After the founding of New China, there are five newly established provincial capitals, namely Hefei in Anhui, Zhengzhou in Henan, Nanning in Guangxi, Shijiazhuang in Hebei, and Haikou in Hainan. When it first became the provincial capital in 1952, Hefei was just a small county with its humble appearance, and it was jokingly called the "Three Five-Year Plan" city - 5 square kilometers, 50,000 people, and 5 roads.
In China, where there are many ancient capitals and famous cities, Hefei is not well known. Around Anhui, the provincial capitals of Nanjing, Hangzhou, Wuhan, Jinan and Nanchang are all cities with deep historical accumulation of provincial capitals, and their strength is above Hefei. In Anhui at that time, the railway transportation hub Bengbu and the Yangtze River giant port Wuhu seemed to be more qualified to lead the development of Anhui. Hefei's total economic output did not surpass Wuhu until 1984, and it did not surpass Anqing until 1989.
Starting with such economic strength, chasing the dream of "great Hefei" for 70 years is essentially to crack the "pain of the lack of big cities" in Anhui. This is not only the desire of Hefei, but also the demand of the whole Anhui.
The change of the big city
Economic data has risen all the way to the most intuitive impression transmitted to the outside world by China's large cities, and as a late-haired city of Hefei, the change in economic data is more obvious.
Statistics show that in 1949, Hefei's total economic volume was less than 100 million yuan; By 2018, it was close to 800 billion yuan, with an average annual growth rate of 10.6%, achieving four major leaps.
The first leap, 1949-1975, the total economic volume exceeded 1 billion yuan in 26 years, with an average annual growth rate of 7.5%; the second leap, 1975-1994, 19 years stepped on the 10 billion yuan step, an average annual growth rate of 9.9%; the third leap, 1994-2006, only 12 years to step on the hundreds of billions of yuan steps, an average annual growth of 16.3%; the fourth leap, 2006 to the present, the average two years across a hundred billion yuan step, In 2018, it reached 782.29 billion yuan, an average annual growth rate of 13.2%. From 1949 to 2018, it increased by 8691 times.
In 1952, China's urbanization rate was 12.46%, and the urban area of Hefei at that time was only 5 square kilometers, with a population of more than 50,000; by 1978, the built-up area of the city had expanded tenfold, and the population reached 700,000; by the end of 2018, the permanent population of Hefei exceeded 8 million, and the built-up area was nearly 500 square kilometers, which once again increased by more than 10 times. These 40 years are also the 40 years with the fastest growth in China's urbanization, with the urbanization rate rising from 17.92% in 1978 to 59.58% in 2018. Up 41 percentage points, the urban population grew to 830 million people.
Behind the digital growth is Anhui's pursuit of large provincial capitals. Because compared with other provinces and cities, Anhui has long lacked a strong central city, and the agglomeration and driving effect of provincial capital cities will have an important impact on the economic development of the province, such as Wuhan to Hubei, Changsha to Hunan, Chengdu to Sichuan, the cohesion and radiation of these provincial capital cities in the province are much stronger than Hefei.
If You put Hefei in the provincial pattern, it will be more clear at a glance to break through the "pain of big cities" in Anhui.
From the east-west direction, Nanjing and Wuhan are super large central cities, especially after the Nanjing Metropolitan Circle included Ma'anshan, Wuhu and Chuzhou as members, which squeezed Hefei to a certain extent. From the north-south direction, Zhengzhou in the north takes the Central Plains Economic Zone as the hinterland and includes the cities of Fuyang and Bozhou; the Xuzhou Metropolitan Circle has absorbed Huaibei and Suzhou. Hangzhou in the south has a strong radiation effect on Xuancheng, Huangshan and other cities in the southern Anhui region.
As a result, the urgency of Anhui Province's desire for a central city jumped out. Hefei, the provincial capital, also has high hopes.
Carding found that as early as 1995, Hefei had clearly proposed the construction of a modern big city, and China's urbanization rate at that time had reached 29%, which was about to pass the threshold of the accelerated period of urbanization. In the eastern coastal areas, after more than 10 years of development, special economic zones such as Shenzhen and Xiamen and the first batch of economically open cities such as Dalian, Qingdao and Ningbo are rising as star cities. Once a large industrial economy city was surpassed by these coastal economic cities, China's urban pattern underwent a major transformation.
