China's swelling cities

More Chinese are moving from the countryside to the cities. Or perhaps in some cases, cities are spreading to incorporate the countryside.

According to this story from People’s Daily, China’s rural population fell from 74 percent in 1990, to 64 percent in 2001, and down to 56 percent at the end of 2006. That means 44 percent of Chinese now live in cities.

China’s urban population stands at 577 million people, and its rural population stands at 737 million people.

Chinese demographers and population planners have told me that China is trying to invert the 60/40 ratio of rural to urban residents. They say the economy cannot modernize until more people live in cities, and fewer rely on agriculture for their livelihood.

Beijing is feeling the result. Its current population of 15.6 million will soar to 20 million residents by 2020, according to this report. 

Comments

[nanheyangrouchuan]

And many of those left behind in the countryside are the middle aged, elderly and those younger ones too feeble and/or unskilled to make it to the cities for general labor and skilled labor jobs.

[rio]

Good point nan.
They need to realize that successful reduction of rural population relies much on agricultural modernization, professionalization. Simply depending on urbanization and migration can have disasterous results.
Ppl in the mainland are still amazed when i tell them that farmers in N.America are considered damn rich.

[rio]

and don't forget - men.
much more young women migrate to the cities than men, due to higher job prospects with industry and other sectors generally favor hiring women.
Gender discrepancy is the greatest in poor rural regions of the country.

[Jane]

From my point of view, we do not have to be panic about this. Since urbanization is one of the circle of the development of a country. The growth of the urban population is just the sign of urbanization. Generally, after several years, an inverse urbanization will appear in China. Actually, there are some faint traces showing the beginning of the inverse urbanization. For instance, in Nanjing, rich people would prefer a house outside the city. This is resulted from all kinds of problems caused by urbanization, such as pollution, heavy traffic and high cost. However, it is essential for us to control the process so that the city won't turns out to be a ruin when the inverse urbanization happens.

[Irene Yang]

From our Chairman Mao,” The more people, the more powerful” Even though this sentence more or less leads the current situation of our China’s huge population and bring us some serious problems caused by the population, we cannot deny that some verities are beneath this sentence.

From 1978 to now, the economy of China has developed a lot and the overall national strength has improved greatly. Some people may argue that it is the policy and the leadership of our country that generate this miraculous economic development of the currency world. I would like to point out the basically motivating force is our country’s huge population, another word, the abundant labor units. It must well-known that the Chinese goods are labeled cheep and good quality and our country has already been the World Factory like the 60’s German and 80’s Japan. Why can we achieve so? It is our abundant, cheep and qualified labor units that let our country to be the World Factory so that the GDP of our country can increase at the rate of 10.3% per year. The totally GDP of China now is about 3,000 billion dollars and will soon surpass that of German thus been the third national economic unit in the world. All these can attribute to our huge population. With the advantage of our labor units, we can low the cost of producing so that more and more MNCs are willing to set the factories in our country and thus help our country to upgrade and adjust the industrial structure. People are the force to shape the world. Take a look on Japan, the population of Japan has not improved and even has decreased. The economy of Japan, as far as I am concerned, is strongly affected by the decreasing population due to the diminishing units. This kind of example is very common thought out the world such as the Russia, Canada, and some European countries. The governments of those countries try every effort to encourage the people to birth. From this point, we may see how important the people are.

On the contrast, as the fast development of our country, the residents of the cities, especially those big cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, to name just a few, are less willing to give birth. The available labor units of some cities are dearth. In audition, the household regulation policy is now altered and more and more people from country sides are seeking the better working condition and decent payments. All these factors putting together cause today’s situation: the people from urban are trying to get moved into the city. It is a typical phenomenon of urbanization which is caused by the fast developing of one country. As I have mentioned before, the people are the most important force to develop. Compared to other developed country or even developing country, the current level urbanization of our country is not sufficient. According to some statistics, the rate of our country’s urbanization is approximately 40.5%. In my point, the better conditional rate is over 75% thus testify that the current urbanization is not enough and we should encourage more people to move into the city and fast the steps of the fundamental facilities construction. We must make more policies and constitute ore laws to encourage people to move in to the cities. We may no fear that the supplying of the agricultural goods, I think the mode of our China may copy the mode of Singapore to import foods and thus diminish the number of people who live on the agricultural.

[Cathy Han]

With the development of urbanization, the population in cities absolutely increases. It leads to a lot of problems. Pollution, traffic, housing have been the essential ones. Rich people want to live a little far from the center of the city mainly because of the noise and pollution.
People living in the rural areas definitely want to move to cities for better jobs, better welfare. No one is willing to work in the field for his (her) whole life. As the technology is not that advanced, people should pay their physical energy to get crops with very low profit. The movement might decrease the proportion of agriculture in GDP.
In addition, more and more people want to live in the rural areas, accurately the suburbs. Some say that it is a start of inverse urbanization. I cannot agree with them. I suppose this still an expansion of cities. The inverse urbanization will not appear until the population of cities falls.

[Sam Liu]

I do not know what your viewpoint is, I hold the opinion that more and more people went to the city or the countries turn to cities is good for the development. The agriculture in china is less developed. In the cities, the students can also have better education service. It can improve the educated level of Chinese. In the countryside of China, we can find everything is free, no red lights, no zebra crossings and some other things. In the urban during a process of urbanization, we can find most of the people have some bad behaviors just like crossing the road when the traffic light is red, spitting on the road or smoking in public. I believe that it is a normal phenomenon in China, lots of reasons lead to the result; especially China is in a special time. Now people in the cities do not obey the rules is common, but the townsmen start to have the awareness, I think that the urbanization can make the behavior of Chinese more polite.
Nowadays, we cannot find a country which is rich and most of the people depend on the agriculture. It is a big challenge of China, 1.3 billion or much more people live in China. The population is the first problem; the resource of China is limited. I do not want to say more in this point; it is Chair Mao’s fault. Secondly, the environment pollution is also a big problem which puzzled all of the Chinese. Air pollution, noise pollution, light pollution, water pollution…… all these are very serious; the people in the cities use much more resource in China. The technology can solve the agriculture problem in China, this problem can be solved by the urbanization.

[sHaW♂x]

Urbanization is to enable farmers in cities, but cities is not only the farmers, but more importantly through the migrant employment and income structure of the change so that they can participate in and dignity of the city to share the results, sharing in modern urban life. The international community usually live in the towns of the country's total population proportion to the total population that the level of urbanization, which is relatively simple in operation, but also conducive to horizontal comparison, but the content of such cities lack a comprehensive, easy to produce heavy urbanization quantity, the quality of light urbanization. The process of urbanization should be the most important thing for the farmers through the provision of employment opportunities to absorb them into the cities and towns settlers, changing lifestyles. Urbanization is the essence of the urban way of life, not merely a population urbanization. Migrant farmers, not only as foreign labor, but also as urban residents, the owner cities, and gradually reduce urban-rural income gap achieve the long-term goal. While urbanization also includes rural lifestyle changes. Urbanization to the level of economic development, jobs increased to decide. Too much emphasis on urbanization rate will generate enormous risk. A large number of migrant farmers can not find jobs, will bring life, society, environment, law and order and other issues. We must avoid Latin America and parts of Africa over the city of lessons and strengthen its macro-control of the process, it is necessary to earnestly promote the speed and the high quality of an appropriate scale urbanization.