Yining Li - China’s Reform and New Urbanization

Jointly published with The Commercial Press, Ltd. The print edition is not for sale in China (Mainland). Customers from China (Mainland) please order the print book from: The Commercial Press, Ltd.

The print edition is not for sale in China (Mainland). Customers from China (Mainland) please order the print book from: The Commercial Press, Ltd.

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Traditional urbanization is the urbanization pattern of early-industrialized countries with developed markets. At that time, urbanization and industrialization were basically synchronized with neither overall planning nor scientific concept of urban scale. The municipal leading group did not take sustainable economic and social development into consideration, and it was too late to change the urban status quo when residents living quality began to decline due to the lack of tremendous public investment and newly-industrialized countries can hardly prevent the ills of urbanization even though they have recognized it. As a result, both the early-industrialized and urbanized countries and newly-industrialized countries have experienced so-called urban ills, i.e., a large rural population flooded into cities with shanty towns or slums arising in urban areas. The environment became deteriorated and overcrowded with surging unemployment rate and poor social security, leading to an anti-urbanization trend, i.e., poor people continue to flood into cities and rich people move out of cities to suburbs and even villages.

For some developed market-economy countries with urbanization rates above 90% after more than 200 years of industrialization and urbanization, such a rate is no longer significant and rarely noticed nowadays because:

Firstly, the urbanization rate can reflect the existence of social hierarchy if there are still inequality of rights and restriction of identities between urban and rural residents in a country. However, at present stage, the urbanization rate does not make any sense since such inequality and restriction have disappeared.

Secondly, if there are still differences in public services between urban and rural areas or if there is a non-integrated urbanrural social security system in a country, the urbanization rate can reflect the urbanrural gap in social security integration, which, however, is of rare case.

Thirdly, due to the increasingly improved domestic transportation conditions coupled with convenient means of communication and reduced transportation information costs as well as the regional gap of land prices, the high rate of urbanization does not necessarily indicate the concentration of industrial enterprises which are likely to be scattered in rural areas outside cities.

The traditional urbanization pattern is not suitable for Chinas national conditions. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, Chinas urbanization rate has so far been slightly higher than 50%. However, as per the study by experts on Chinas urbanization, Chinas current urbanization rate is lower than 50% on the ground that the dual household registration system characterized by urbanrural division still exists in China today. As a result, though some migrant workers in urban areas have become permanent residents, they are still peasants who cannot enjoy the same treatment as urban residents do because their household registration status has not been changed. Therefore, the urbanization rate still makes sense for China at present stage, which reflects the lack of integration between urban and rural areas.