People have long been arguing about the disappearance of China's old cities - whether it should not be so fast, and whether it should not be so cruel as to knock down the buildings that used to give Chinese cities their unique style.

Nostalgia has been part of the urban dwellers' culture. Frequently, when the older cab drivers meet customers who speak with the distinctive "local flavor" they soon begin to compare notes about where they used to live - with the expectation that all homes were once within a bike ride from each other, and now many families, if not all, have moved at least once in the last 30 years from the city's central area to some distant, formerly obscure, suburban spots.

Today's Beijing has indeed grown so large, and is so much a mixture of Chinese classic buildings and ultra-modern architectural designs, as the argument still continues about protecting traditional houses.

In the meantime, the good thing is that the building industry has become one main pillar of the economy in terms of the capital investment and for the jobs it can create.

The demand from the construction industry has also fueled rapid increases in the businesses of steel and cement.

The change in the cities' skylines has also brought former rural workers into their first urban jobs. In the photo of workers having their lunch break at the construction site of the new headquarters for CCTV, the national television station, you may hear people greeting each other daily in more than five provincial accents.

According to figures released at the end of 2006, all Chinese cities were able to accommodate some 577 million fully-registered residents, or around 44 percent of its entire population.

But at this stage, China is still in an early stage of urban development. And the building of new houses and new public infrastructure in most cities other than Beijing and Shanghai is still lagging behind.

Cities are being built in a markedly decentralized fashion, partly also because of the country's large land area. In comparison with South Korea, where half of its population and GDP are concentrated in Seoul, the capital city, Beijing, as the Chinese capital city, makes up only a little more than 3 percent of China's GDP.

(China Daily 09/08/2008 page1)