Are Chinese Cities a Threat to the World?

Many fear that the world oil situation is being caused by the rapid growth in Chinese cities. As peak oil is approaching will the world be able to cope with the growth in the Chinese cities as they are buying cars rapidly (see Brown, 2006)? They certainly are growing in size and in their appetite for oil; China now accounts for over 30 percent of the world’s new consumption of oil. However, the 200 million Chinese who have moved into cities over the last ten years use around 13 gallons of transport fuel per person, which is less fuel than 1 Atlanta with 4.1 million people or 4 Sydney’s with 3.5 million people. China’s total demand for fuel is still a major player in the global fuel stakes and is growing as they increase their reliance on cars.

But it will be challenging to expand their freeway systems. Chinese cities are built of high rise towers so the density of their cities is around 150 to 200 people per ha (60-80 per acre). Space for highways becomes the limiting factor in high rise cities and the current building phase appears to be reaching that limit.

Chinese cities until recently hardly used any oil and were almost totally bicycle based; they still use bicycles for about 70 percent of journeys in most of their cities. Their new cities are even more dense than their existing cities thus there are implications: when a few people begin to use cars as has happened in the past decade, the streets rapidly fill up with the traffic and the impression of car dominance is obvious. Such car saturation of the streets is however only skin deep as most Chinese cities can rapidly respond to oil depletion as distances for journeys are very short. They can simply phase down automobile use as bicycle use replaces them for short journeys and they can build modern transit very economically as their density facilitates it. This in fact is happening as Beijing and Shanghai will have the largest Metro systems in the world by 2008.

In addition to the investment in mass transit, there are other signs that China will play its part in moving towards resiliency. For example, it is the largest producer of photovoltaic cells in the world, mostly for its own market, and it is building demonstration carbon-neutral eco-cities like Dong Tan and Rhizao. But there are signs that its rapid urbanization will present great challenges to China in mitigating their impact on climate change. Carbon output is increasing, for example, as China builds approximately one coal-fired power plan a week.[i]