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):
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...