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traditional industries are not necessarily new productive forces

there is a student's painting in li xiaojiang's office. it depicts the typical buildings of the urban village around guangzhou zhongda cloth market with delicate lines: apartment buildings and factory buildings are interlaced, and the ground floor is full of shops, including fast food restaurants, foot bath shops, and hardware, computer embroidery and other auxiliary material merchants. the second, third and fourth floors are mainly garment factories, with workshops and warehouses in the same space. the boss of the garment factory sits on the street, holding signs to recruit workers or looking for customers, and convenient buses, electric cars carrying cloth and small trucks shuttle through the crowd.

two years ago, shen guanqing completed his master's thesis on the zhongda fabric market, and during the research he captured the most dynamic production and living scenes in the area.

li xiaojiang is the former president of the china academy of urban planning and design and a national engineering survey and design master. he has been tracking and studying the planning and construction of cities such as guangzhou and shenzhen for a long time, and has presided over the completion of the overall planning or strategic planning research of megacities such as beijing, shanghai, guangzhou and shenzhen. in the past decade, urban villages have also been an important area of ​​his research. in march this year, he visited kangle village and lujiang village in guangzhou again, which are currently the "most expensive" urban renewal projects in guangzhou.

behind the renovation of the urban village in kanglu district, china's urban village renovation is entering a new round of development cycle, and china's real estate market has also entered the era of stock. how should we objectively treat urban villages during urban renewal, and how should we treat the effective use and organic renewal of existing industrial resources? "china news weekly" interviewed li xiaojiang on the above topic.

li xiaojiang. photography: dong jiexu

“you may not like it, but you can’t deny it”

china newsweek: you have been paying attention to guangzhou zhongda textile business district for a long time. what was the opportunity behind it? when you visited it in march this year, what scenes impressed you the most?

li xiaojiang:i have actually been paying attention to the zhongda fabric market and the surrounding urban villages. i had been watching from the sidelines until i started to study it more than a decade ago. i remember that a colleague from guangdong joked at the time: "sun yat-sen university is the most hopeless. zhongguancun is near tsinghua university and peking university, and there is a design industry cluster around tongji university. there is only one zhongda fabric market near our sun yat-sen university." my first reaction at the time was that the zhongda fabric market might not be the "milan" of guangzhou in the future. milan initially grew up as a oem for the french clothing industry, and gradually grew into a world fashion capital on par with paris. so we have to look at many things in the long term.

in march this year, i visited the kanglu area. the sewing workers in the garment factory here said that the fast fashion clothing brand xiyin "can't afford us". the wages of these people are the most expensive in the entire guangzhou clothing manufacturing market. they are paid by piecework, that is, they can get paid for making a piece of clothing, or even just doing one of the processes. the premise of being paid by piecework is that a huge industry and talent gathering ecology has truly been formed here. the fact that workers can work in different factories every day shows that there are enough orders and factories here, and there is a large enough clothing manufacturing community.

this also reflects the basic temperament and industrial structure of a city. the basic industrial structure of a city determines the industrial chain, supply chain, industry type and industrial population. as for guangzhou zhongda textile business district, guangzhou should protect it and continuously transform it. the transformation should not be drastic, because the clothing industry is an important industry in guangzhou.

"china newsweek": but the transformation seems to be "inevitable". some factories in the kanglu area have been cleared and demolished, and reconstruction has now begun.

li xiaojiang:the transformation of urban villages is a very big topic. i first studied urban villages around 2011, and my starting point was how to view the "informal" phenomenon in cities. as the gap between urban and rural areas is getting bigger and bigger, many people are blind when they first enter the city, so there is a need for a lot of "informal" supply, "informal" employment, "informal" residence, and "informal" public and living services. this is an issue that cannot be avoided in the process of a country's modernization and urbanization.

in some developed countries, as well as developing countries that have fallen into the "middle-income trap" such as brazil and south africa, the main manifestation of "informality" is the large number of slums. in china, the main "alternative" is the urban village.

