By Tom Hancock
More than four million residents of a central Chinese city face an permanent change of address. Chaohu City, in Anhui province, will be abolished, according to Chinese media reports.
The city will be divided into three zones, which are set to be absorbed into neighboring cities, an official from the Anhui Government is reported to have said.
The idea was first suggested at a meeting of China’s People’s Congress in 2010, when representatives from Anhui argued that the small size of government districts in the province was having a negative impact on economic development.
According to the plan, three districts of Chaohu City will be administered by the neighboring cities of Hefei, Wuhu and Ma’anshan. Hefei, the province’s capital, currently has a smaller population than Chaohu city, and is also smaller than several other cities in the province. With the absorption of parts of Chaohu city, the relative economic importance of Hefei is set to increase.
Anhui has traditionally been one of China’s poorest provinces. American author Pearl Buck set her 1932 novel about Chinese peasants, “The Good Earth,” in Anhui. The province now has one of the fastest GDP growth rates in the country, standing at 14.5% last year, according to Xinhua.
The province hopes to exploit Chaohu city’s position on the Yangtze river, by creating an industrial zone focusing on the steel, automotive and electrical industries.
Chaohu’s official population is 4.5 million. The city last made headlines when a video of an unsucessful attempt to destroy an ornamental gate in the city was posted online. A huge explosion left the gate standing, but successfully damaged several nearby buildings. Here’s the video:
The date for the city’s demise does not seem to have been set, and some reports on the story have been removed from Chinese websites. A few posters on microblogging service Sina Weibo are sceptical. “Will somebody from the government speak out and deny this rumour?” one user writes. Others expressed shock at the decision. “How can they do this? I love Chaohu!”
“At the moment, it must be Chaohu’s party secretary who’s most worried”, writes another user.
