Improving the quality of urbanisation

Experts say urbanisation is not as simple as relocating rural people to cities or turning them into urbanites but rather providing them with the best social security, housing and other recreational facilities, both in cities and their hometowns.

ONE of the major tasks of the Chinese government next year is to improve the quality of urbanisation.

Hou Yongzhi, the head of the Development Strategy and Regional Economy Department of the Development Research Centre under the State Council said the urbanisation process should be done right and not at the expense of the well-being of the people.

He said enhancing the quality of urbanisation was one of the highlights of the recently concluded central economic work committee's conference in Beijing and the subject was discussed at length to ensure all government agencies deal with the task ahead.

"Urbanisation is a historic mission as part of China's modernisation. It can unleash the great potential of domestic demand and consumption.

"In order to propel modernisation to another level, we must improve the quality of urbanisation," he said at a press conference after the meeting usually held at the end of each year.

"Only by doing so can we achieve our goals of energy conservation, environment protection and improvement of the people's livelihood, in the process of modernisation."

Over the past three decades, China has undergone phenomenal economic development in major cities with many villages being integrated into bigger cities.

Billions of yuan have also poured into the development of infrastructure in rural areas and redevelopment of villages into full-fledged counties and towns. But scholars and researchers still feel that resources spent by the government on rural areas were not as much as that on urban areas.

This has resulted in mass migration of villagers to the cities seeking better opportunities.

More often than not, the villagers found that such a shift was not to be as they faced the challenges of high cost of living and unequal social status due to strict hukou (household registration) system in some cities.

Hou pointed out that all cities, including first-tier, second-tier, medium or small, should be ready to absorb the urbanisation paradigm shift with adequate infrastructure capacity and policies.

"The conference stressed the importance of applying the principles of ecological progress in the course of urbanisation. We should embark on sustainable urbanisation that focuses on energy-saving and low-carbon development.

"We should avoid traffic congestion and pollution to the environment that come with urbanisation. We should ensure small and medium cities create jobs and more importantly, achieve unity and harmonious development and co-existence of different groups of people in cities," he said.

He maintained that China would still need the hukou system as a tool to control urban and rural population but it would be further reformed in line with urbanisation efforts.

Last year, China's urbanisation rate reached 51.3% but remained about 20% lower than that of developed nations.

In some areas like Guizhou province and Tibet autonomous region, the rate was only about 35%.

In its commentary, Xinhua news agency said that urbanisation, reforms and innovation would be the main driving forces of China's economic growth in the next 10 years.

"Now is a critical moment of China's economic structural adjustment. The 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (held last month) made it clear what the next point of reference of our economic development would be.

"Several experts have analysed that the urbanisation of the population will stimulate the potential of domestic demand. In areas where the urbanisation rate is relatively low, there is a dire need for investments in the development of basic infrastructure," it said.

The commentary piece said that although China was now regarded as a middle-income nation, many companies were still trapped in the category of low-end industries in the global industrial value chain.

"In this new era of development, we should work on transforming from a factor-driven and investment-driven model to one that builds around innovation. We should increase the innovative capability of the companies and upgrade the primary and secondary industries to a high-end industry."

Experts also warned that urbanisation should be promoted in parallel with the industrialisation and modernisation of the agricultural sector.

They said urbanisation was not as simple as relocating rural people to cities or turning them into urbanites but rather providing them with the best social security, housing and other recreational facilities, both in cities and their hometowns.

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