NewsYou are here:Home > Events > Annual Meetings > 2005 > News

Keynote Speech at the 4th meeting of CCICED Phase III(Xu Kuangdi)

2005-11-18author:李瑞source:

  Distinguished guests, friends, ladies and gentlemen, 

  Good morning! 

  I'm sorry I come a little bit later for this conference, because I just come back from abroad last evening, and I heard from the chairman, the organization subject you have had discussed yesterday. So I'm very fast through my presentation and I hope I can have some time to answer your questions from my personal point of view and this research subject has been done by China Academy of Engineering for two years. I think the first part I will be very fast throughout. This is the urbanization process during the last five decades in China, I think you know it already. But I want to point the last ten years, this process speed up rapidly, every year 1.5% of population move from rural area to the cities, particularly to the eastern coast of China. In the Chinese map, if we point a line from the northeast part of Heilongjiang province Aihui city, a small city, very small city, Aihui, down to the southwest city Tengchong in Yunnan Province, the east part of this line only takes about 37% of the land area, but the population is amounting to 84.3%, the population density is not balanced for whole country. Nowadays, the people move, mainly from northwest to southeast. Now we have some big area, the Pearl River Delta, the Yangtze Delta, and the Tianjing, Beijng and Tangshan area, it concentrates big population. And some other cities, big cities, like Wuhan, Xi'an, Chongqing, Shenyang, and so on. We plan to 2020 the city population will be 830million, about 300million rural people will move to city during the next 15 years. So the famous economist from United States Mr. Stinguist once pointed that the most important thing, movement in this century will be the high-tech to the development of United States and the organization happened in China. Now I will like to change to the main point, some problems during the urbanization process in China and the recent ?.

  The first, the pollution problem and the ecology environment service foundation is decreased. Mainly I think this is from the air pollution, because over 70% of electricity came from coal power, this gives us big amount of air pollution. I don't want to raise this figure, you can see both in Chinese and English. If you fly from abroad or from other part of China, want to land to Beijing, you can see, when you fly in the 3,500m on the sky, it's blue sky, very clean, down to 2,500m, you can find some smoke or fog above the city, and 1,500m, nothing to see, and even down to 500m, then you can see the picture is very polluted air. And also the acid rain takes about nearby 40% of our country, mainly in southeast part of China. In the northern part because of big sandstorm, the bad thing is particles, so it keeps the balance, so in the north part, there's no acid rain.

  The secondary problem is the energy consumption increases very fast, and the utilization rate is lower than the world level. First, the energy consumption is very high, before the refining process in 1978, all the buildings and construction energy consumption only 10%, but last year it reached 24%, 25%, and we just have some forecast to 2020 it will be increased to about one third of our total energy consumption, because people's living standard picks up very fast. For instance, in Shanghai, the household air conditioner is very popular, 94% of the family owned their own air conditioner, even higher than European level and American level. So this is a big problem. And also private cars increase very fast, only last year about 2 million private cars were sold in China. 

  Third one is the water resources shortage. About 50% of our city, big-sized and medium sized, are shortage in water. Hundreds of them is emerging shortage, particularly in the northern part, north China and the northwest of China.

  Four, this is the new development zone take too much land and utilization rate is not high enough. I give you a picture, the state approved high and new technology development zone, each square kilometer, the output, you can find, it is very different. For instance, in Shanghai, three high-tech parks, their output is between 5 trillion to 8.5 trillion, and some of those in Guiyang, in Zhengzhou, Nanchang, or Yingkou, it's less than 500 million, so it's quite different. It means the land utilization rate is not very high. In the southern part of China, specially in the Pearl River Delta area, because lot of people, lot of rural people move to there, they need house, so they develop such building we say shake-hand building. You can shake hands from one side to another side. Some building is too nearby, so we say maybe 'kiss-building', people can kiss each other from their windows. So this is very bad, and it's not good for city, not for safety, not for everything. And some place in northern part of China, a shortage of water, but they have big square inside the city and they want to put a fountain when they visit it. And also some town and small city the utilization of the land is very low, this figure shows the comparison between the big city, medium-sized city and township and so on, and the very big challenge for the city security, due to China is earthquake frequency country and also in the southern part it's flooded in the summer season.

  Six, the city develop very fast, but it's only in the quantity, the quality and the culture is not catch up.

