Evolution and assessment on China's urbanization 1960–2010: Under-urbanization or over-urbanization?
Highlights
► A simple and quantitative method was developed based on empirical data of 110 counties. ► The method provides a visualized, continuous and objective analysis during 1960–2010. ► China's urbanization process has progressed faster than economic growth since 2004. ► The core of China's future urbanization is to improve the quality of urbanization.
Introduction
World urbanization trends have been irreversible since the second half of the 20th century. The world's population is increasingly found in the cities. According to a report of world urbanization prospects by United Nations, more than half of the world's population lived in urban areas by the end of 2008 (UNPD, 2010). Generally, levels of urbanization are closely correlated with levels of economic development (Henderson, 2003). Demographic processes of immigration and emigration are important determinants of urbanization, but these are in turn underpinned by other processes, especially economic change. Developed countries are considered to experience “parallel-urbanization”, achieving high industrial growth and a parallel increase in the degree of urbanization. Most of these countries have entered the third stage of urbanization, and the urbanization level has stabilized. The focus of world urbanization had shifted to the developing world. Developed and the developing countries pursue two different paths: in developed countries urbanization and economic development were synchronized, whereas developing counties over- and under-urbanization is common. A great deal of literature has been generated dealing with the special characteristics of “over-urbanization” or “excessive-urbanization, common phenomena and processes of formation, and the new challenges posed by developing countries (Cohen, 2006; Henderson, 2002; Skeldon, 1999). The conclusions of this research have led to a basic consensus. However, China's road to urbanization has been thought of as unique for it is neither identical with that of the developed economies nor does it duplicate the path of developing countries (Zhang & Zhao, 2003), posing a puzzling riddle. In recent decades, a great amount of ink has been spilled by planners, economists, and geographers to paint a picture of China's urbanization (Chen & Gao, 2011; Friedmann, 2006; Lin, 1998, 2007; Shen, 2005, 2006). Interestingly, as research opinions vary, no unanimous conclusion can be drawn about China's urbanization level. Some hold that in both the pre-reform era and the period of economic transition, China has tried to restrict rural–urban migration and the number of people entitled to an urban citizenship, while its economic growth seems impressive. Despite very dynamic recent rural–urban migration, official figures as well as academic estimates of the level of urbanization remain low. Indeed, China's under-urbanization grew in the recent period of reform, the reason being that economic growth outpaced urbanization (Chang & Brada, 2006). However, others believe that China has been eliminating this urbanization gap during the post-1978 period as a result of its economic reforms. China's urban population increased dramatically from 170 million in 1978 to 670 million in 2010 and the urban share of the total population rose from a mere 18%–50%. The most noticeable evidence associated with China's over-urbanization is the dramatic increases in the number of peasant workers (nongmingong in Chinese) and urbanization of land (Lu et al., 2007). Although much effort is being spent examining China's urbanization, it is clear that there is no shortage of controversy, and that quantitative assessments are difficult (Zhang & Zhao, 2003). There are two critical problems to be solved: one is identifying a perspective for the study of dynamic evolutions; the other is developing a quantitative method to assess effectively the relationship between levels of urbanization and economic development level.
In a cross-country panel data context, the purpose of this paper is to design a quantitative analytical frame work and to come up with a better understanding of the evolution of China's urbanization. The paper is organized as follows. The next section will introduce the research data and method. In section three, the evolution of China's urbanization is analyzed along three dimensions are examined. This will be followed by a discussion of three viewpoints relating to the assessment of China's urbanization. Some conclusions are reached in the final section.
Section snippets
Data
Two key indicators are selected to measure the development level, GDP per capita (GDPPC) and the urbanization level (URBANL). The research data comes mainly from the World Bank online database (http://data.worldbank.org/). GDP per capita is gross domestic product divided by the midyear population. GDP is the sum of gross value added by all resident producers in the economy plus any product taxes and minus any subsidies not included in the value of the products. It is calculated without making
The urbanization level and urban population in China
To display some important characteristics of Chinese urbanization, the urbanization process is decomposed into three: the population (total and urban); urbanization (level and annual growth) and population change (annual growth rate of the total and urban population, annual change of the total and urban population). The overall patterns of Chinese urbanization and urban migration can be discerned from Table 1, which includes eight indicators for 5-year periods from 1960 to 1990 and annually for
China's economic development and urbanization relative to the world as a norm has greatly improved, approaching the world average levels, coordinated with middle growth and middle urbanization
During 1960–2010, all values of ZGDPPC and ZURBANL are less than zero, and all of the points (Fig. 4) lie in the third quadrant. These values suggest that China's urbanization is associated with an average degree of coordination of urbanization and growth. It is safe to say, in fact, that over a long period China's urbanization and economic development were associated with a “double-low”: low scores on each indicator. In 2010, the value of ZURBANL and ZGDPPC is larger than −0.5, typed of
Conclusions
In relation to the controversial issue of the urbanization level in China, the FQM method was used to analyze quantitatively the evolution of the relationship between urbanization and economic development in China relative to the world as a whole using empirical data on levels of urbanization and economic development for 110 counties. The analysis led to a number of conclusions.
Urbanization has increased a great deal under the strategy of urbanization acceleration in recent years. Compared to
Acknowledgments
This work was supported jointly by the EU project URBACHINA (Grant No. FP7-266941), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41001080) and Key Project for the Strategic Science Plan in IGSNRR, CAS (Grant No. 2012ZD006). The insightful and constructive comments of professor Mick Dunford (Sussex University and IGSNRR) and anonymous reviewers are appreciated.
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