Xinzheng offers model for new-style urbanization

Xinzheng, a small city in central China's Henan province, has summarized its experience in implementing a new-style urbanization process during recent years, so as to share it with other cities in the region.

The city has undergone gradual but continuous changes since 2009 to arrive at today's fresh new look.

It has demolished 156 villages and built 50,000 new houses for nearly more than 10,000 resettled households.

It also established 34 ecological corridors, eight sewage treatment plants, a landfill and a garbage incineration and power generating plant.

In 2009, Xinzheng started its urbanization process by reconfiguring the layout of its villages. It combined 325 administrative villages into 146 living areas to improve the road network.

In 2012, the city further centralized the 146 living areas into 52 communities, which were categorized into three levels based on their development stage and functional location.

A community at the highest level, for example, has finished the transformation and upgrade of leading industries and the renovation of shantytowns, while the lowest level is still cultivating leading industries such as textiles and environmentally friendly architecture.

The local government believes the scale and speed of rural labor migration to cities should depend on the size of urban industrial clusters and the number of new jobs.

It has therefore made many efforts to build more industrial zones and highlight the development of pillar industries to increase jobs.

During the coming three to five years, the city plans to add 300,000 jobs.

The government eliminated 500 companies with high pollution and high energy consumption, and encouraged profitable and environmentally friendly companies to move into business parks set aside for the use of farmers.

In Mengzhuang town, a farmers' business park has built 125,000-square-meter factories and is now home to 98 small and micro companies.

In the past three years, the government used all the newly added land designated for construction to establish and expand industrial zones.

It also adjusted the city's leading industries from 12 sectors including nonmetal mineral manufacturing and smelting and pressing of ferrous metals to three, which are business logistics, food processing and biomedicines.

In 2015, the total added value of the three new leading industries reached nearly 33 billion yuan ($5.09 billion), accounting for almost 50 percent of the city's GDP. People-oriented policies are the core of the new-style urbanization, the government said, which requires the provision of equal public services and political treatment to urban and rural residents. To enhance the employable skills and entrepreneurship abilities of farmers in urban areas, the city government launched six projects, including training, setting up farmers' associations and improving the urban-rural social security system.

It has organized 12 free training sessions, set up 62 farmers' associations and reformed government services by reducing 262 administrative examination and approval items to 138 items, and cutting more than half of the related 1,310 procedures.To better finance the project, the government adopted such methods as financial leasing, trust funds and city investment bonds to attract social capital. Since 2012, the city has raised a combined 11.1 billion yuan.

Contact the writer at xiangmingchao@chinadaily.com.cn and haonan@chinadaily.com.cn