After entering the new century, the positioning expression in Hefei's "Eleventh Five-Year Plan" is "modern lakeside city"; in the "Twelfth Five-Year Plan", it is "modern lakeside big city". The one-word difference is not only the reconstruction of the urban spatial pattern, but also the improvement of the development realm. "Big" has also become one of the deepest impressions transmitted to the outside world by the changes in the city in the past 70 years, whether it is the eastern coastal cities or the late-starter catch-up cities in the central and western regions, they have put "big" in the first place in the development planning, so that at that time, more than 100 "international big cities" appeared in China overnight, triggering a hot discussion in public opinion.
Hefei's urban pattern was a turning point in 2005, and Hefei launched the largest "demolition" and "large-scale construction"; by November 2006, the construction of Binhu New Area was launched. A series of big moves have fundamentally changed the urban appearance and spatial layout of Hefei.
In August 2011, after the adjustment of the administrative division of Hefei, 800 Lichao Lake became the "inner lake" of Hefei, and the urban form realized the triple jump of "ring city - binhu - linjiang"; In terms of space strategy, from the "141" group to the "1331" group. In China's urban planning, the group spatial layout is a magic stroke for Hefei's urban development.
Because the "pie-sharing" urban expansion has been proved not to be a high-quality road, Hefei's spatial layout planning can only be an open, group layout, composed of a system of different functions from the central main city, the secondary city, the new city, and the satellite city, effectively avoiding the drawbacks of "not having a big disease before it is strong, and failing to decline before it is strong". This has become a classic case of urban planning in China and has been written into textbooks.
Looking back on the road traveled now, we can deeply feel that during the accelerated period when China's urbanization rate reached 40% in 2003 to exceed 50% in 2011, Hefei just seized the major opportunity of urban expansion, and this period is also a critical period of rapid expansion of all large cities in China. If there is no advance layout in urban space, it is impossible to have future development potential and platform carriers. This is also the driving force behind the new urban areas throughout all large and medium-sized cities in the country. This was followed by "land finance" and real estate development, and the "crane economy" became the path of consistency in major cities. Amid the roar, Chinese cities have become one big construction site after another.
However, urban spatial expansion is only one level, from the perspective of population size, regional megacities are first of all large-scale population agglomeration, which is an important purpose of urbanization, otherwise the city will become a pile of buildings. Therefore, "big" cities are not only an expansion of geographical area, but more importantly, an increase in population.
"One of the important symbols of a megacity is the population, and for a city to become a megacity, the total population must be at least 10 million." In August 2011, the Propaganda Department of hefei Municipal Party Committee and the Hefei Federation of Social Sciences jointly held a seminar on "Mega City Construction and Regional Development", and an expert from the Anhui Provincial Federation of Social Sciences made a quantitative analysis, saying, "The basic symbol of regional megacities is that the total economic volume exceeds 300 billion yuan, the urban population exceeds 5 million, and the built-up area exceeds 500 square kilometers." "These key indicators are the most basic conditions for a city to be able to participate in urban competition, and the reality of urban competition is like this." Under this special path of local competitive development, the competition for the top position has brought about the agitation of China's urban pattern.
Stir up the pattern
Starting from Hefei's regional GDP exceeding 100 billion yuan in 2006, Hefei "brushed its sense of existence" on China's urban coordinate system, and a common evaluation of Hefei by the outside world is "spoiler", because Hefei triggered a reshuffle" in the economic ranking of provincial capital cities.
But in fact, as a provincial capital city with backward infrastructure, thin economic foundation and small population, until 2000, the total economic volume still hovered 18th in the national capital city and ranked 50th in the national city for a long time. In the "contest between provincial capitals", Hefei has always been in the inferior position. First of all, compared with the surrounding 6 provincial capitals nanjing, Hangzhou, Nanchang, Wuhan, Zhengzhou and Jinan, Hefei's total economic volume is the smallest, at the "bottom of the valley"; secondly, in 2004, when the strategy of the rise of the central region began to be implemented, Hefei was also the smallest among the capitals of the six central provinces.
