Urban Chinese outnumber rural dwellers for first time

CHINA’S RAPID economic expansion in recent years has transformed the way people live, and the country’s urban population has for the first time exceeded the number of people living in rural areas, a report has shown.

Last year’s nationwide census showed China’s urban population accounted for 49.68 per cent of the total population, and the social “blue book” compiled by state-run think-tank the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences found that by now there are more people living in cities than on the land.

“Urbanisation will become a major engine in China’s social and economic development, and in our industrialisation,” wrote one of the authors of the report, Li Linpei.

“If the rural population really outnumbers the urban population, it will be a significant breaking point for China in changing its thousand-year-old farmerdominated population structure.”

While incomes were rising, the social costs are high, and many migrant workers are forced to leave their families behind them.

Estimates put the country’s number of migrant workers at over 240 million. About 40 per cent of them have brought their families to cities with them, while 60 per cent had left a spouse or a child behind in the countryside.

The rise in the number of city dwellers means profound changes in people’s lifestyles, employment, consumption and even values, the blue book said.

Other data has shown that some 300 million Chinese now living in rural areas – the equivalent of the population of the United States – will move into cities in the next 20 years, which will rapidly result in urban concentration rates of more developed countries.

The wealth gap between the urban rich and the rural poor is often cited by the authorities as one of the great threats to stability, and the government has issued numerous policies to smooth the urbanisation process.

The report showed income was growing faster in the countryside than in the city, although rural incomes still trail urban incomes by a large margin. While urban incomes grew 7.8 per cent to 16,301 yuan (€1,958) in the first three quarters of 2011, rural per capita incomes rose 13.5 per cent to 5,878 yuan (€706).

One of the chief drivers of urbanisation in recent years has been the reform of the “hukou” household registration system, whereby citizens are registered in the town of their birth. For years, that was where they would stay.

However, the process of opening up and economic reform in the late 1970s led to demand for labour to work on the building sites and in the factories that were suddenly springing up as China’s industrialisation process began.

The hukou system was reformed to allow people move to be able to work, with much of the movement in the direction of the east and south. Soon tens of millions of migrant workers were making their way to Shanghai, Guangzhou and other cities. Massive cities are a more efficient way of managing resources, but the blue book showed rural dwellers are happier than urban folk.