The human impacts of China's new urbanisation
In the first of a two-part series, photographer Justin Jin chronicles China's ambitious plans to move 100 million farmers into the cities that are being built over their fields
For generations, Li Rui's family picked vegetables on his family's plot in Liaocheng, Shandong province. When I met him in 2013, the 60-year-old farmer was returning to the same land to harvest scrap metal. He bent down to pocket bits of twisted wire, screws and whatever else he could sell for a few fen a kilo. The land, appropriated by government authorities to make way for a phalanx of condominiums, yielded construction waste instead of food.
Without a skill, Li had become one of millions of newly landless farmers forced to adapt to an urban life as China hurtles through a massive new phase of urbanisation.
Faced with shrinking exports and slowing growth, Communist leaders are pushing ahead with a gigantic, historic plan to uproot 100 million farmers and turn their fields into urban dwellings in six years - by 2020 - to create a giant new middle class and boost demand. This model, based on expectations of 7 per cent GDP growth per year, calls for mass creation of jobs, schools, factories, offices, shopping malls - in short, a brand new consumer population out of poor, uneducated farmers. Yet, such a levitation act can only work when times are good. Sharp downturns, such as the recent stock market crash, can reduce gleaming new cities into ghost towns, liberated farmers into hordes of unemployed.
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