China’s New Urbanisation Opportunity: A vision for the 14th Five-Year-Plan

This report identifies opportunities from a new type of urbanisation that can help China achieve high-quality growth in the coming decade and create an economy based on high value-added manufacturing and services while avoiding enormous environmental costs. This transformation will not be easy, but our analysis shows that getting China’s cities right offers the best chances for success. Additionally, this analysis provides policy-makers with recommendations on how a new model of urbanisation can help enhance China’s economic, social and environmental prosperity while avoiding climate catastrophe. The goals and priorities outlined in here are intended to help facilitate productive discussions with China’s national decision-makers.

Some priorities suggested by this brief include:

• Placing sustainable cities at the heart of China’s 14th Five-Year Plan and second Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), with the goal of developing a new national system of compact, connected and clean cities across the country. The system will be capable of generating a virtuous circle of green investment and manufacturing to drive future economic transformation, while providing a home for migrant labour and reducing citizens’ vulnerability to climate impacts.
• Aligning national policies behind compact, connected, clean and resilient cities by stopping the sale of fossil fuel-powered bicycles, cars and buses, investing in mass transit, reducing the demand for energy and materials, and fuelling a clean energy revolution.
• Building a sustainable national and subnational financing system for cities alongside complementary reforms to local governance and capacities for urban planning by shifting national transport budgets towards mass transit, introducing national to subnational income tax piggybacks and property taxes, and enhancing the capacity of local governments to manage liabilities.

By putting low-carbon cities at the heart of its new Five-Year Plan, China could unlock not only economic growth but social and environmental advancements in line with “ecological civilisation”: a concept of sustainable development with Chinese characteristics.