Analysis of the Current Development Trend of Urbanization in China
Urbanization is the process by which population concentrates in cities and towns and thereby drives urban development. Accompanying this process are major transformations in a country's economic structure, social structure, modes of production, and ways of life. Urbanization is an enormous systemic project. Urbanization development bears on the overall situation of China's modernization. Urbanization is a common trend in the development and progress of human society. However, the processes, characteristics, and models of urbanization in different countries and regions are markedly different.
Overall, socioeconomic development is the internal driving force of urbanization development; the natural foundation and ecological environment play an important foundational role in urbanization development; the urbanization pattern is an important component of the socioeconomic spatial structure; and the urban-rural relationship is the most important relationship of mutual dependence within a country and a region.
On the driving forces and mechanisms of China's large-scale urbanization development
In recent years, China's rapid economic growth has promoted large-scale urbanization. Among these, the export-oriented economy has played a huge role in driving urbanization in coastal areas, especially in the development of large cities, megacities, and super metropolises. For a long period, because the development model of “low-end product” production and the policy of investment-driven economic growth were implemented, urbanization developed at high speed. But sustainability will be a problem. The implementation of two large-scale economic stimulus plans brought increasingly serious structural problems. Investment-driven growth, the “world's factory” development model of low-end product production, and so on, maintained China's long-term high-speed economic growth. In recent years, the national economy has finally entered a new stage of “stabilizing growth and adjusting structure,” but from 2011 to the first half of 2013, China's urbanization faced the risk of an even greater leap forward. The 18th National Congress and the Central Urbanization Work Conference made a major adjustment to the strategic policy on urbanization, namely that the core of urbanization is the urbanization of “people,” and that progress should be sought while maintaining stability.
Its profound background reflects the objective laws of urbanization development. The large-scale urbanization since 1996 has achieved results. Urbanization has promoted the internationalization of China's economy. Comprehensive national strength has risen substantially, and China has become the world's second-largest economy. But at the same time, a series of prominent problems have also emerged.
First, the speed of urbanization is too fast, and the urbanization rate is artificially high. During the “Ninth Five-Year Plan” period, there were three years in which the urbanization rate increased by 1.7 percentage points per year, and during the “Tenth Five-Year Plan” period it grew by 1.4 percent annually on average. Since the “Eleventh Five-Year Plan,” the speed of urbanization has remained high, growing by 1.3 percentage points annually on average, meaning that the newly added urban population each year was more than 18 million. In 2012, China's urbanization rate reached 52.6 percent. However, the actual population urbanization rate was only 35 percent. The country's 260 million migrant workers have not become urban citizens, and their living conditions, including housing, are very poor, which is called “semi-urbanization.” Small and medium-sized cities develop slowly, and some small and medium-sized cities are declining. Rural hollowing-out is severe.
Migrant workers mostly live in “urban villages” on the edges of cities, in simple sheds or basements, and other such places, with crude and harsh living environments. For example, in Nanjing and Hangzhou, 45% of migrant populations or migrant workers live in low, dark work sheds or simple sheds in the marginal zones of the urban suburbs.
Second, economic growth and industrial support are incompatible with high-speed urbanization. China's high-speed national economic growth and large-scale industrialization have driven the high-speed development of urbanization. But in recent years, the growth rate of the national economy has slowed, the adjustment of industrial structure is facing increasing pressure, and the increase in jobs cannot meet the needs of urbanization. According to the urbanization rate of recent years, the urban population has increased by about 18 million people each year, correspondingly requiring an increase of more than 12 million jobs.
The increase in the urban employed population has now become increasingly dependent on the development of the tertiary industry. However, because the population base is enormous, it is also very difficult for the development space of the tertiary industry to continue providing the required scale of jobs. In recent years, the employment problem in all types of cities has been very severe. Although the number of jobs added each year is above 8 million, some of these jobs are very unstable.
A large number of facts clearly show that the urbanization process must be coordinated with economic growth, especially with industrialization development. In planning a reasonable process for future urbanization, the most important thing is to scientifically assess the supporting capacity of industry. The urbanization process should be guided according to the supporting capacity of industrial development and the possible increase in jobs. Urbanization without industrial support is unsustainable. Urbanization development lacking strong industrial development support will also slow down. China's national economy has experienced long-term high-speed growth and is now entering a development stage of “stabilizing growth and adjusting structure.” In structural adjustment, energy-heavy chemical industry and traditional manufacturing will find it difficult to expand greatly in scale, and new competitive brands and large industrial chains will need a process of formation. The effect of multiple factors will cause the economic growth rate to decline somewhat. In addition, structural adjustment and innovative development will also change the elasticity coefficient of employment growth. All of this will make the increase in jobs slow down.
China's urbanization needs to follow the principle of gradual and orderly progress. The level of urbanization development should remain consistent with the transformation of urban industrial structure and the capacity to add new jobs, with the actual capacity of cities and towns to absorb rural population, and with the carrying capacity of water and land resources and the environment. China's urbanization level should be gradually raised according to the absorptive capacity of urban industry, the supporting capacity of infrastructure, the carrying capacity of resources and the environment, and the degree of improvement in urban management levels. Therefore, China's urbanization speed cannot be too fast.
