China to create largest mega city in the world with 42 million people … China is planning to create the world’s biggest mega city by merging nine cities to create a metropolis twice the size of Wales with a population of 42 million. City planners in south China have laid out an ambitious plan to merge together the nine cities that lie around the Pearl River Delta. The “Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One” scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales. – UK Telegraph
Dominant Social Theme: We will build an urban infrastructure and save the environment.
(Indepth Agenda 21 Links below)
Free-Market Analysis: We’ve covered the insanity of Chinese economic growth in numerous articles stretching back nearly two years now, but this latest news is the most startling yet. If the Telegraph is to believed (we have no reason not to), the Chinese have now dropped any pretense of a market driven economy. The Chinese are “planning” the economy, and in a big way.
Perhaps this bureaucratic zeal partially explains the eruption of empty cities that the alternative press (and the Daily Bell in particular) has been reporting on. While speculation seems to be out of control at an entrepreneurial level, the vast tracks of empty housing now being constructed may have an even deeper import, one having to do with the UN’s sweeping, global mandate, Agenda 21. Perhaps they are thus part of an urban planning policy of a magnitude unseen in human history. You can read one of the Bell’s China stories here:
(See Daily Bells previous article) (see photos of ghost cities)
We don’t understand where China is going to find the money for these ambitious projects. In a free-market, cities spring up spontaneously as the need arises. In China, obviously, the need is perceived by bureaucrats and the funding is provided via China’s dangerously over-extended central bank. The economy is so overheated that China keeps banning housing investments. The latest crackdown, we read, is that people in certain regions will not be able to own more than one speculative real-estate property.
None of this will help, of course, and it is baffling to see the steps the Chinese communist leaders are taking to “cool” the economy. Either they actually don’t realize that inflation is a monetary phenomenon or they do realize – but are confident that state control and its mandates can overwhelm market forces. In fact, running economies by mandate can work for a period of time, but when the increasingly fragile patchwork of regulatory dictates implodes, the mess is all the worse.
And that is surely what is going to happen to China. It is impossible to predict a timeline but just as Western economies imploded in 2008, so will China’s economy eventually implode as well. There is really no difference between the Chinese economy and Western economies at this point except in terms of the position of the business cycle and the magnitude of the upcoming disaster. When the Chinese bubble pops, we imagine the resultant reverberations will shake the world.
Of course that’s not the spin from Western powers-that-be. Newspapers and magazines are filled with articles about the Chinese miracle and the country’s entrepreneurial zeal. Granted, passing mention is made to state coordination, but most articles in mainstream magazines and newspapers still do not mention, let alone emphasize, what surely will occur in China sooner or later: the mother of all busts.
Within this context, the above cited mega city would seem to be fairly predictable, though astonishing in scope, given the leadership’s quiet – even secret – propensity for central planning. To us the entire plan as enunciated, seems to mimic the worst features of the USSR, where sterile, crumbling planned developments still dominate local landscapes. The Chinese may do it better but the spirit is no more laudable. The powers-that-be will decide where and how average Chinese will live, and obviously most of them will live in cities.
It doesn’t stop with one mega city. According to the Telegraph, “By the end of the decade, China plans to move ever greater numbers into its cities, creating some city zones with 50 million to 100 million people and ‘small’ city clusters of 10 million to 25 million. In the north, the area around Beijing and Tianjin, two of China’s most important cities, is being ringed with a network of high-speed railways that will create a super-urban area known as the Bohai Economic Rim. Its population could be as high as 260 million. … As the process gathers pace, total investment in urban infrastructure over the next five years is expected to hit £685 billion, according to an estimate by the British Chamber of Commerce, with an additional £300 billion spend on high speed rail and £70 billion on urban transport.”
This is central planning on steroids. But as Bell feedbackers have suggested (and there have been scattered commentaries on the ‘Net as well), perhaps China’s zeal for city planning has other impetuses beyond resettling rural farmers in urban environments. The issue of the UN’s agenda 21 has been mentioned in this regard. What is Agenda 21? According to the UN, it is, “a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts on the environment.”
