. Prudent? Let’s weigh up the arguments. What does Beijing have going for it?

History? Yes, Beijing’s steeped in it. Although of course Beijing has not always been China’s capital city. Xi’an and Nanjing have both functioned as capital and, according to some historians at least, it would never have risen to prominence were it not for Yuan dynasty founder Kublai Khan’s decision to base his government in Dadu, present day Beijing, because of its proximity to his power base in Mongolia.

Location? It’s hard to argue in favour of Beijing on the location front. China’s southern and eastern seaboard is the dynamo of the economy. Beijing has a horrible climate, with scorching summers and freezing winters, is severely lacking in rainfall and would essentially be desert were it not for large-scale water diversionary projects. I visited a village 90 km west of Beijing in Hebei province over the weekend and I couldn’t help but notice how dusty and dry the landscape was. I don’t think I saw a free-flowing river or a natural body of water anwhere along the way. The long-term plans to rectify the situation appear questionable. The grand south-to-north water water project is incredibly expensive and it remains to be seen both how feasible it is and what impact diverting large amounts of water away from southern rivers and lakes would have on China’s natural environment.

Cost of relocation? Again, this would be vast, but it can be done – many other countries have shifted their seats of government – Australia to Canberra, Brazil to Brasilia being just two examples. And besides, whereas in these two cases both essentially moved their capitals to newly created cities, China has plenty of, on paper at least, cities that would be much more logical locations for a capital city than the dusty, dirty northern capital. Shanghai, the financial hub, a logistics hub, located at the end of the Yangtze, linking it directly to China’s heartland and surrounded by the wealth and dynamism of Zhejiang and Jiangsu? Chongqing, Chengdu, Xian, Guangzhou, which would provide a gateway to south-east Asian and global trade routes. All, with the possible exception of Xian, with access to far greater natural resources than Beijing.

You may very well be under the impression at this point that I am not a fan of Beijng – in fact this is far from the case. I find Beijing’s mix of tradition and cutting edge modernity fascinating, it has a thriving arts and cultural scene that the bright lights and glitzy malls of Shanghai cannot match. But there’s no getting away from the fact that the city is already too big, its inhumanly large avenues already clogged with traffic, its skies often grey and polluted and its climate completely unsustainable. It seems to me that it just cannot keep on growing indefinitely.

Do I think the capital is likely to be moved elsewhere? Almost certainly not. Do I think it should be moved elsewhere. I’m honestly torn. But the very fact that it’s being debated in the Chinese language press – not just the FT, but also the Southern Metropolitan Daily among others – suggests that it is not completely beyond the realms of possibility that it could one day happen. And once you start to think about it, a lot of the arguments in favour of relocation seem to make sense. Anyway, at present this is little more than an academic exercise. But it’s definitely food for thought. More jiaozi anyone?