it is inevitable to some extent that urban villages are dirty and messy. because behind urban villages is china's dual urban-rural social structure and dual land supply. state-owned land is strictly managed, but collective land around big cities is controlled by farmers. in order to maximize their benefits, they will use these spaces as much as possible and gradually build the highest-density areas in the city. you may not like it, but you can't deny it. it provides a low-cost space and is the first stop and "settlement city" for new immigrants entering big cities. moreover, the forms of urban villages are diverse, not only residential, like the zhejiang village in beijing in the past and the kanglu area now, which are typical industrial villages.

over the past 20 years, beijing and shanghai have been regulating urban villages more and more standardized. i have always thought that guangzhou is the most tolerant among first-tier cities, recognizing that urban villages can meet the living and employment needs of new residents entering the city and can adapt to the city's industrial development needs. it is really rare that it can retain a medium-sized and large cloth market in the city center.

when we find that even world-class metropolises have many "informal" areas in the city center, how can we, as a developing country, eliminate them just because we want to? it is easy to make it bright and beautiful. in the past, there were many urban villages that were "demolished and rebuilt". but if all of them were demolished, an industrial ecosystem would be destroyed and a group of people would be driven away. has the cost of this been evaluated?

“transformation is a complex chain”

"china newsweek": "handshake buildings" and "skylights" can be seen everywhere in urban villages. how should we view the safety hazards and governance difficulties they pose?

li xiaojiang:from the perspective of urban safety and public security, urban villages definitely have potential safety hazards. urban villages grow freely, and to some extent even grow wildly. its property rights relationship determines that the government has rarely intervened and invested in the past. therefore, urban villages have several characteristics: mixed living, production, and commercial service functions, almost a fully functional "city", with a mixed population, extremely high residential and employment density - at least 3-5 times higher than general manufacturing and residential space, and little investment in infrastructure, low standards, and poor operation. the original inhabitants do not live here, and private houses have become their "cash cow".

in the urban villages, various safety hazards such as public security and fire protection are prominent. i also asked when i went to kanglu district for research in march. there are fires every year in the area, a factory or a building catches fire. fortunately, they react quickly and the fire does not spread. these are areas that need to be strengthened.

over the past 20 years, the zhongda cloth market has also undergone several rounds of rectification, including power supply, communications, water supply, and fire protection. however, it is not easy to manage urban villages. it is not as easy to manage as state-owned land, and local governments have no motivation to manage it. but the question is, is it necessary to demolish and rebuild on a large scale, and can safety hazards be better avoided after the renovation?

three or four years ago, before the renovation of a certain urban village in shenzhen, the local government managers asked me whether to renovate it. my suggestion at that time was organic renewal. because our china academy of urban planning and design has done relevant research on urban villages, if the urban village is demolished and rebuilt on a large scale to achieve financial balance in the end, the floor area ratio must be more than 10% or even more than 20%. after such a renovation, this place is just a "high-rise slum."

the small area that kanglu has been renovating may also be full of high-rise buildings in the future. however, high-rise factories are not safer than multi-story factories, and high-rise rescue and emergency evacuation are more difficult. we still need to scientifically and objectively evaluate the problems of urban villages, including considering whether it is financially feasible, evaluating the form of the buildings after the renovation, and whether the management and operation are safer than now.

"china newsweek": how can we prevent these current safety hazards and other comprehensive problems?

li xiaojiang:this is a core issue. the land in the urban village is collectively owned, but in reality it is decentralized, with each house belonging to a different villager. under this premise, transformation is indeed difficult.

the simplest but most expensive way is: the government takes all their land and gives enough compensation, but when is it enough? when every household agrees to move, the government's finances will definitely be difficult to support. and after the government's transformation, where will the demand for these properties be? you don't know. there are at least dozens of urban villages like kanglu district in guangzhou. if they all use the method of large-scale demolition and reconstruction to manage urban villages, the government and enterprises may not be able to do it, and the real estate market may not respond.

how to transform the urban villages requires a lot of effort to study, which requires many basic institutional reforms, policy innovations by management departments, and the reorganization and redistribution of interests. at present, it is necessary to force management departments to systematically think about the internal logic of the development of urban villages, and how to improve and improve the risk resistance of natural disasters, fire safety issues, pollution issues, etc.