The change occurred in 2006, when the "100 billion Hefei" was realized, and the total economic volume of Hefei reached 107.386 billion yuan, exceeding Taiyuan's 101.338 billion yuan. This is the first time that Hefei's economic aggregate has been hovering for a long time, and it is also the first time to get out of the embarrassment of the "bottom of the pot" in the central provincial capital, marking the first solid step in Hefei's leap.
By 2008, Hefei's total economic output had continuously surpassed Nanchang and Kunming, and then advanced by 2 places. At the same time, there is also a major change is that Hefei has finally jumped out of the economic valley of the six surrounding provincial capital cities, surpassed Nanchang, and rose to the fourth place in the central city. Because of these two jumps, Hefei has been called "the most active changemaker in the regional economic pattern".
Subsequently, after 5 years of hard work, Hefei's total economic volume exceeded 500 billion yuan in 2014, surpassing Shijiazhuang. By 2015, the total economic volume surpassed that of Fuzhou and Changchun, ranking 12th among the provincial capitals of the country. At the same time, a number of core economic indicators have entered the top ten provincial capitals in the country, and the added value of industries above designated size in that year ranked 9th in the national capitals; fixed asset investment exceeded Nanjing, Xi'an and Shenyang, ranking 5th.
From 2006, when it exceeded 100 billion yuan to 2015, it has just gone 10 years. Among the provincial capitals of the country, only 3 cities have maintained double-digit economic growth for 10 consecutive years, namely Hefei, Guiyang and Xining, and Hefei is the fastest growing.
As a result, "Hefei Speed" has become the focus of national attention. In the work report of the Taiyuan Municipal Government thousands of miles away, a paragraph was specially written about Hefei, which is extremely rare in the country. On June 10, 2015, People's Daily published two newsletters on the same day, "Hefei Acceleration" and "Change to the Depths to See the Strange Treasure", interpreting Hefei's development experience.
When the time was advanced to 2016, Hefei's total economic volume exceeded 600 billion yuan, and in 2017, it exceeded 700 billion yuan, and successively overtook Harbin, Shijiazhuang and Jinan, and advanced to the top ten provincial capital cities in the country. This kind of competition for the top position is unique in the national capital cities, and has a significant "shuffling effect" on the urban pattern. For a time, "Hefei has continuously overtaken 8 provincial capital cities", "dark horse Hefei" and "Hefei phenomenon" occupy a prominent position on major media platforms. In June 2018, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences released the "Report on the Competitiveness of Chinese Cities", and Hefei was rated as one of the most successful cities in the 40 years of reform and opening up!
In the process of this change, not only the economic aggregate indicators are competing for the lead, Hefei's single indicators are also continuing to advance, especially the main indicators of independent innovation that reflect the quality of urban development and endogenous power have all entered the top ten provincial capital cities: in the "Twelfth Five-Year Plan" period, the number of national high-tech enterprises in Hefei increased to 1056, rising from 12th to 7th; the number of invention patent applications and authorizations increased by 50.93% and 47.73% per year, reaching 16431 and 3413 respectively, from the 12th, The 16th place rose to the 5th and 10th places; the average annual growth rate of the whole society's R&D investment was 28%, accounting for 3.2% of the regional GDP, rising from 16th to 3rd place.
In the 70-year history of China's urbanization, Shenzhen is the most significantly changed city. In the future, Shenzhen will become a demonstration area and leader in the high-quality development of Chinese cities.
"Big" is not only in the size of the urban economy, in order to improve the level of China's urban system, it is also necessary to have the corresponding radiation driving ability and external influence. This is like playing Go, you need more than three pieces to form a "potential" to take advantage of the situation to win. Therefore, While China's large cities are increasing in size, they are moving towards the era of urban agglomerations and metropolitan areas.
Draw circles and build groups
If You put Hefei in the dimension of the urban system to analyze, what kind of direction is it in? To the east there is the Nanjing Metropolitan Circle, the West Wuhan Metropolitan Circle, the South Is the Poyang Lake Urban Agglomeration, the North is the Shandong Peninsula Urban Agglomeration, the Southeast is the Hangzhou Metropolitan Circle, and the Northwest is the Central Plains Urban Agglomeration with Zhengzhou as the core.
