The World's Largest City

Perched on a bluff above the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers, the old city of Chongqing appears to some visitors to resemble the superstructure of a large ship. Situated more than 800 miles from the sea and more than 900 miles from the power center of Peking, Chongqing could easily have come to resemble a rusted hulk aground in an urban backwater, despite its brief fame as Chungking, China's capital city during the war with Japan. Forty years later, however, few other cities in China are undergoing such momentous change and rapid growth.

Virtually overnight, Chongqing has become the largest city not only in China but in the world. Territory to the north and west has been annexed, so that the population now encompasses 13.89 million people.[*] Some residents live in newly built apartment blocks, others in air-raid shelters dating back to the war. All seem to be in constant, industrious motion. Chongqing, as a result, is a swirling cauldron of noise and smoke as buzzing motorbikes and overloaded buses strain to climb its steep hills.

Chongqing embraces 90 districts and twelve counties. In 1983 it was given the economic and administrative powers of a province, although it remains part of Sichuan. For the past two years the city has become an economic laboratory for the country. Chongqing has plants that produce trucks, buses, machine tools, chemicals, textiles and munitions. It has ample supplies of high-grade coal, natural gas and iron ore, as well as rich red earth, which provides an abundance of vegetables and grain. Thus it is an ideal testing ground for the plans of Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping, a Sichuan native son, who wants to streamline China's bureaucracy, increase economic incentives and put a new face on Chinese socialism.

With Peking's blessing, Chongqing's city government has taken over the administrative functions once managed by 22 separate government ministries and Sichuan province. It has also been empowered to negotiate contracts worth up to $5 million directly with foreign companies without consulting Peking. Last year alone, the city signed deals worth about $100 million with 70 foreign firms.

If an idea works in Chongqing, so the new reasoning goes, it should work elsewhere in China. The notion that factories should be allowed to funnel some of their profits back into expansion, for instance, was first tried in Chongqing. So was another innovation: decreasing the decision-making power of political cadres in plants and increasing the power of local managers. Observes Long Zeyuan, deputy director of the city's economic-system reform commission: "In the old days, all the decisions were made on a political level by people who didn't think about profit or prices or market conditions."