Urbanization has helped greatly improve people’s living standards

China has urbanized at a rapid pace since the founding of New China in 1949, especially in the past 40 years. Seventy years ago, China’s urban population accounted for only 10.6 percent of the total, much lower than the global average of 29 percent at that time.

By the end of 2018, China’s urbanization rate in terms of household registration was only 43.4 percent, but the permanent urban resident population had reached 59.6 percent of the total — higher than the global urbanization rate of 55 percent. Over the past 70 years, China’s urbanization rate has increased 49 percentage points, and 773.72 million people have shifted from rural to urban areas, a rare phenomenon worldwide.

Since 1996, China’s annual newly increased urban population has exceeded 20 million. In 2014, a new type of urbanization policy replaced the concept of simply pursuing rapid urbanization with a people-oriented urbanization concept based on the integration of urban and rural infrastructure and equalization of public services.

As a result, China’s urbanization has entered a high-quality development stage. The 2019 Government Work Report and the key tasks of a new type of urbanization issued by the National Development and Reform Commission further emphasize the significance of promoting highquality urbanization.

From 1949 to 2018, the number of Chinese cities increased from 132 to 672, and the network of urban structure gradually improved. With the spatial expansion of urban built-up area and the establishment of new areas from the national to the county level, China’s urban built-up area increased from 7,400 square kilometers in 1981 to 56,200 sq km in 2017.