China: 1.3 billion people, 60-plus cities with more than 1 million people, three with over 10 million. Yet we really don’t have a grip on what’s happening in China’s cities, or the competitive dimensions of Chinese national urban policy. The question’s especially timing right now as we shape our first-in-decades national urban policy, including the avowed focus on metropolitan areas that President Obama, chief White House urban affairs officers Adolfo Carrion and Derek Douglas and other top officials underscored at a White House Urban Policy Roundtable last week.

A few authors have focused on Chinese cities. Tom Campanella’s brilliant The Concrete Dragon, China’s Urban Revolution and What it Means to the World (2008) takes us to places one wouldn’t have imagined two decades ago. He tells us of the South China Mall that at 7 million square feet is bigger than the Pentagon. About Grand Epoch City, a 540 acre hotel, conference center, Buddhist Temple just outside of Beijing. And China’s 25,480 miles of national trunk highways–a project that has built more than 15,000 miles of interstate-like roads in just four years, including phenomenal engineering feats to increase vehicular mobility in cities–yet at great expense to the neighborhoods.

Views of last year’s Olympics let us see Beijing transformed. The historic core of Shanghai has seen 400 20-story-and-higher skyscrapers built since 1990. News accounts of civil unrest focus suddenly on Urumqi, a city of a million on the country’s western edge. Yet an I.M. Pei-designed museum in Suchow is emblematic of the culture–and investment wealth–of oversees Chinese “coming home.” Workers’ demonstrations in the Pearl River Delta cities of Shenzen and Dongguan remind us of China’s role in globalization. And the opening of the giant hydroelectric dam at Three Gorges evokes a vision of nearby Chongqing, one of China’s four autonomous municipalities, which I visited this month, a two and a half hour plane flight from Beijing.

Let’s pause at Chongqing for a moment because it represents urban policy at work in a smaller (by Chinese standards) city. With a population of 5 million in its core and about 30 million within its bounds, located at the confluence of the Yangzi and Jailing Rivers, it reminds us it was China’s national capital for a few years after the Japanese invaded in the 1930s. Chiang Kai Chek, Mao, and many other luminaries fled to its green hills. Today, it’s the commercial center for central China, specializing in manufacturing (iron, steel, motorcycles), shipbuilding, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and tobacco production. And it’s preparing for even more growth in its government-sponsored satellite city for 700,000 located on the other side of a mountain that their traffic engineers just pierced with a four-lane highway.

So what’s happening in this new urban place? Some of the usual things–modern space for offices and plants, housing, shopping centers and the like. But here is the key item: 11 universities will have campuses here. Two or three “science cities” will be built adjacent to the academic areas. Chonqing University has opened a new 3,000-acre campus (built, incidentally, in a year); it will have 50,000 students, many destined for advanced study in the city.

We know about the great economic disparities among and within China’s rural and urban populations. But China and its municipalities are clearly on target with their focus on knowledge production, building critical infrastructure, and developing industries to help the country grow its competitive edge.

So where are we in the United States with regard to urban policy?

In a nation overwhelmingly metropolitan in its population and economic foundations, we need the kind of focus that Brookings Institution Vice President Bruce Katz articulated at the White House’s recent Urban Policy Roundtable–the four interrelated challenges of advancing innovation, human capital, infrastructure, and quality of place. Taken seriously, it’s a formula that could leverage our cities far into the future. The White House Office of Urban Affairs is trying to define how it moves federal initiatives in that direction. At the roundtable, Secretaries Shaun Donovan (HUD), Ray LaHood (Transportation), Hilda Solis (Labor), and other high-ranking federal officials including Karen Mills (SBA), Lisa Jackson (EPA), Xavier Briggs (OMB) all pledged to support the inter-agency task force now being formed to direct federal mandates and funding towards collaborative, urban-focused policy.

But it won’t be easy: entrenched forces favor status-quo arrangements. Examples: the devastating evidence that federal stimulus funds for transportation infrastructure projects, apportioned out by state governments, are seriously shortchanging cities. And the reversals of states’ funding to education–California, for example, has just announced an $800 million cut in its support for its ten universities.

With China at our back, its national and local government investing seriously for an urban future, our margin of error is eroding rapidly.

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