Page:The international development of China (IA developmentchina00suny).pdf/56

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34
THE INTERNATIONAL

Our Projected Port will be a highly remunerative proposition for the cost of construction will be many times cheaper than Shanghai and the work simpler. The land between Chapu and Kanpu and farther on will not cost more than fifty to one hundred dollars a mow. The State should take up a few hundred square miles of land in this neighborhood for the scheme of our future city development. Let us say two hundred square miles of land at the price of one hundred dollars a mow be taken up. As six mows make an acre and six hundred and forty acres a square mile, two hundred square miles would cost 76,000,000 dollars Mex. An enormous sum for a project indeed! But the land. could be fixed at the present price and the State could buy only that part of land which will immediately be taken up and used. The other part of the land would remain as State land unpaid for and left to the original owners' use without the right to sell. Thus the State only takes up as much land as it could use in the development scheme at a fixed price which remains permanent. The payment then would be gradual. The State could pay for the land from its unearned increment afterwards. So that only the first allotment of land has to be paid for from the capital fund; the rest will be paid for by its own future value. After the first section of the harbor is completed and the port developed, the price of land then would be bound to rise rapidly, and within ten years the land value within the city limits would rise to various grades from a thousand to a hundred thousand dollars per mow. Thus the