Greater north-south synergy needed

A farmer uses a shovel to separate grains of wheat from the husk in Zhangyao village of Erlang town in Xiping county, Central China's Henan province on May 26, 2020. [Photo/Xinhua]

According to some proposals put forward by the authorities for the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25), China will optimize its territorial space layout and promote regional coordinated development.

Earlier, the authorities wanted to link the establishment of new development patterns with the implementation of a national strategy for regional coordinated development and the establishment of pilot free trade zones, and first explore the new pattern in some conditional regions.

Contradictions still exist in the way of China's regional coordinated development strategy. For example, the urban system is yet to be improved in the central and western regions where a large part of the middle and low-income groups live.

Because of the relatively low cost of living in county towns, migrant workers choose them for "urban settlement".

However, county towns have relatively less land quota distribution and industrial investment rights, leading to weaker financial capacity and limiting the scale of employment for migrant workers.

Then, how can the country support its new development strategy?

First, the central and western regions should be oriented as important places for new middle-income consumer groups. So far, the country has about 400 million middle-income people and they have high growth potential in the central and western regions.

As long as these regions better combine industrial transfer with industrial transformation and upgrading, and combine a new type of urbanization with a new type of industrialization, they will become important regions for the growth of new middle-income groups.

Second, regional coordinated development should be integrated with the national strategy of integrated urban-rural development and a new type of urbanization to form a comprehensive and integrated policy system.

The country should build more balanced metropolitan circles and improve the overall carrying capacity of central cities and city clusters. Increasing investment in transportation facilities and public service facilities in metropolitan circles and city clusters will not only effectively stabilize national economic growth, but also improve the rational distribution of productivity and population there, thus building a mechanism for central cities to promote the development of small and medium-sized cities.

Third, the country should speed up the development of regional central cities to form a benign circular development model.

In recent years, the national economic center of gravity has moved further south and the development of the northern and southern regions has been different.

It is necessary for the country to build more vibrant central cities in the northern regions and to connect the northern and southern regions through a more efficient, more convenient and low-cost modern transportation and logistics system to form a new trend of north-south economic cooperation.