China pushes towns to brand themselves, then regrets it
Officials in Beijing fret that local boosters are getting carried away
Dec 19th 2017 | HAIYAN
NUCLEAR is the future for the small coastal city of Haiyan. Not just as a source of power but, local officials think, as a magnet for businesses and tourists. Home to China’s first domestically developed commercial reactor, Haiyan recently started calling itself “nuclear-power town”. It has opened a nuclear museum (pictured), broken ground on a nuclear-related industrial park and drawn up blueprints for homes and hotels that play up the atomic theme. Signs above the main road declare it a “city of hope”.
For those not so enamoured of nuclear power, other newly emerging cities a short drive away might be more alluring. Gourmands can opt for “chocolate town” or “shiitake town”, whereas fashionistas have “leather-fashion town” and “cosmetics town”.Aspiring fund managers are also well looked after. They can choose between four different “financial” towns.
They are all part of China’s push to create tese xiaozhen, or “speciality towns”, a policy campaign that began in the wealthy eastern province of Zhejiang, where Haiyan is located, and that is now being rolled out nationwide.It is rooted in a long-standing effort to limit the size of big cities and keep the country’s population dispersed as it rapidly urbanises. Central planners view the speciality towns as a way to promote the growth of urban areas with populations of 500,000 or fewer (see chart). These are often far shabbier than the glitzy megacities.
ennamoured: in a state in which you love, admire, or are very interested in something or someone
gourmand: a person who loves to eat and drink, a person who eats and drink too much
disperse: to go or move in different directions: to spread apart
中国要建立特色小镇，避免资源集中在超级大城市，平衡各个城市之间的发展，我觉得是将来国内发展的重中之重。毕竟大城市的弊病已经显露了， 小城市是时候要起一波了
下面的柱状图显示了中国城市数量和人口：1m-3m 这个人口数量的城市有90多个！要知道，新西兰一共才400多万人，最大城市奥克兰才140万人，真的是没法比的，中国管理起来不是一般的难，中国加油！
Local officials have been asked to identify things that make their places unique—some combination of industry, tourist attractions and the local way of life—and then cultivate them into a full-fledged theme, a lodestar for development. The result, it is hoped, will be a mass of differentiated, thriving towns. Over the past 18 months the central government has approved 403 speciality towns and aims to have 1,000 of them by 2020. In the past, cities racked up massive debts by building vast new districts in the hope of developing a wide variety of businesses. The speciality towns, by contrast, are supposed to be focused on one particular industry, and much cheaper to build.
There are worries, though, that the campaign is veering off course. While the central government—fearful that local administrations might splurge on wasteful schemes—is trying to restrict approvals, lower-level officials are forging ahead, with or without permission. China Times, a newspaper in Beijing, estimates that as many as 6,000 speciality towns are being developed. The average investment so far has been about 5bn yuan ($755m)per town, according to Shenwan Hongyuan Securities, a brokerage. If that were spent on all the 1,000 towns in the government’s plan, the total cost would reach 5trn yuan, or nearly 7% of GDP—a huge amount, even by China’s standards.
full-fledged: always used before a noun: fully developed
splurge on: to spend more money than usual on something for yourself
Some of the towns appear to deviate from what China’s leader, Xi Jinping, had in mind when he lent support to the idea. Yucheng, a hamlet in Zhejiang, aims to be “happy town”, complete with a sex-toy shopping street and a hotel for amorous couples.Zhongxian, a poor city in the west, wants to be an online gaming mecca. It is building a 6,000-seat stadium to host e-sport competitions, even though three other cities have similar plans.
As local officials get carried away, planners in Beijing are losing some of their enthusiasm. In July the housing ministry scolded local governments for “three blinds” in their projects: blindly demolishing old districts, blindly building skyscrapers and(horror of horrors) blindly copying foreign culture. In September Zhang Xiaohuan, a government researcher, warned of a familiar problem in this supposedly new approach to urbanisation. Municipal officials, he said, were seizing on speciality towns as a way to gin up short-term growth without any thought to the longer-term consequences of their debt-laden investments. On December 5th the government warned officials not to use the speciality push simply as an excuse for bingeing on yet more property developments.
deviate: to do something that is different or to be different from what is usual or expected
scold: to speak in an angry or critical way to (someone who has done something wrong)
住建部指责地方政府三个盲目： 盲目拆掉旧区，盲目建高楼大厦，盲目复制国外的文化
binge: to eat, drink, etc. , too much in a short period of time: to go on a binge
binge and purge: to eat a lot of food and then force yourself to vomit so that you do not gain weight
The central government may have a point. But it fails to acknowledge that it is at fault, too, with its top-down approach to urbanisation. As many economists note, trying to limit the size of the biggest cities and boost that of smaller ones is a recipe for inefficiency. Lu Ming, an economist at Shanghai Jiaotong University, notes that China has a long history of places that have prospered with the help of a single industry, especially along the coast. Examples have included towns focusing on products as diverse as zips, cigarette lighters and bras. Yet these have almost always developed organically, disciplined by the rigours of competition for global market share. “They cannot easily be replicated on a national basis,” says Mr Lu.
At its best the speciality-town policy might give a boost to places that already have a good deal going for them. With a nuclear-power plant in operation for more than 20years, Haiyan has long been a leader in China’s atomic-energy industry—eventhough few outside the city are aware of this. During the National Day holiday in early October, thousands of people lined up to visit its swanky new museum which portrays the science behind nuclear energy and its history in China. But it is a fair bet that it will not be tourism that powers Haiyan’s future growth.
有部分经济学专家不同意这种发展方式，认为限制大城市鼓励小城市发展是一个低效的做法。中国沿海城市的单一产业发展模式，像生产拉链，打火机，胸罩等，是在特定的全球市场竞争下的产物，无法复制到全国范围。
swanky: very fashionable and expensive
总结：很多事物都有两面性，中国地方政府为了自己所管辖的城市吸引更多投资，发展起来肯定是好事；但做的过程中的盲目性，浪费行为则是它不好的一面。我对中国的发展充满信心，2018年撸起袖子干！加油！
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Results
Lexile®Measure: 1200L - 1300L
Mean Sentence Length: 20.26
Mean Log Word Frequency: 3.25
Word Count: 851
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