Some readers disagreed with me when I wrote last week that so much festival-season travel in China had to do with the lack of color in urban lives. They pointed out that "the system" is to blame for the barriers it has created for migrant workers to move their entire families into cities.

I do not dispute this point but it is also obvious that it is not practical for administrators of China's large cities to completely eliminate the half century-old hukou (household registration system).

If Beijing and Shanghai did this, officials would soon see their population double, creating shortages in many basic supplies.

Freedom of migration is easy to defend in newspaper columns but that freedom is yet to be put into practice between China's large cities and its rural people. The situation is similar to migration between the vast Third World and the world's rich countries.

Just as when Third World countries better manage their development, there will presumably be less desire for migration to distant lands, if cities other than Beijing and Shanghai can demonstrate greater appeal, this would ease the migrant pressure on Beijing and Shanghai.

Having more cities with their own special business and cultural appeal is a much more feasible approach at the moment not only to relieve the transportation system of the impossible mission of arranging for more than 2 billion trips in only 40 days, but also to let more migrants and their families settle down permanently in an urban environment.

One major disappointment is that many cities in China, including quite large ones, are not making enough progress in building their appeal. A recent national survey found that the 10 cities most favored by migrant workers are Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Suzhou, Wuxi, Xiamen and Wenzhou. Aside from the nation's capital, not one is outside the country's coastal belt.

In the old agrarian provinces, which still have large rural populations, renewing old cities, large and small, has been particularly difficult.

In Hunan Province, in Central China, as the local press reported last year, based on another survey, its most desirable place is the small tourist city of Zhangjiajie, rated 22nd nationwide. Changsha, the provincial capital and economic center for more than 2,000 years, ranked only 61st on the same list.

For the last three decades, Hunan villagers have continued to power the business boom in the nearby province of Guangdong, particularly in the rapidly developing Pearl River Delta. Changsha has little to offer these people.

The same is true in reverse. In Shanghai, residents seldom make leisure trips to the many smaller cities in the Yangtze River Delta.

In Beijing, even worse, residents never speak highly of any of the cities they can reach in a couple of hours' drive. Not even Tianjin, despite the port city's recent immense rebuilding efforts. What kind of service or fun can they count on when they visit Baoding, Tangshan, Chengde, Qinhuangdao all fairly large historical cities?

On weekends, the wealthier consumers from those cities head for Beijing's shopping malls.

What is the point, China's city administrators should ask, of managing cities by just building wide roads, tall offices and look-alike department stores without making life easier and more colorful for the common people?

Even if they are lucky in having a few manufacturing operations, what else can the urban leaders do to make their cities better places to live other than providing more protection and more services for new workers?

E-mail: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 02/12/2007 page4)