China’s Mega Cities

The Sinosphere has its own cultural-linguistic logic. The Chinese language erects huge barriers to in-migration. But, at the same time, command of simplified Mandarin creates a shared culture for at least one-eighth of humanity. That opens the path to mass migration.

Beijing may not have many foreign inhabitants but almost 40 per cent of its population has recently arrived from other parts of China. Likewise in India’s tech hub Bengaluru, the foreign population is tiny but more than half of the city’s inhabitants are migrants from the rest of India.

These are not global cities as once imagined, but they are hubs and nodes in large and innovative societies that account for an increasingly large share of the world economy. The online life of their citizens further exemplifies these trends. The denizens of China’s mega cities, like their counterparts everywhere, live on smartphones, consuming round the clock flow of news, gossip and the essential services of daily life, all exclusively in Mandarin.

The Great Firewall separates this world from the west. But linguistic hurdles and the gravitational pull of China’s social media system also naturally enclose the Chinese internet. Even if you choose to use a VPN and a translate app, who has the time and energy to keep up with another digital world of this intensity? When the Chinese leadership launched its vision of “dual circulation” in May 2020, it was seen as a geoeconomic master plan for competition with the US. China would build a robust circuit of domestic consumption and innovation while leveraging a separate circuit of international trade. Increasingly, however, it looks less like policy and more like the description of a new mode of global economic development. Instead of mixing and fusing the world in the melting pot, China’s cities are giant national and regional centres, interacting intensively with the wider world but at arm’s length.