the use of houses should also be managed more strictly. if the upstairs is a clothing warehouse and the downstairs is a restaurant, it is easy to have a fire. this is a very complicated chain, which requires managers to sort out and solve each link one by one. it is not a general idea that demolition can solve all problems at once. on the other hand, it should be noted that over the past few decades, urban villages have also been changing, and the requirements of urban village residents for living environment have also been changing, but such progress is relatively slow.

on april 23, the last building of the f37 plot in kanglu district collapsed. photo/visual china

“what is needed more is tolerance and care”

china newsweek: kangle and lujiang are typical industrial villages. how is this type of urban village renovation different from other traditional urban village renovations? what is the key to the renovation?

li xiaojiang:beijing and shanghai are more purely residential urban villages. the transformation of industrial villages is more complicated than that of traditional purely residential urban villages. because it is a link in the industrial chain, the local government needs to consider whether there are reasonable alternatives for this link. previously, the local government wanted to move the garment industry in the zhongda textile business district to qingyuan, but qingyuan was not attractive enough for population and industry, so these factories had no motivation.

more importantly, the city's industrial chain and supply chain have their own spatial attributes and characteristics. for example, why are xiyin's manufacturing links all in panyu district and its circulation links all in guangzhou? if it were scattered in other places in guangzhou, it would not have the current effect, and the costs of production, logistics, personnel exchanges and flows would increase. therefore, one of the keys to transforming this type of industrial village is to understand its spatial attributes and spatial laws.

"china newsweek": if kanglu's garment manufacturing industry moves away, what impact might it have on upstream clothing wholesale markets such as the zhongda cloth market and downstream shisanhang?

li xiaojiang:guangzhou needs to study the importance of the clothing industry to the local area. i believe that guangzhou's clothing industry is an inevitable product of a thousand-year-old commercial capital, and is an important industry that has a significant impact on guangzhou nationwide and even internationally. therefore, we should study the spatial distribution of the clothing industry chain and supply chain, the employment and business population in each link, and their ability to bear living, production costs, and time costs. in the end, we will be able to analyze the spatial demand for production and circulation of the zhongda cloth market as the center and backstage of guangzhou's clothing industry. if an industry is not a core industry locally, you can consider giving it up.

as long as it has value, don't act rashly, because the clothing manufacturing industry is different from other manufacturing industries. at the current stage of development, it is an industrial system supported by "informal" elements. it is not strong enough to compete with the technology industry and industrial manufacturing industry. what it needs more is tolerance and care. moreover, it has grown completely on the market. in contrast, the development of the technology manufacturing industry requires high government subsidies, which is its great advantage. in the current situation of economic slowdown, guangzhou should give due tolerance and care to clothing manufacturing, an important industry in guangzhou. this is also the due meaning of the diversified development of economic industries.

china newsweek: kanglu's garment industry consists mostly of small workshops, most of which do not have business licenses and do not pay taxes. how should we view the value of these industries and practitioners?

li xiaojiang:china's tax revenue is mainly intermediate tax and corporate tax, and small and micro enterprises and service-oriented enterprises contribute very little directly to tax revenue. but in fact, wherever people gather, there will be people paying taxes, and they will go to consume, which also solves a large number of employment problems.

the root of the problem is the tax system. our tax system is an intermediate tax system, and people don't know what taxes they have paid in a year, but in developed countries, people know exactly how much tax they have paid. because they are terminal taxes, including consumption taxes, property taxes, and income taxes. in these countries, when you buy something, it has two prices: the price of the product and the tax.

terminal taxation means that enterprises pay taxes only when they make profits, and individuals pay taxes only when they generate income and consume. therefore, as long as a place retains people, there will be tax sources. however, china has intermediate taxes, and local governments are more interested in industrial enterprises because they pay taxes in the open. manufacturing plants like kanglu district should see the benefits of the employment and services they bring, and the benefits of supporting the prosperity of guangzhou's garment industry. this is not a question of whether to pay taxes or not, but a question of at which link to pay.

if we look at it from an individual perspective, these industries can support hundreds of thousands of manufacturing workers, and these workers consume every day, which in itself makes a huge financial contribution to economic development.

