China planning to increase development of city clusters

The development of city clusters is an important part of China's urbanization process, as it could help with coordinated development between large cities and surrounding smaller ones, a city development expert said Sunday.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China's top economic planner, is considering adding two more national-level city clusters in the country's urbanization blueprint, which is expected to be released later this year, China Business News reported Friday.

Cities in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River and Southwest China's Chongqing-Chengdu area are most likely to be the new national-level city clusters, the report quoted Liu Hua, chief economist with Nanchang Municipal Commission of Development and Reform, as saying.

Liu said four capital cities along the Yangtze River - Wuhan, Changsha, Hefei and Nanchang - are lobbying central government authorities about forming a national-level city cluster, with the aim of gaining increased policy support.

Currently, there are three national-level city clusters across the nation - the Bohai Economic Rim, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta, with Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou as the core cities.

These city clusters have contributed tremendously to China's economic growth. For instance, cities in the Pearl River Delta produced GDP of 4.8 trillion yuan ($782 billion) in 2012, accounting for 9.2 percent of the country's GDP.

Ni Pengfei, director of the City and Competitiveness Research Center under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the development of city clusters will facilitate China's urbanization process.

"Developing city clusters could relieve problems such as traffic congestion and pollution and increase the competitiveness of the region," he told the Global Times Sunday.

"But the formation of city clusters should be decided by market forces rather than administrative orders," Ni said.

Feng Kui, a researcher with the NDRC, has warned of risks in city clusters being formed by administrative decisions.

"It is likely to focus on economic growth rather than ecological progress, and see a lack of efficient coordination," he wrote in an article published in the Economic Daily last month.