Large-scale, high-speed urbanization has already placed natural resource support capacity in serious difficulty
Continuous large-scale land occupation and land enclosure have consumed too much arable land resources. At the same time as the population is “semi-urbanized,” in the past ten years an average of 2.6 million farmers each year lost arable land to land requisition. Over the past ten years, many cities have carried out large-scale land enclosure by vigorously building various types of “new districts.”
Land occupied by urban construction has expanded rapidly and on a large scale. Urban per capita land occupation quickly reached the high level of 110-130 sq m. This land occupation indicator is the level of most developed countries whose per capita arable land resources are several times or even more than ten times greater than China's.
Large-scale industrialization and urbanization have caused comprehensive tension in water resource supply in 15 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions in northern China, and many cities and towns in southern regions also frequently have serious water quality-related supply problems. Water crises have occurred in some local areas.
The most serious water use problem is in China's northern region. The land area of the 15 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities in the northern region accounts for 60.4 percent of the country's total, and in 2011 their population and GDP accounted for 41.9 percent and 42.8 percent of the country's total respectively. The average annual total water resources of the northern region over many years is 525.9 billion cubic meters, accounting for only 18.6% of the country's total. In 2011, total water use reached 243.4 billion cubic meters, accounting for about 40% of the country's water use that year. After more than half a century of large-scale water resource development, the northern region faces an extreme challenge in relying on “tapping new sources” to solve water shortages.
In view of this, great emphasis should be placed on implementing “resource-conserving and environment-friendly” urbanization. China's per capita share of resources is very limited, especially arable land resources and freshwater resources, which are in short supply. The planning and construction of all types of cities must fully take this basic national condition of China into account. Even when modernization is achieved, the Chinese people must still live “frugally.” Per capita urban land occupation, per capita domestic energy consumption, and freshwater resource consumption cannot imitate the per capita indicators of the Western world, especially those of Americans.
Lower indicators must be implemented for per capita urban land occupation and per capita domestic energy consumption. Since the 1990s, the per capita comprehensive land occupation of Chinese cities has increased rapidly to 110-130 sq m. The per capita comprehensive land occupation indicator of most small towns is as high as 200-300 sq m. China cannot follow the sprawling urbanization development path of countries such as the United States and Australia. It is suggested that 70-100 sq m per capita be taken as the suitable range for comprehensive urban land use in China.
Because small and medium-sized cities generally do not have large public facilities (stadiums, transportation hubs, municipal squares, etc.), future planning and construction can completely further reduce the scale of land occupation. General megacities (with exceptions for a small number of internationalized large cities) should have per capita domestic energy consumption of about 2 tons of standard coal per year, and small and medium-sized cities should be clearly below this indicator.
According to China's basic national conditions, it is also necessary to appropriately lower urban per capita land use standards and establish indicators for the economic density of urban land use and regional territorial development intensity.
Environmental pollution and the heavy burden on ecosystem service functions
Since 1996, large-scale urbanization has been one of the main causes of increasingly serious environmental pollution. The rapid expansion of large and medium-sized cities in coastal areas, together with the “world's factory” production of low-end products, has caused prominent environmental problems. Small and medium-sized cities in the central and western regions have become pollution sources in many areas because of large-scale resource development and resource processing.
While traditional organic pollution has become increasingly serious, pollution from toxic and harmful substances has begun to appear. Increasingly serious environmental pollution has led to severe degradation of ecosystems and frequent ecological disaster events. Neglect of rural environmental problems has made environmental problems in China's rural areas widespread and prominent. China's environmental pollution has begun to enter ecosystems from the surrounding environment and further infiltrate the food chain, beginning to affect human health. The regional scope of environmental pollution extends across the country's main population and industrial agglomeration belts and urban agglomerations.
Urban infrastructure supply, as well as resources and the environment, cannot adapt and match. Cities require large-scale electric power, high-quality energy, and large centralized water sources as support, and per capita energy consumption, water consumption, and centralized waste discharge are all much greater than in rural areas. At present, most cities in China are short of water, and most drinking water sources are polluted. The phenomenon of garbage surrounding cities is prominent, and the harmless treatment rate is very low. Although governments at all levels have increased investment year by year in urban infrastructure such as water supply and drainage and environmental protection, the gap in resource and environmental supply guarantees has not narrowed correspondingly. This shows from another angle that China's urbanization speed is too fast.
The impact of ecologically fragile regions on the development of metropolitan areas and areas with dense industrial populations is becoming increasingly prominent. The development of industrial and urban agglomeration areas requires the support of ecosystem service functions over a larger scope. Therefore, large cities and the vast surrounding regions form a whole linked by ecosystem services and ecological compensation. The scale of urbanization is constrained by ecological and environmental carrying capacity.