Saturday 14 November 2009
Shenzhen wants to be clean, just like Singapore
Shenzhen is in the midst of a self-improvement binge. On the orders of provincial party secretary Wang Yang, the ragged boom town has set the target of catching up with premier Asian cities such as Hong Kong and Seoul within 10 years, and becoming a “world-class international metropolis” within 20.
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Shenzhen wants to be clean, just like Singapore
He Huifeng
14 November 2009
Shenzhen is in the midst of a self-improvement binge. On the orders of provincial party secretary Wang Yang, the ragged boom town has set the target of catching up with premier Asian cities such as Hong Kong and Seoul within 10 years, and becoming a “world-class international metropolis” within 20.
Quite what this means has never been explained - but that has not stopped the city trying.
In the past year cadres have been sent all over the world to study topics including innovation, urban management, legal systems, environment and social welfare. Consultants have been brought in from overseas to offer advice on some of the thorniest issues.
One of the areas where Shenzhen falls short of the Asian cities it aspires to is public sanitation. A 2005 report found that it ranked last among 31 mainland cities for the number of public toilets, with just 637 for its estimated 10 million population.
The number has since increased to more than 1,500, but it still pales in comparison to cities such as Singapore, which has 10 times as many public toilets for a population half the size.
Shenzhen has chosen Singapore to be its guiding light in public-sanitation improvement. A Singaporean consultancy was hired and spent two years working with the municipal environment and sanitation bureau compiling a report on the challenges facing the city and how they should be approached.
In the meantime, Shenzhen has sent dozens of officials to the Lion City for study trips in its ambitious endeavour to turn the municipality into a garden city like Singapore.
The report suggests improvement in several areas, such as trash collection, sewage treatment and public toilets, and severe punishment for those who litter. The last point certainly has a Singaporean ring to it - the Lion City famously banned chewing gum in the early 1990s because of the problems it caused in public places.
Last month, the Shenzhen government announced it would hire a Singaporean environmental sanitation consultancy to continue to advise the city on improving public sanitation.
Shenzhen media have said the municipality wants to learn from Singapore on public education and penalties, involvement of the private sector in sanitation and garbage management, and the mechanisation of public sanitation.
The decision to model itself after Singapore was made two years ago, before Wang Rong was appointed acting mayor.
Wang’s previous job as Suzhou party boss gave him much exposure to Singapore. Suzhou is famous for the industrial park co-invested with Singapore and the Jiangsu city has learned much from Singapore’s management of the industrial park.
Asked why the bureau did not use Hong Kong as a model, Hu Zhenhua, a spokesman for Shenzhen’s urban management bureau, said: “Hong Kong is the efficiency expert, but Singapore is a unique garden city, and nobody would be better than Singapore for environmental improvement.”
As far as the people of Shenzhen are concerned, the top priority is public toilets.
“In my memory, I’ve never used a public toilet in Shenzhen,” resident Wendy Liu said. “The public toilets are unhygienic.
“It’s fine in downtown areas where there are restrooms in shops or fast-food restaurants. But it’s a big headache in suburbs or industrial areas where there are millions of migrant workers.”
A proposal in the report that hotels and restaurants open their toilets to the public was dismissed by many as not a real solution to Shenzhen’s problems.
Shenzhen’s central business district and upmarket areas have modern facilities just like Singapore and other modern cities. But unlike Singapore, Shenzhen has a large population of low-income earners, many of them rural migrants who live in shabby housing in the outskirts of the city. It is these areas that lack sanitation and public facilities.
A fancy consultation report cannot turn Shenzhen, with its deep economic divide, into a garden city like Singapore unless there is strong commitment to improve public facilities and social welfare, especially for the poor.
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