This is a tale of two cities. The first is Charles Dickens' Coketown: "It was a town of red brick, or of brick which would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever and never got uncoiled."
The second is the Chinese city of Chongqing as described by (the Guardian's) Jonathan Watts: "It is just after dawn, but the sun remains hidden behind a thick haze. The giant movement of humanity that is Chongqing is about to get into full swing, working, building, consuming, discarding, developing ... We head into the hills to see the biggest of the mega-city's rubbish mega-pits ... an awesome sight; a giant reservoir of garbage, more than 30m deep and stretching over 350,000m2."
After a decade of urbanization and industrialization, China's cities now resemble the nightmare metropolises of mid-19th-century Britain. Accounts of the pollution, ill-health and overcrowding in Nanjing or Chengdu recall the worst excesses of 1840s Manchester or Glasgow. Last week the Chinese authorities finally began to face up to their urban problems with the announcement of a ?95 billion (US$178.4 billion) clean-up fund. But equally telling is Beijing's recent invitation to a British 19th-century historian, Gareth Stedman Jones, to tell them just how we managed the transition to a modern urban nation.
The similarities are striking. Between 1770 and 1840 Britain underwent one of the most dramatic urban migrations in world history.
Hundreds of thousands left their villages and farmsteads for the workshops of Birmingham, docks of Liverpool and mills of Manchester. Sheffield and Bradford doubled their populations in a matter of years.
Today that history is repeating itself in China as families from the rural hinterland decamp for the coastal cities. Every year 8.5 million peasants make their way into the urban centers. By next year China is set to become a majority-urban nation, with more than 3.2 billion living in cities and suburbs.
With the influx of China's peasantry has come the inevitable accompaniment of low wages, exploitation and tension with the indigenous working class. In Victorian Manchester the Irish, in Glasgow the Highland crofters, and in London the Hampshire laborers, became victims of a savagely flexible labor market.
In China the underemployed urban masses are known as "bangbang men": unskilled laborers hanging around docks and markets (as they used to in London and Liverpool) ready to do any work, however dangerous or dirty.
And it certainly is dirty work. From its construction sites, factories, sweatshops and car plants, China's cities have fermented a witches' brew of environmental pollution.
"A sort of black smoke covers the city. The sun seen through it is a disc without rays," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville of 1830s Manchester.
The same could be said of Xinghua or Shanghai today. China is currently home to 20 of the world's 30 most smog-choked cities. And its plans for ever more motorways and airports will only make it worse.
Meanwhile, its rivers -- even the once-mighty Yangtze -- now resemble "the fetid, muddy waters, stained with a thousand colors by the factories they pass" of De Tocqueville's Manchester.
This ever-present pollution causes chronic health problems. Just as the squalor of the Victorian city led to an explosion of cholera, typhus, typhoid and smallpox, the noxious cloud of China's cities has resulted in marked increases in lung cancer, bronchitis and other respiratory diseases.
Only fears for the health of athletes competing in the 2008 Olympics has at last spurred municipalities to act in reducing levels of sulphur dioxide and dust.
The initial Victorian response to the state of their cities was equally lackadaisical. Pollution and inequality was the price of progress, and the middle classes solved their problems by simply moving upwind. But in the end a combination of religion, officialdom and civil society forced the cities to change.
Evangelical Christians assailed the white slavery of factory hands and demanded reforms to working hours and conditions. The growth of the state alongside the science of statistics led to a new awareness of the human cost of city living. In 1834 the Office of the Registrar-General was formed, and every year it issued mortality figures revealing the true horror of urban industrial life.
These official facts were marshalled by a new breed of interventionist civil servants, led by the public-health campaigner Edwin Chadwick, in their Whitehall campaign for state intervention.
Assisting Chadwick in his struggle was a free press. The journalism of Henry Mayhew and WT Stead, alongside the novels of Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli and Elizabeth Gaskell, helped to put pressure on politicians and industrialists to clean up their conurbations. The public voice of civil society produced the great social reforms of the mid-19th century, from sewerage to child labor and trade union rights.
But in modern China there exist few if any of these reforming tendencies. The Beijing authorities have handicapped free religious expression and the social movements that come with it. The state is notoriously secretive when it comes to the release of environment statistics. Rather than leading the fight for reform, China's provincial officialdom is notorious for its incompetence and corruption. Meanwhile the Chinese Communist Party leadership continues to take an aggressively Maoist approach to civil society: non-government organizations, an open Internet and a free press are not at the top of their list of concerns.
Much to their relief, Gareth Stedman Jones argued that Britain held back the urban masses from rebellion in the early 19th century not with an immediate transfer to democracy but by cutting sales taxes, stamping on bureaucratic bribery and curbing the elite aristocracy.
But such reforms were only a holding point. Ultimately the urban masses had to be enfranchised. For at the forefront of politicians' minds was another story of rapid urbanization. Across the Channel, France too was trying to cope with startling rates of immigration and industrialization. But the consequence of its political fumbling was a Paris in flames in 1830, 1848 and 1871. That is a history the Chinese are all too keen to avoid.
Tristram Hunt is the author of Building Jerusalem: the Rise and Fall of the Victorian City.
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