New Approaches to China’s Urbanization
By HU JIANGYUN
THROUGHOUT world history human populations have relied on land and water resources for subsistence. In early agrarian societies, river basins provided easy access to both. Alongside the development of techniques for ocean navigation, harbor areas became centers of economic activity where goods exchange, processing, and transportation developed. Manufacturing hubs later prospered in close conjunction with the above trades, and the emergence of the factory – and the industries it would spawn – saw significant percentages of countries’ populations abandon traditional agriculture. Cities slowly took shape.
As technology has continued to advance and labor has become increasingly specialized, urbanization has itself diversified; cities today exist in a variety of forms, and no longer rely solely on easy access to rivers and ports to prosper.
Since the 18th CPC National Congress last year, China’s approaches to urbanization have been raised to the level of national strategy. The “urbanization” we know is commonly taken to mean the physical growth of urban areas as a result of rural migration into cities, and increasing suburban concentration. But China’s new take on urbanization is broader in scope, and includes the processes by which rural residents migrate to live and work in cities, as well as suburban towns. In this context, effective urban planning places equal emphasis on large cities, medium-sized cities, satellite suburbs and large towns.
China’s urbanization is currently in a critical period of transition. In general, academic circles adopt the urbanization rate, i.e. the proportion of a country’s urban population in its total population, to measure the urbanization level of a country. According to national statistics, China’s urbanization rate hit 52.57 percent by the end of 2012, up 1.3 percentage points from a year earlier and up 34.7 percentage points from 1979. The rate exceeded 50 percent for the first time in 2011, signifying that the country’s urban population surpassed that of its rural areas for the first time, to reach 690 million.
Urbanization is a lengthy process. It can be divided into an initial period with an urbanization rate less than 30 percent, a development period with the rate between 30 and 70 percent, and mature period with a rate surpassing 70 percent. A post-rural society can be divided into four types: a low-level urbanized society with an urbanization rate between 51 and 60 percent, a mid-level urbanized society with a rate from 61 to 75 percent, a high-level urbanized society with a rate from 76 to 90 percent, and a completely urbanized society with a rate exceeding 90 percent.
According to World Bank statistics, China’s national income per capita reached US $4,940 in 2011; the minimum cut-off for a middle-income country is US $4,148. Based on the above standards, China is both a low-level urbanized society and a middle-income country. China’s future economic development will decide whether China can escape the middle-income trap that has plagued other countries on their route to prosperity. Its approaches to urbanization will have a lot to do with this.
China is a middle-income country, but it is still a developing nation. Its peculiar national conditions – chief amongst which is its huge population – mean China’s path to urbanization has been different from that of developed nations.
Over more than three decades of reform and opening-up, China’s cities and towns have developed rapidly. However, some problems have cropped up. The first is uneven population distribution. The Heihe-Tengchong Line is revealing in this regard. Discovered by population geographer Hu Huanyong in 1935, the line shows a striking phenomenon: roughly 94 percent of China’s population lives to the east of the line drawn between Heihe in the north and Tengchong in the south, an area comprising 36 percent of China’s landmass.
China’s approaches to urbanization need to be multifold to reflect the differing population distributions revealed by the Heihe-Tengchong line. In the area to the east of the Hu Huanyong Line, conditions are ripe for steady, coordinated development of large, medium-sized and small cities, and rural areas. In the vast but scarcely populated area to the west of the Hu Huanyong Line, where economic foundations are comparatively weak, the level of urbanization should be raised. Incentives should be introduced to attract more people to big cities in order to create the labor base necessary for industrial expansion.
The second problem faced in the rapid development of China’s cities and towns is uneven development. In short, small cities and towns have lagged behind large and medium-sized cities, a process which has to a certain extent exacerbated unchecked urbanization.
This lag effect is also present between regions. Most provinces with an urbanization rate surpassing 50 percent are located in the east and northeast of the country. Urbanization rates for provinces in central and western China are much lower. The urbanization rates for Gansu, Yunnan, Guizhou and Tibet are less than 40 percent.
Thirdly, there exists a significant income gap between rural and urban areas. And the gap isn’t showing any signs of shrinking.
The income ratio between urban and rural residents stood at 3.13:1 in 2011. Although the figure was slightly lower than that of the preceding two years, it was still 26.2 percent higher than the ratio for 1997, and 68.3 percent higher than that of 1985.
A final problem is that the kind of urban economic growth that relies on quantity over quality creates air and other forms of pollution, and necessitates the voracious consumption of land resources that is not sustainable. Such approaches lead to accelerated imbalances of both an economic and social nature, and even conflict. China needs to wean itself off such economic activity.
Our country must learn from the lessons of others. Detroit’s decline, for instance, is a warning, while the sustainable development of German cities is a way forward.
We need to merge urbanization with the new industrialization, informatization and agricultural modernization. Environmental protection, the centerpiece of the new industrialization, should be accepted throughout the production chain not as a cost but as opportunity for new growth and job creation. Informatization promotes the utilization of information technology in various social and economic fields in order to raise people’s living standards and the level of social welfare. And agricultural modernization improves efficiency in agricultural production and frees workers previously tied to the farm to partake in the urbanization process.
The market mechanism and government planning are essential for China to achieve its aims where urbanization is concerned. From the governmental perspective, focus should be kept on making a scientific 10-year urbanization plan, enhancing education and training of urban residents, creating various job opportunities and reducing various risks. In examining the world’s experience with urbanization, China should pay special attention to a number of areas: compatibility between urban infrastructure and a city’s carrying capacity; coordination between human resources and a city’s sustainable development; coordination between urban development models and local conditions; and coordination between a city’s expenditure and its industrial development and environmental protection.
