Meeting the urbanization targets of the 13th Five-Year Plan will be quite difficult

The issue of new-type urbanization remains a hot topic that the upcoming Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee will address.

21st Century Business Herald has learned that the Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee will discuss recommendations for the “13th Five-Year Plan”, in which, apart from the relatively important gross domestic product (GDP) and indicators for the service sector and science and technology, how the urbanization targets are set will be fairly critical.

According to the National New-Type Urbanization Plan (2014-2020), by 2020 the urbanization rate of the permanent resident population should reach about 60%, the urbanization rate of the registered population should reach about 45%, and efforts should be made to achieve the settlement in cities and towns of about 100 million people who have moved from agriculture and other permanent residents.

From the actual situation, achieving the above two targets still requires accelerating reforms in supporting areas such as household registration. Data show that in 2014 the total number of migrant workers grew by 2.8%, a decline from the growth rate of more than 5% in 2011-2012. And at the end of the second quarter of 2015, the total number of rural laborers working away from home grew by only 0.1%, which means the total number of migrant workers may see negative growth in the future.

Ge Jintian, a professor at the University of Jinan who works on new-type urbanization research topics, believes that with the return of migrant workers and the decline in their numbers, it may be necessary in the future to adjust the statistical criteria for the urban population.

Urbanization rate slows

As the footsteps of the national “13th Five-Year Plan” draw ever nearer, how to determine the urbanization targets for the “13th Five-Year Plan” requires careful study.

According to the earlier National New-Type Urbanization Plan (2014-2020), by 2020 the urbanization rate of the permanent resident population should reach about 60%, the urbanization rate of the registered population should reach about 45%, the gap between the urbanization rate of the registered population and that of the permanent resident population should narrow by about 2 percentage points, and efforts should be made to achieve the settlement in cities and towns of about 100 million people who have moved from agriculture and other permanent residents.

The urbanization rate in 2014 was 54.77%. If the urbanization rate target for 2020 is to reach 60%, the urbanization rate should rise by about 1 percentage point each year in the future.

From the actual situation, achieving such a target remains an arduous task. In particular, as China's total labor force begins to shrink year by year, the number of migrant workers gradually dries up, and the number of migrant workers going out declines, this may affect the urbanization rate figures for some time to come.

Cai Fang, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, believes that future increases in the urbanization rate will mainly depend on two groups of people. One group is farmers, the vast majority of whom are over 40 or 50 years old, and they will no longer migrate. The other group is newly graduated rural middle school students, that is, junior and senior high school graduates aged 16 to 19, and this group has entered a stage of sustained negative growth starting from 2015.

“(In the future) the pace of urbanization itself will slow down, and second, urbanization and the economy are mutually cause and effect; a slowdown in China's economic growth will lead to a slowdown in urbanization, posing a new challenge to the Chinese economy.” he said at a forum in August.

Liu Shilin, dean and chief expert of the Institute of Urban Science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, is currently conducting research on urbanization.

As an expert on the “13th Five-Year Plan”, he discovered an interesting situation, namely that some students in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang region still retain rural household registration when they attend university, because rural household registration allows them to participate in dividends from local collective enterprises. This also makes the target for the urbanization rate of the registered population difficult to achieve.

Statistical criteria may need adjustment

Ge Jintian, a professor at the University of Jinan who works on new-type urbanization research topics, believes that with the return of migrant workers and the decline in their numbers, it may be necessary in the future to adjust the statistical criteria for the urban population.

Statistics show that nearly 30% of China's population with agricultural household registration already lives in cities and towns. Ge Jintian believes that “many of these migrant workers buy homes in small towns and mainly engage in non-agricultural work, and these people should count as urban population.”

In addition, the construction of communities and industrial parks carried out in rural areas has also produced a new type of farmer.

For example, Dezhou in Shandong is currently exploring and has created a new model of “building two zones together”, in which new-type rural communities and rural economic parks are built in tandem, with 378 centralized-residence rural communities completed and under construction in total, housing 300,000 farming households. Whether these farmers, who live at home and work in factories, are defined as urban population still needs to be studied.

Niu Fengrui, vice president of the China Urban Economy Society, believes that the biggest problem with urbanization at present is that farmers are willing to go to large cities and megacities, where there are job opportunities and higher incomes. But these areas require residence permits, while the state encourages migrant workers to go to small and medium-sized cities and towns and has lifted household registration restrictions, yet because there are few job opportunities, farmers are unwilling to go.

“If megacities with more than 20 million people restrict the entry of migrant workers, cities with a population of 5 million to 10 million can still absorb some of the migrant worker population.” he said.