How can new urbanization achieve key breakthroughs?
A continuously rising urbanization level will expand the urban consumer group, upgrade its structure, and unleash its potential, while also generating huge investment demand in areas such as urban infrastructure and public service facilities. With profound changes in the internal and external environment and conditions, China's urbanization must enter a new stage of transformational development focused on improving quality. In this process, it is necessary to build new employment spaces and, more importantly, to further advance reform of the household registration system and implement policies that relax restrictions on household registration transfers, so that the rural population that has moved to cities can "get in, settle down, integrate, find employment, and start businesses."
China is undergoing the largest population urbanization process in human history. At present, China's urbanization rate of permanent residents is 54.77%, while the urbanization rate of registered residents is only about 37%, lower than the 60% average of developing countries with per capita income similar to China's. Against the backdrop of growing downward pressure on the economy, urbanization has become the greatest potential source for expanding domestic demand in China.
According to the general laws of global urbanization development, China is still in a period of rapid urbanization, with the urbanization rate increasing by about 1 percentage point per year. A continuously rising urbanization level will enable more farmers to enjoy better public services by becoming urban residents, expand the urban consumer group, upgrade its structure, and unleash its potential, while also generating huge investment demand in areas such as urban infrastructure and public service facilities.
If urbanization takes the right direction and blazes a new path, it will help unleash domestic demand and break down the urban-rural dual structure; if it one-sidedly pursues the numbers of the urbanization rate and continues the traditional extensive model, it will bring risks such as slow industrial upgrading and increased social conflicts. What is worth guarding against is that, for a long time, a large number of agricultural transfer populations in China have found it difficult to truly integrate into cities, industry-city integration has been loose, industrial agglomeration and population agglomeration have not been synchronized, and urbanization has clearly lagged behind industrialization. With profound changes in the internal and external environment and conditions, urbanization must enter a new stage of transformational development focused on improving quality.
The driving force for the orderly transfer of the rural surplus population to cities and towns comes from the employment attraction of cities and towns. If they cannot find employment in cities and towns, the rural population will inevitably flow back to rural areas or take root in cities and towns at a low standard of living. Therefore, creating more employment opportunities and building new employment spaces has become the key to achieving new urbanization. To this end, it is necessary to develop new business forms in the process of new urbanization, expand employment channels, and explore a new business form system, industrial structure, and economic model different from traditional industrialization thinking. At the same time, efforts should be made to improve the quality and ability of migrant workers to integrate into cities and towns, so that they are competent for the jobs created in the process of new urbanization.
To meet the needs of advancing new urbanization, it is necessary to further advance reform of the household registration system and implement policies that relax restrictions on household registration transfers. Affected by the dual household registration system, the 234 million migrant workers and their accompanying family members counted as urban population have not been able to enjoy the same basic public services as urban residents in areas such as education, employment, medical care, elderly care, and housing. The direction of household registration system reform should be to focus on social fairness, gradually achieve full coverage of basic urban public services for permanent residents, and gradually eliminate unequal treatment between registered and non-registered populations.
Traditional urbanization emphasized the construction of cities, while the core of new urbanization is people-centered. It is necessary to rely on the aggregating carrier role of cities and towns to meet the needs of people's all-round development in many aspects such as economy and culture, so that the rural transfer population can "get in, settle down, integrate, find employment, and start businesses."