  And the seventh big problem is some mining city. Because of their resources is finished, so there may be big problem both for employment and to the development. We have about 154 those mining city, and about 10% now became shut up this kind of mine, about 700 mining city is meeting the big problem. This is Beijing you can see, in the downtown area the car' s speed down to 20km/h, it's same as bicycle. And also the noise and the waste gas bring a big problem for the residents. It's not only depending, because our city planning philosophy is if the traffic problem, then we build wider road, if you have wider road, you have more and more cars come to the road, then you meet a new problem. So I give you a figure, for per kilometer road can have 449.6 cars in New York city, but in Shanghai we only can have 84.5 and Beijing 56.3, this means traffic management system is very poor, and we need this kind of knowledge, we need this kind of system. So in Beijing you have found very few one-way road, (every cannot) they can change the direction everywhere or directive, so this makes a big problem for traffic.

  And we are also finally worry about the balance between economy development and social, cultural development. So some very old city, they destroyed old city and build a modern high glass box to instead of the historic things. So this is destroying our tradition. Please find these four pictures, can you point which city is Shanghai, which city is Guangzhou, which city is Beijing and which city is Dalian? It looks very similar. Because I'm a mayor of Shanghai for a long time, I tell you this one is Shanghai, because it's People Square, its the museum, in the middle it's the round museum. Maybe the right one is Guangzhou because they have Pearl River. But I can say this is Wuhan, this is Shenzhen, it looks very similar. And we do have some traditional places, very beautiful, and we need them to keep this tradition for our next generation to next, next generation, and to show our culture to the foreigners.

  Finally, I think maybe we can take some very fast approach to see what we plan, to have strategic way to solve this kind of problem. The strategic point is the organization must use the Chinese characteristic, must have sustainable development. And of course, the Chinese population is so big, so we don't want to have such phenomena happening in Latin America and some middle-east country. Lot of rural people come to city with nothing to do, we must have our own mould to have developed economy, give the ? job opportunity for those rural young people go to the city, they can find suitable house and no one sleeps on the road, no slums in the big city. So our strategic plan is those kind of city must together with the economic growth, and also we must keep the ecological system and environmental protection and the service, city service for sustainable development.

  The third one is we must change the economic growth type and to further develop the circular economy. I'm a metallurgist, very dirty job, and polluted very much, however I must tell you honestly. China need steel because lower built highway, railway, prepare house for the people living, every family wants to have a new apartment, so we need steel, we do need steel. But we want to have a clean process and we want to have a recycled, circular economy for this. For instance, we plan in the next five years to build a mould steel complex with 8 million to 10 million capacity and use all of this facility for waste plastics collected from the city to instead of cork, to instead of coal some of them and recover 1.2 million tons of scrap, steel scrap to re-melt down to instead of iron, and also collect all the gas, waste gas to burn the electricity-generator to produce electricity and in the meantime, all the slag will be used to produce cements to instead of to taking the mountain to destroy the ecology. And this plan, this steel complex will be built in eastern part of China, in Bohai area, Bohai Gulf, nearby Tangshan, and then we ?crossed on the capital steel in Beijing to meet the air requirement for the 2008 Olympics. So this is a big project, the capital steel and the Tangshan Steel complex and some other investors will put about 30 billion RMB to build this new factory. And of course, this whole process, the energy consumption was lower than the Japanese and Korean steel complex. It should be a mould for the further development of Chinese high energy-consumption industry, and of course we need sanitary land, we need sanitary water, we need recycled water, and collected rainwater and desaltation of the sea water for the water shortage. I just come back from Singapore, they told me ten years ago they bought the sweet water from Malaysia 100%, now one third is collected rain, and 30% is the recycling of the waste sewage to clean and reuse it for toilet, for gardens, for everything. And now they have the three steps, desaltation of the sea water, to change sea water to the sweet water, now this year will reach 10% and five years later it will become one third. So I think this is good example for our city in the eastern coast, like Qingdao, Dalian, Tianjin, and some city like Ningbo. Of course, the last one must build a very nice public security system to protect our people, and all the mining city should have a scientific plan, and comprehensively develop their economy, not only depending on mine, and from a personal point of view, we must control the private automobile in the big city, and build a high working efficiency, low energy consumption, safe and convenient public transport system. Now most Chinese big cities are building the subway very hard, and hopely can use those kind of system to instead of the vehicles.

  

  Finally, we hope we can further protect our traditional culture, and we can develop our new city culture to service the people and to keep our Chinese cultural tradition for a long time.

  Thank you very much for your attention!



Contact Us:

E-mail:secretariat@cciced.net

Address:5 Houyingfang Hutong,Xicheng District,Beijing 100035 P.R.Chinazip code:100035

Copyright © 2020 Secretariat of China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development. All Rights Reserved. Presented by China Daily.