The conservative website Rightside News has recently run a series of articles – exposes – of UN Agenda 21. (lscroll down for links)
“Sustainable development has become the buzzword for a strategy under development since at least the early 1970s to completely control every aspect of our lives, including resettling entire populations.” Rightside News points out that the 1976 U.N. Conference on Human Settlements called for population redistribution as follows:
• All countries should establish as a matter of urgency a national policy on human settlements, embodying the distribution of population, and related economic and social activities, over the national territory.
• A national policy for human settlements and the environment should be an integral part of any national economic and social development policy.
• Human settlements in most countries are characterized by wide disparities in living standards from one region to another, between urban and rural areas, within individual settlements and among various social and ethnic groups. Such discrepancies exacerbate many human settlement problems, and, in some instances, reflect inadequate planning. Human settlement policies can be powerful tools for the more equitable distribution of income and opportunities.
China it turns out is an enthusiastic proponent of Agenda 21 and extensive information on the country’s compliance can be seen at the website http://www.acca21.org.cn. A book-length White Paper can be downloaded there that delineates fully the compliance of the Chinese government. Chapter 1 – “The Preamble” – begins as follows:
This century has seen remarkable advances in the development of science and technology and in social productivity. The abundant material wealth created by mankind is unprecedented and it has resulted in a rapid development of civilization. However, aggravations caused by population expansion, excessive consumption of resources and global environmental problems such as pollution, reduced biodiversity and increased gap between north and south, have seriously hampered the development of economies and improvements in people’s quality of life, and are even threatening human existence itself.
Given the pressures of these harsh realities, mankind has no choice but to re-examine its social and economic behaviour and its path of development. Traditional ideas of considering economic growth solely in quantitative terms and the traditional development mode of “polluting first and treating later” are no longer appropriate when considering present and future requirements for development. It is now necessary to find a path for development, wherein considerations of population, economy, society, natural resources, and the environment are coordinated as a whole, so that a path for non-threatening sustainable development can be found which will meet current needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.
This is fairly strong – though general – language. But now, apparently, we seem to have evidence that China intends to put the UN’s mandates into practice in a big way. The ultimate intention is to depopulate the countryside we would imagine, in preference for gigantic cities. Farming will be accomplished corporately and the corporate state will benefit from an expanded, controllable, urban population – one that can be repurposed for whatever social and corporate goals the leadership has in mind. The goal, ultimately, is globalism and a marriage with similar urban constructs created by Western elites.
It is control that the power elite is after – East or West. Environmentalism is merely a pretext for the kinds of mass-engineerings of society that is contemplated. And while the Chinese may be ahead in the race to implement Agenda 21, there is no doubt that Western elites intend to fulfill UN mandates as well. The Internet is full of stories about the attempted implementation of Agenda 21 under various euphemisms, Smart Growth being among the most popular. But the euphemisms no matter how cheerful disguise the reality – which is the abrogation of Western property rights.
In America, homeowners and local communities are fighting back. But there is a darker side to the story in the US; it can be speculated, for instance, that the depopulation of the Gulf Coast is part of a disguised effort by the powers-that-be to reconfigure population densities for various purposes. The rationales may include both the forcible mergers of Mexico and the US (referred to as the North American Union – and including Canada) and Agenda 21. Alternative news media investigator Jesse Ventura has already devoted a television program to the issue of Gulf Coast depopulation. (We’ll be discussing this and other issues with Mr. Ventura in an upcoming Bell interview.)
The West has invested hundreds of billions – perhaps trillions – in China’s development and growth. In hindsight, one wonders at the viability of this funding. China’s free-markets at the top-level are evidently non-existent and much of China’s recent growth has been fueled by tens of trillions of yuan printed by the Chinese central bank. The economy is so overheated that the ChiComs are applying price controls wherever they can – and price controls never work.
Conclusion: The Chinese are about to embark on the most significant social and population reconfiguration ever attempted; but where is the money to come from? Are the ChiComs simply going to print it? How can they? It is simply mad. And what is madder still, is that Western media continues to report on China as if it were a sane society run by a sane leadership. Reading about the plans to re-engineer the living conditions of one billion people puts us in mind of the worst excesses of the Soviet Union. Who would have invested in that?
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Sustainable Communities – A Transformation of Virginia,
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