[sridharvembu]

In purely economic terms, China has performed a fascinating ongoing experiment.

The Party looked at the "end state" of an industrialized, prosperous middle-class nation and then decided to will that end state into existence. In that end state, China needs to urbanize on a massive scale and these cities are simply the physical manifestation.

This is the grandest scale human experiment ever, collectivist decision making at its finest (those farmers who are forced to give up the land don't have much of a voice).

Will this work? I don't believe we can begin to calculate all the consequences of this experiment. In any case, it is not obvious the causality runs the way that is implicit in this experiment: build cities, move people, and forge a vast urban middle-class out of rural peasants.

This book is a somewhat sympathetic description of that grand experiment (mildly sympathetic to the Party):

http://www.amazon.com/Chinas-Urban-Billion-Migration-Argumen...

[_delirium]

Interestingly, this has long been one of the main Marxist criticisms of the policy of centrally driven industrialization (which Marx didn't believe in, but Lenin did). The traditional Marxist view is that socialism can only be instituted after capitalist industrialization, because it's a revolution driven by the urban proletariat that capitalist industrialization creates, not something that can be artificially created absent those material conditions. Hence the view of orthodox Marxists that "socialist" industrialization driven by a vanguard party would be internally incoherent, or at least non-Marxist.

(One hears less about this today, because the German revolution failed while the Russian one succeeded, so Lenin won out over Kautsky in dominating 20th-century leftist discourse.)

[auctiontheory]

Very interesting.

In typical state-planner fashion, the Chinese government completely misses a critical component of the rich-country population distribution: people (more or less) choose where they are going to live, i.e. it's not just a question of available bedrooms. Detroit has plenty of available bedrooms, and so does the most of the South and mid-West.