Experts Call for Faster Urbanization Process

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Friday, December 20, 2002

Experts Call for Faster Urbanization Process

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As a developing country with the biggest population in the world, China must speed up its urbanization to realize its goal of developing a well-off society in an all-round way in the first 20 years of the century.

This idea is expressed in the China Urban Development Report (2001-2002) which was published in Beijing Thursday.

Produced by some 100 top-level experts and scholars from home and abroad, the report is the first in China targeting urban development.

Vice-Chairman of the Standing Committee of China's National People's Congress (NPC) Jiang Zhenghua said at the report's launching ceremony that China's urbanization still lags far behind developed countries, though many of its cities have developed rapidly fast under the country's reform and opening-up.

In 2000, China's urbanization rate was 36 percent, while that of the United States and Japan was 80 percent and 65 percent respectively. The difference in the rates normally influences a country's capability to garner wealth, Jiang said.

China's current low degree of urbanization, its uneven urban system, and insufficient population and economic scales in many large cities have limited economic development and affected the growing of national competitiveness, said Niu Wenyuan, a chief scientist among the report's authors.

Niu is also the head of a research team for sustainable development strategy under the Chinese Academy of Social Science.

According to the report, only 11 percent of the Chinese population live in large cities with populations over one million, five percentage points lower than the world's average level.

Low population density in large Chinese cities also highlights the low contribution of these cities to national gross domestic product (GDP), said the report.

China's current large cities are still not big enough, and their capability to garner wealth needs to improve, Niu said. Take Shanghai as an example, the city should expand its economic efficiency to the surrounding areas covering Jiangsu and Zhejiang Provinces.

China has a total of 662 cities, plus over 20,000 towns, with a combined total population of over 480 million.

According to the report, by the middle of the century, China's urbanization rate will rise to 75 percent, and the population in cities and towns will top 1.1 billion. By then the country will have a well-organized, complementary and optimized urban system.

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