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Beyond the Bedroom Community

For about 3,000 years, regardless of its names or actual physical locations, the centre of Beijing has served as a focal point for social, economic and political life in North China.

Even today, Beijing's subway lines, major ring roads, airports and its suburban and natural trade areas are like centrifugal objects locked in orbits, circling the city, with Tian'anmen Square at its centre. The force of its gravity is to the centre.

But this natural order of things is about to be seriously challenged by a new order; a new social reality that is about to emerge. Under this new order, the centre of Beijing will become one among several new urban centres organised around various functions to which millions of people will move in the coming years, resulting in a complete change in the way people spatially orient themselves in Beijing.

In short, some of the city's bedroom communities (shuicheng) are about to become "new towns," the "multiple centres" of Beijing's "two axes, two belts, multiple-centres" development plan. Many of Central Beijing's traditional service functions will be shifted in one form or another to these new towns, particularly to Shunyi, Tongzhou and Yizhuang, along with several other special development areas or zones, and many of the central city's population are expected to follow, including some people currently living in dilapidated inner-city housing.
 
Beijing's permanent population has increased by 1.54 million people since 2000 to 15.36 million. With its amazingly rapid economic and cosmopolitan development, the prices for real estate inside the Third Ring Road of Beijing have skyrocketed, prompting many newcomers to the city, young professionals and newly weds to seek residences in its suburban bedroom communities such as Tiantongyuan, Huilongguan, Wangjing and Tongzhou.

But while these new communities have opened new vistas with new roads, better communications systems, water and electrical supplies and other infrastructure, they also have serious shortcomings. With their focus toward the centre, bedroom community residents, many of them highly educated, find themselves enduring long commutes, for instance, from and to Tongzhou in the mornings and evenings. Since the bedroom communities are short on top-grade health care and entertainment options such as hospitals, cinemas, bowling alleys, recreational, sports or cultural activities, residents there must commute to enjoy these things as well, thus inefficiently using their time, while either adding to the city's public transportation burden or jamming freeways morning and night. For those without personal transportation, finding safe transportation late at night after an evening event in the city is another burden, especially for women.

The new town concept is gradually expected to change everything, because the new urban centres will have new jobs, new entertainment and cultural options, better health care facilties and many more transportation options. Residents who do commute may well find themselves commuting around the traditional city centre to one of the other new towns, which will be connected by roadways, public bus and light-rail lines. Some Tongzhou residents are already looking outward, for instance taking new jobs being created in nearby Hebei Province.

As the urbanization of the countryside continues, and as the new towns mature, the movement away from the centre is only expected to become more apparent and pick up speed.

Yizhuang (Daxing District)
"The new town should relieve the burden of the mother city, and not just in terms of the population but also the functions," said Shen Baochang, secretary of the Beijing Daxing District Committee of the Communist Party of China. "Bedroom communities do not provide conprehensive services for the residents. Nowadays, the mother city occupies the one-eighth of the municipality, but it bears the burden of most of the most important urban functions such as the politicial centre, cultural centre, educational, medical and financial systems. Also, it is a traffic hub, but these concentrated functions have brought big pressures. New towns should relieve these burdens.
Shen said: "If we want to reach our goals, first of all, the functional characteristics of each new town should be identified and industrial bases must be established. Then, the new towns will attract residents because of the jobs they offer. After that, develop real estate, medical, educational and shopping facilities. Establishing top-grade hospitals and educational institutions is very important. This will ensure that newcomers from the mother city will choose to stay here."

According to Shen, the key principle of the whole process is: "Employment first, then the bedrooms."

Shunyi (Shunyi District)
"The new town strategy provides a great opportunity for Shunyi District," said Xia Zhanyi, secretary of the Beijing Shunyi District Committee of the Communist Party of China. "Now we can focus on protecting tillable fields while engaging in sustainable city planning."
According to Xia, Shunyi will use opportunities arising from the 2008 Olympic Games to develop the Shunyi and Airport New towns. It may even unite the two into a single 60-square-kilometre new town with a population of existing and new residents of 500,000. Modern automobile, microelectronic and logistics businesses will lead industrial activities there. It will engage in functions considered complementary to activities in nearby districts and counties.
Under the plan, Shunyi District will have a population of 540,000, and about 70 percent of them will live and work in the new town and will be joined by more than 100,000 newcomers, with technicans or managers from the fields of modern manufacturing and the service sector accompanying them.

Tongzhou (Tongzhou District)
Culture will be the focus of Tongzhou District, its pillar industry, augmented by governmental-backed conferences and exhibitions and publications distribution activities. According to Liang Wei, secretary of the Beijing Tongzhou District Committee of the Communist Party of China, in 2006, Tongzhou District will invest 500 million yuan (US$62.4 million) to build a publications distribution centre and packaging centre.
The Songzhuang area (an artists villge) will be encouraged to establish agencies to transfer artworks into commodities. Yu Xueyin, director of the Tongzhou Planning Bureau, said Tongzhou will establish a global video picture theme park that is expected to result in the creation of thousands of jobs.
"The transportation system is the most important aspect of new town construction," Yu said. The Tongzhou District government plans to set up a large-scale transit exchange centre, which will serve as a hub for light-rail lines, expressways and as a gathering place for suburban and rural residents to take public transportation into the city. Parking reportedly will be provided. Also, the construction of roads and highways servicing the Tongzhou area will be speed up.

