ABSTRACT
There perhaps are no other countries that have witnessed urbanization and city spatial development more profoundly in terms of scale and scope than China in the past decades. The urbanization rate was only 17.9 percent in 1978, but it grew gradually to 19.4 percent in 1980 and then 26.4 percent in 1990. The pace of urbanization was accelerated during the 1990s and 2010s. The urbanization rate jumped to 36.22 percent in 2000 and then to 49.68 percent in 2010. China’s urbanization rate increased annually by about 0.7, 1, and 1.3 percentage points during 1978-1990, 1990s, and 2010s, respectively. The growth pace of urbanization in 2010s was nearly twice as high as that in 1980s. 1
It is worth noting that the urbanization rate in China may be subject to biases in both directions. On one hand, the floating population working and living in cities does not have an urban status ( hukou ) and is not counted as urban population. On the other hand, the administrative establishment of a city status from a previously county status may cause an overestimation of urban population. Since the floating population is estimated between 150 and 250 million, the total direction of bias is toward underestimation. Since the mid-2010s, China has begun to take the floating population into account. The accelerating pace of urbanization in the 2010s may have something to do with this change in the definition and counting of urban population. The difference of the pace of urbanization between 1990s and 2010s may hence be not as big as the data have suggested.
