China’s plan: by the year 2000 a home for every family

Press, 11 January 1986, Page 12

China’s plan: by the year 2000 a home for every family

Bill Harrison, who recently visited Japan and China, reports that it would take New Zealand 5125 years to reach China’s turn-of-the century housing target.

“Providing low-cost housing in any country presents the greatest challenge to builders, designers, and governments. Countries vary so much that no single answer can be found to meet our expectations.

Modern China, a nation of a thousand million people, has set a national target to have one appropriate, sanitary, single family house for each family by the end of this century.

Work towards this target, which requires the building of millions of dwelling units, is well under way. It is constrained only by the purchasing power of China’s government. Under Chairman Deng Xiaoping’s new open policies, the great walls of China’s isolationism are crumbling. The old regime, committed to political ideology, is being replaced by young technocrats determined to modernise their nation and improve the living standards of one fifth of the world’s population. Ever-increasing numbers of tourists now allowed into China are witnessing the reawakening of one of the world’s once great civilisations.

They return with tales of sights that are as fascinating to today’s travellers as they were to Marco Polo in the thirteenth century. The Great Wall, the only man-made structure on earth visible from the moon is no longer a defence structure but a tourist magnet. The Forbidden City is no longer forbidden. To enter its gates is to appreciate something of the great dynasties that once were China.

Donkey-carts and hand-

barrows, their wooden wheels replaced with pneumatic tyres, their only concession to progress, still clutter the roads. They demonstrate to the jet-age tourist the time lag that must be bridged by the technocrats.

China’s building industry can be traced as far back as the eleventh century 8.C., in the Western Zhou dynasty. However, it is the industry’s performance and the effect of political influence since the founding of the new China in 1949 that is of most interest to New Zealand visitors.

In 1949 only 200,000 people were employed in the whole of China’s construction industry, mostly in privately-owned enterprises. Their work was mainly in the coastal towns.

By 1952, the number of people employed in stateoperated enterprises in the construction industry had grown to 995,000. The numbers continued to grow by about 200,000 a year until 1959, when productivity per employee was measured at 31 square metres of completed floor space annually. The industry then entered a long period of stagnation until 1976.

Unrealistic construction targets, and poor management of labour and material resources were blamed for the decline in productivity, which by 1961 had fallen to only 13.6 square metres of completed floor space, per employee annually. Since 1977 the government has given greater attention to the construction industry, aiming to improve its contribution to the national economy. New management rules, improved technology, and the adoption of an “economic responsibility syswta”

have improved the industry’s performance.

By 1984 the annual completed floor space figure of some well-managed enterprises had risen to 70 square metres per employee. Now, 12,360,000 people are employed in the industry, and the living conditions of 320 million people have been improved. Much still remains to be done.

China must surely have the largest market potential

for low-cost housing in the world.

With 500 million young people entering the marriage age during the next 20 years the scale of their housing task is massive, to say the least.

Two million newly married couples will need homes in China’s urban areas each year. Rural housing figures are just as impressive.

The national housing target to have one house per family by the end of this century requires the building of 12.3 billion square metres of floor space.

In New Zealand terms that equates to 123 million dwellings of 100 square metres.

Given that last year New Zealand built 24,000 dwelling units it would take our industry 5125 years to reach their target. China has one vast, selfrenewing resource — labour, which in itself created the housing problem. To use this resource, building methods must be labour-intensive. Land and material resources must be conserved. China’s timber resource was depleted by previous generations many years ago. Bricks and concrete are the predominant materials. Even the most temporary structures are thrown up with bricks.

To conserve land for vegetable growing around the cities, urban dwellers are being housed in highrise apartment blocks of five or six storeys, and in some cities over 10 storeys. The skyline of the capital, Beijing, is pierced with tower-cranes that stand like an army of one-armed gladiators guarding the growing high-risers

These cranes were the first obvious concession to mechanisation, and now concrete pumps are finding favour.

The only concession to the social problem of moving families from their ground level shelters into highrisers is to ensure they have fiiore space in their new. apartment than they had on the ground.

Statistics indicate that each Chinese occupies a dwelling space of only 4.6 square metres, which is probably less than a quarter of that enjoyed by a New Zealander.

Planning strategies for rural housing are quite different. In recent years agricultural production has improved and peasants’ incomes have increased. Farmers are now en-

couraged to own and build their own homes, often assisted by construction gangs using prefabricated concrete beams and panels to erect duplex-type houses, s Some are of two storeys,, with bedrooms and living spaces upstairs and room for cottage industries and storage below. Fenced courtyards provide private garden spaces. China now has an insatiable thirst for modern technology. The library of the China Building Technology Development Centre in Beijing already contains more than 200,000 books on building subjects. When that modern technology can be converted into purchasing power, China will have the potential to consume much of the world’s resources.

‘Even the most - temporary structures are thrown up with bricks.’