Experts aim to slow growth of population
Measures to control Beijing's ever-increasing population are being considered by experts.
The issue was among the main topics for discussion during meetings attended by the capital's legislators and advisers who met in an annual meeting in January 2006.
Some have argued that the idea of capping the capital city's population growth at 16 million or less by 2010, as stated in the city's new 11th Five-year Programme, is a "mission impossible."
Lu Jiehua, a member of Beijing Municipal People's Political Consultative Conference, said, "It is really not an easy job, considering that the current permanent population of the capital surpassed 15.3 million in 2005."
Lu said the city may have to rely upon a old technique, that of limiting the entry of migrant workers, the so-called "floating population," into the city. The floating population in Beijing was estimated at 4.58 million at the end of 2004.
The permanent population of the capital in 2005 increased by 1.6 million over that of 2000, Beijing Mayor Wang Qishan told said in a meeting with members of the Municipal People's Congress.
Experts said the rapid growth in Beijing's population has harmed the environment, added to traffic congestion, created public security problems, and has contributed to health care, educational and housing problems.
Lu suggested that more work needs to be done on the administration of migrants such as collecting data on them as well as to safeguarding their legal rights to job-seeking, educations, sanitation and their own personal safety.
He said specific laws concerning the administration of migrant people in Beijing should be drawn up as soon as possible.
Sun Jin, a professor from Beijing Normal University and a delegate to the Municipal People's Congress, said, "Ten million or 20 million people is not the problem as such; the question is how to cope with the situation."
He said rational consideration should be given to how many residents Beijing can afford to sustain.
Sun suggested that a deliberate balance should be sought between the city's expansion and the demands of people to ensure a decent standard of living.
With Beijing serving as the centre of everything important in Chinese and Beijing urban life, its population naturally crowded into the downtown area, said a proposal from the Jiusan Society, a non-communist party.
As a result, the city's satellite or "bedroom" towns cannot fully exercise their roles as industrial and economic centres. A huge amount of residents must commute from their homes in the suburbs to places of work in the downtown area, which adds to their living costs, the society said.
Members of the society suggested that one of the fundamental ways of solving the population problem would be to divert some of the city's functions to the nearby metropolis of Tianjin and cities in neighbouring Hebei Province through the so-called Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Metropolitan Cluster Strategy.
It also suggested Beijing adopt the multi-centre path of development in its future planning.

Beijing's population reached 15.36 million in 2005, comparing with the city's population of 4.2 million in 1949 when New China was founded, according to Beijing Municipal Statistics Bureau.
The city's population has increased by an average of 195,000 annually during the past 55 years.
The bureau said Beijing experienced slow population growth during the 1960s. At that time, the city's population rose by only 45,000 annually. The city saw steady population growth in the period from 1979 to 1990, when it reached 10.86 million, 2.1 million more than in 1978.
Beijing's population grew by 290,000 people per year during 1991-2004. Migrant populations, or non-Beijing natives, accounted for 63 percent of population growth in this period.
The 2.52 million rural residents who live in outlying regions of the municipality make up 16.4 percent of Beijing's permanent population, the statistical bureau found in its latest survey in 2006.
The survey does not include more than 4 million migrant workers from rural areas outside Beijing or other cities who do not have permanent residency status. This would raise the actual number of Beijing residents to about 20 million.
The survey found that Beijing had 1.57 million children under the age of 14 at the end of 2005, accounting for 10.2 percent of its permanent population. This is down by 3.38 percent from the 2000 figure.
There were 1.66 million over the age of 65, accounting for 10.8 percent of the city's permanent population, an increase of 2.37 percent from five years ago.
Beijingers are also better educated, according to the survey which shows that 3.62 million Beijingers are now college graduates, an increase of 30 percent or 1.29 million more graduates than the figures for 2000.
The bureau reports that Beijing had 5.24 million families at the end of 2005, with an average of 2.71 people each. In 2000, the average Beijing family had 2.91 people.
Those who only completed elementary schooling totaled 2.12 million at the end of 2005, down by 220,000 from the turn of the century.

Wang Gangwei lives in Liyuan County in Tongzhou District.

"My family has lived in Tongzhou for quite a long time. Compared to the past, Tongzhou has really changed a lot; now we are living in new apartment with a very good environment, but we are still short of shopping centres and entertainment facilities. After supper, my parents want to go out walking, but there is no park nearby; so they have to walk along the street."

Mr. Guo lives in the Wuyihuayuan apartments.

"I work in the core of the city so I really worry about the traffic problem. I hope there will be more roads to the downtown area. Also I think the fees for using the Beijing-Tongzhou Expressway should be reduced. I hope to go to work in a more convenient and economical way."