By the EO Editorial Board
News, Cover, Issue No. 583
August 20, 2012
Translated by Wang Fan
Original article: [Chinese]

It's a milestone in a country's development when the number of people living in urban areas exceeds the rural population for the first time.

According to research recently published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China's urbanization rate has already passed the 50 percent mark for the first time in history. As the paper's authors note, this marks a historical change in China's social structure, it shows that China has already bid farewell to an era in which rural society was dominant and has now begun to enter a new urban era.

Urbanization is of great importance to a country's modernization. Along with industrialization and the growth of markets, urbanization is one of the main forces propelling the huge changes that have been taking place in China. These three forces have complemented and reinforced each other.

However, we shouldn't overlook one crucial piece of data - as the number of city-dwellers exceeded that of the number of people living in rural areas, the size China's internal migrant or "floating" population also reached a record high.

In 2011, the number of internal migrants in China grew to nearly 230 million, making up 17 percent of the country's total population. The majority of these migrants were heading towards the cities from rural areas, and were counted as part of the urban population.

If we subtract these 200-odd million people from China's current urban population of 691 million, then is it still possible to claim that China has entered a new urban era?

Assessing the pace of China's urbanization is not a simple task and we can't simply do the math. When we're lauding our achievements, we should remind ourselves not to forgot that there are more than 200 million "half-urbanised" people out there.

These marginalized people share something in common - they are neither urbanites nor villagers; they were born in the countryside but live in the cities; they move from one place to another and although they contribute to the cities where they earn a living, they are unable to enjoy the social welfare provided to other residents of the city.

A graphic illustration could perhaps explain the problem more vividly. The process of urbanization can be compared to a barbell; the weights on each end represent the urban and rural populations respectively, and the bar in the middle symbolizes the floating population.

Under normal circumstances, when the urbanization rate reaches 50 percent, then we'll have a standardized barbell with equal weights on each side.

However, China's urbanization process is unique.

Active promotion of China's urbanization reduces the size of the rural side, but what gets swelled is not the urban counterpart, but the bar in between, transforming the barbell into the shape of an American football. This new model represents the social structure of, what we call, "bogus urbanization."

"Bogus urbanization" is attributed to the establishment of numerous thresholds that bar entry to the cities. Some of these barriers to entering the city have come about through historical circumstances, for exmaple the Hukou system (i.e. the household registration system in mainland China), which is closely tied with interests of multiple parties and thus is difficult to reform.

Aside from these more established barriers, Chinese city managers have also introduced new measures that try to slow or turn back the process of urbanization.

These include measures such as demolishing schools built to educate the children of migrant workers or introducing various administrative measures and industrial policies to squeeze out low-income groups that have arrived from elsewhere.

The people who manage these urban areas seem to believe in the principle that "cities belong to the people who live in the city", they don't seem to understand that the correct answer to the question who does a city really belong to should be "anyone who resides in the city."

The core of urbanization is supposed to be the integration of urban and rural areas, not simply the rise of cities alone. The purpose of urbanizing the society goes beyond raising the ratio of urban to rural population; the ultimate goal is to eliminate antagonism between cities and countryside, achieving sustainable economic, social, cultural, and ecological development on both sides, and arrive at urban-rural unification.

When we talk about urbanization, we're not simply talking about the flow of people from the country to the city, urbanization in a real sense should allow the free exchange of production factors between cities and countryside.

However, both the explicit and implicit costs of opening up this free exchange is extremely high. Many provinces and cities in China report that the costs of domestic transport are even higher than international trade.

According to China's Twelfth Five-Year Plan, "it is urgent to accelerate the process of removing systematic obstacles of urban-rural development, promoting a balanced allocation of public resources and a free flow of production factors between town and country."

Thus, it's imperative we put forward and implement policies which are in line with the goal of that plan, including policies that reform the ownership of rural land in China.