Chongqing transforms after 15 years of provincial status

When a Louis Vuitton flagship store opened last September in southwest China's megacity of Chongqing, well-off customers poured in and queues rapidly formed, a scene a local newspaper described as "unbelievable."

Located in the city's Jiefangbei business center, the appearance of the two-floor store's outside wall is dazzling. Covered with crystalline bulbs, the wall makes the store resemble a palace at night.

The store is emblematic of the rapid transformation the city has experienced since officially becomming a municipality under the direct jurisdiction of the central government in June 1997, granting it a provincial status that brought with it with more political and financial power.

Nearly 15 years on, the rapid changes have even impressed locals who have been away for awhile. Bridges and cars have replaced ferries and ropeways, which once served as the main form of cross-river transportation in the city. Last year, one of the city's two signature ropeways was removed to make way for a new bridge.

On its outskirts, development zones have sprung up, expanding the metropolitan area at a pace that would've been inconceivable 15 years ago. One such zone now functions as a major global laptop production center, housing assembly lines for three leading PC makers: Hewlett-Packard, Asus and Acer.

The city's interactions with the outside world have grown as well. Flights to the city have increased multi-fold, the number of foreign visitors has shot up and standard Mandarin has replaced the local dialect as the language of choice in more parts of the city. As of the end of 2011, more than 300 of the world's top 500 multinational companies had established a presence in Chongqing.

Viewing the city from where the Jialing River flows into the main stream of the Yangtze River, skyscrapers have emerged on the mountain slopes alongside the rivers. An arched bridge styled after the Sydney Harbour Bridge spans the Yangtze, connecting Chongqing's upscale business districts.

Chongqing's economic output exceeded 1 trillion yuan (160 billion U.S. dollars) in 2011, making it the first inland city to establish an economy on par with those of the country's coastal cities.

As the Kuomingtang's base of operations during World War II, Chongqing was once China's political, economic and cultural center. However, it only made strides in development after winning provincial status and a national campaign called "Develop the West" was launched in 2000 to support the development of western regions.

Chongqing's development is representative of China's growth as a whole, facing the same kinds of challenges and obstacles. The city suffers from the same rural-urban disparity, with 20 million of its 33-million-strong population employed as farmers.

In Fengjie county, located a four-hour drive away from the LV store in Jiefangbei, the annual income of an orange farmer and his family is often less than the cost of a LV handbag; in Wuxi county, about five hours away, half of the local populace lives on less than one U.S. dollar a day.

Professor Zheng Fengtian, vice director of the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development of Renmin University, said that while Chongqing does share of the same challenges as Beijing and Shanghai, some obstacles are specific to the city.

"In Beijing and Shanghai, most people live in the city. Balanced urban-rural development means a large city lifting a small village, but the case in Chongqing is quite the opposite. It's ten million people in the city lifting two times that amount in rural areas. In addition, infrastructure costs are dramatically higher in mountainous areas like Chongqing," he said.

Authorities have begun to address the city's urban-rural imbalance, starting with the implementation of a pilot reform program in 2007 to bridge the urban-rural gap.

The reforms have been smooth. Early last month, Zhang Dejiang, China's vice premier and Chongqing's Communist Party of China (CPC) chief, held a special meeting to review the progress of the reforms. A statement issued after the meeting called for advancing the reforms and continuing to score new achievements.

"For Chongqing, development now has to occur in both urban and rural areas. The goal is to achieve coordinated development," said Xu Qiang, vice director of a task force set up to conduct the reforms.

One of the first reforms to take place was aimed at the city's residential registration system, which previously limited the ability of rural migrants to work in the city and gain access to public services.

Changes to the system began to take place in 2010, with the city planning to grant urban resident status to 10 million farmers within the next decade. Over three million farmers have already gained urban resident status, with authorities permitting them to retain their rural land and gain equal access to education, health care and other services in the city.

Gao Jianhua is among the three million. After 12 years of working as a migrant worker, Gao, a husband and father of two, finally settled in Chongqing as an urban citizen, living in an affordable apartment he found through a public housing program.

"This apartment is my home now, and I won't go back to the countryside," he said, hinting at his satisfaction with a new life that many farmers in China's underdeveloped remote region have dreamed of.

"I am settled down here now. All I want to do is work harder and raise my children here in the city," he said.