In this big chess game, Hefei is surrounded by Nanjing, Wuhan, Hangzhou, Zhengzhou and other megacities competing for development, and Hefei has entered the "trillion club" in advance. Moreover, the economic circle with these big cities as the core is "racing" to expand its influence. Therefore, if Hefei wants to achieve its rise, it must build an economic circle with itself as the core.
It was in 2006, when the "100 billion Hefei" was realized, the strategic planning of the economic circle centered on Hefei was officially proposed, and in August 2009, the name was determined as "Hefei Economic Circle", and the surrounding four cities of Huainan, Lu'an, Chaohu and Tongcheng were included in the scope of the economic circle. In 2008, the Hewu Mussel Independent Innovation Comprehensive Pilot Zone was launched, and Hefei and surrounding cities formed a "1+6" in strategic layout. By 2010, Hefei-Fuyang paired cooperation, which formed a "1+7" pattern with Hefei as the center. In December 2013, Chuzhou city joined the Hefei Economic Circle as a whole.
By April 2016, the Hefei Economic Circle was upgraded to the Hefei Metropolitan Area. A year later, in April 2017, Wuhu and Ma'anshan officially joined the Hefei Metropolitan Area. In September 2019, Bengbu became a member of the Hefei Metropolitan Area. At this point, the overall pattern of "1+10" has been formed. This is not only the interaction between Hefei and the surrounding cities, but also the "chorus" that dominates the Jianghuai region in the general development trend of Anhui Province.
In the hot love between members of hefei's economic circle, another national-level strategy, the Anhui River City Belt Industrial Transfer Demonstration Zone, surfaced in 2009. In January 2010, the planning of the Anhui River Demonstration Zone was officially approved by the state, and Hefei is one of the core of the demonstration zone. The Hefei Economic Circle and the Anhui River Urban Belt have realized the "two linkages" between Jiangnan and Jiangbei.
As one of the regions with the strongest comprehensive economic strength and the most active innovation in China, the Yangtze River Delta is the benchmark for the construction of China's urban agglomerations and metropolitan areas.
Also in 2010, in March of that year, Hefei officially joined the Yangtze River Delta City Economic Coordination Council. Since the application was submitted in July 2003, this admission ticket has been fought for 7 years in Hefei. But beyond expectations, once the door is pushed open, all kinds of greater benefits follow.
First, in December 2012, at the 15th Joint Mayors' Meeting of the Economic Coordination Committee of Central Cities along the Yangtze River, Hefei was identified as the fifth chairman city after Shanghai, Chongqing, Wuhan and Nanjing. By September 2014, the State Council issued guidelines for the development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, and Hefei was officially positioned as a sub-center of the world-class city cluster in the Yangtze River Delta; in March 2015, in the "Belt and Road" vision and action, Hefei's strategic positioning was an inland open highland and an important strategic node. In May 2016 and May 2019, the Cpc Central Committee and the State Council successively issued the Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration Planning and the Outline of the Yangtze River Delta Integrated Development Plan, and Hefei is a "sub-center of the world-class urban agglomeration".
This evolution process of the vertical axis of time, at first glance dazzling, the essence behind it is only one, in the new chess game of regional economy, the metropolitan area is the main body of future development, which is also the inevitable of urban upgrading, China's urbanization is entering a higher level.
After this series of vertical and horizontal crossings connecting the east and the west, connecting the south and the north, Hefei, which originally had limited external influence, is not only the "Tianyuan" of Anhui Province, but more importantly, Hefei lives in the middle link point of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration and the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, showing a general pattern of "one flat shoulder picking two ends". This strategic location determines that Hefei is the gateway and hub of the east and the west, and the "left and right Fengyuan" has a huge space for maneuvering.
In the past 70 years, like all large and medium-sized cities in the country, Hefei has experienced urban space expansion, transportation hub construction, industrial structure upgrading, innovation platform building, inland open highlands, and comprehensive deepening of reform... When every new opportunity comes, only those cities that are keen to seize the opportunity, "start first, be on time, and act fast", can gather the majestic power of chasing dreams and running.