A nation’s GDP driven by real-estate and massive construction, plus the deepest-widest portal of import for trading in high-tech and high-fashion consumer products, that is what take place in modern China. The factual trend is rapidly converting all regional natural resources into mountains of building structures (urban metropolis, transportation facilities, townships, manufacturiers, etc. mostly in steel and concrete). To keep next three decades of such phenomenal growth of economics, trade-offs and compromises must continue to be committed. Let’s only look into top few trends if they be hardly reversible:
Cities’ will trapped with their surrounding of non-processable wastes and garbage (already piled up in 1/3 of major cities according state government survey, more than half is from construction debris). Most cities will reach 100-300 PM2.5 index (already commonly see up to 150, once above 300 in 50+ cities on the same day, occasionally above 500 in Beijing or Shanghai now. Reading the instructions: at 300 of PM2.5 index, the recommendations are: ill or elder persons stay in-door; and healthy people avoid out-door activities). Farmable land will mostly be eliminated (at the current rate of 5% annual shrinkage according national survey). Labor force: most people are becoming old. 60-and-above will reach 1/3 of population from its current portion of 13%. Unemployment rate of college graduates, who supposed to be the core body of young urban professionals, will keep the highest in the world. Women’s work conditions and political-social power will remain the lowest among the world’s developed and developing countries…
If there would be such a cylinder of dystopia for the central nation to reference from the inside, that it will only be miss led toward a dystopia inside. The time for this destination is about 30-50 years. The course might have been set since early 1990’s. By the end this shall draw an conclusion upon the “cylinder” that wrapped 1/5 of world population inside, seal it or by whatever means to quarantine, with the least option that the rest of the world shall have to survive from China.
The world must be saved. On today’s course, the more the insiders pursue, the faster it exhausts inside. Calibration has to be made, it it is not alreadt too late.
And the band plays on. Also a suggestion by the Westerners, the saga of China’s wealth and prosperity seems to be symbolized by Xtopia, a monumental icon of solutions even better than Utopia which the West had its early imagination of the highest form of socialist, and even communist’s. However it is an extreme materialist approach. Again it will need more steel and concrete to pile up. To such reference a Vertical Mega City named Xtopia was already proposed in great details, and documented by a Discovery Channel film aired in 2010. The concept emulated the new society made up of every-thing-is-an-western-invention in the Shanghai Pudong New Area. Where erected is its “X” shaped Typhoon-proof structure 3-miles-tall building. A quarter of million residences inhabit in it, and half-million people are in-and-out of it in daily basis. The promise: they will grow people along their foods together within Xtopia.