"china newsweek": the renovation plan of kanglu area has reserved industrial land in the village collective property for the first time. can it play a role in protecting existing industries?

li xiaojiang:this is a good idea, but two things are still uncertain. first, will industrial buildings also have operational risks in the future? can they be excluded in planning, construction and management? second, how will the rental costs of industrial buildings be accepted by kanglu’s original small owners?

if the rent is expensive, these people will not come, because the clothing manufacturing industry here is a low-cost industry. now here is a building, where living, production, and commercial services are mixed, which implies a lot of risks, but it is low-cost, and the cost and time cost are very low - at the current stage of development, usually if you want efficiency, you have to take risks, and if you want no risks, you must be inefficient.

whether these two points can be achieved in industrial buildings determines whether the original owners will move in. and after they move in, will this production, living and service space become a mixed space in the future, bringing new risks? can future safety hazards be controlled?

but now that construction has begun, the local government can conduct a trial first. it is worthwhile to see how the investment attraction, acceptance of settled enterprises and safety management of the property are after the completion of these buildings. this is a good attempt. if it is successful, it can be promoted further. if it is found that the risk is just a change of space, the local government should study more effective renewal and improvement plans.

shen guanqing completed his master's thesis on the zhongda cloth market. during his research, he hand-painted the typical buildings in the urban village around the zhongda cloth market in guangzhou with delicate lines. drawing/shen guanqing

“what kind of land you grow, what kind of crops you grow”

china newsweek: in the past, many urban village reconstruction models were to transform the original traditional industrial areas into high-tech industrial parks, financial service areas, urban residential areas, etc. is this model still feasible today?

li xiaojiang:it won't work. because china has too much urban space supply. for example, why should internet companies go to kanglu? they can just go to pazhou internet cluster. industrial development has its own ecology, and ecology has its own location. what kind of land grows what kind of crops. it's not that if a region wants to change its positioning to high-tech, high-tech companies will come. companies also have their own demands.

the locational advantage of the city center is not the key. for example, beijing's east and west districts, shanghai's huangpu district and xuhui district have not developed high-tech industries. shanghai's high-tech industries are still in zhangjiang, songjiang, etc. the industrial ecology has very complex spatial correlations and rules.

at the same time, it should be noted that traditional industries are not necessarily new-quality productive forces. the reason why xiyin appeared in guangzhou is that it is a successful case of new-quality productive forces created by empowering traditional industries with new production factors such as the internet, modern marketing, fashion design, and new logistics. xiyin's success is based on guangzhou's industrial foundation and transportation gateway hub foundation, and it has a rigid logic inside. if you destroy it, you are destroying its vitality.

scholars or the government cannot analyze this logic. i often say that xiyin appeared in guangzhou, and huawei and dji appeared in shenzhen. behind them are the industrial structure, social culture, and urban temperament of the city, which are not interchangeable.

china newsweek: the urban village renovation in kanglu district coincides with the new round of urban village renovation in guangzhou and across the country. compared with the previous round of urban village renovation, what changes have taken place?

li xiaojiang:the best era of chinese real estate has passed. if our real estate was still booming and housing prices were still rising, developers would spend a lot of money, even if the floor area ratio of the new building after demolition was more than 10 or even 20, and there would be people who would take over in the end. but now this game cannot be played anymore.

last year, i personally participated in the bidding for the "maritime silk road city" project in huangpu, guangzhou. there are a large number of urban village renovation projects, and some historical and cultural relics have been preserved. however, after the demolition, the renovation progress has been very slow. the problem is that after the demolition, who will build and who will take over are all problems. now the local government has allowed some state-owned enterprises to take over, but at the same time rigidly requires developers to provide a certain amount of business, commercial, affordable housing and public services. the state-owned enterprises have calculated the accounts and cannot build. now, except for residential properties, there are no people to take over business and commercial properties. it is also a problem whether there is anyone to use public services, so developers are unwilling to start projects.

china is now entering the stock era. an important point in urban renewal is to focus on the redevelopment and utilization of existing resources, including industrial and living spaces, as well as cultural protection and the development of green and low-carbon. the transformation of kanglu urban village and the development of guangzhou's clothing manufacturing industry are essentially a question of economic development. the visible hand of the government and the invisible hand of the market should be interactive. there must be market response and respect for market laws. at the same time, we will explore comprehensive solutions to reduce risks in urban villages, ensure the legitimate interests of villagers, effectively operate enterprises, and ensure the settlement and happiness of new residents.