ABSTRACT
Introduction Against the background of economic globalization, China’s urbanization has attracted widespread attention. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in economics, once said that urbanization of China, together with high-tech development in the United States, are two key issues which will reshape the world in the twenty-first century (Wu et al. 2003). As a milestone of the national demographic urbanization process, China’s urbanization level, i.e., the proportion of urban population in the total population, crossed the 50 percent threshold for the first time in 2011. However, a broadly defined urbanization process involves not only population growth, but also economic development and environmental change. The proportion of urban population in total population cannot capture the full process of urbanization. Internationally, due to the lack of uniform definition of cities and towns, the term urbanization could not be commonly evaluated by normative statistical means. For China, using the demographic indicator of urbanization level to assess the urbanization process has the following two limitations:
1 Demographic urbanization level (DUL) is sensitive to the definition of city and urban population. Owing to the changing and confusing definition of urban area and the inconsistent statistical criteria of urban population in China, terms like “riddle” (Orleans and Burnham 1984), “enigma” (Orleans and Burnham 1984; Shen 1995), and “the statistical mystery in China” (Yan et al. 1994) have been frequently used by scholars to describe China’s urban population size and the corresponding index – namely, DUL. Additionally, China’s household registration (hukou) system makes the situation even more complicated.
