Small Towns and China's Urbanization Level

In: The China quarterly, Volume 120, p. 771-786

Abstract

China'sde jureurbanization level more than doubled in the five years between 1982 and 1987, jumping from 20.8 per cent to 46 6 per cent (Table 1). The Chinese State Statistical Bureau (SSB) officials explained that this unprecedented increase was largely the result of an increase in the number of urban towns since the mid 1984 relaxation of criteria for urban town designation.1 This is, however, only a partial explanation. My own analysis shows that much of the gain in the town population was in fact due to the post-1984 governing system of"town administering village" (zhen guan cun). Many newly designated urban towns (and some existing towns as well) have enlarged their administrative territories to include a huge number of agricultural residents in their official urban population. Most of these rural persons, however, judged by strict occupational and residential criteria, should not have been counted as urban population. The inclusion of many agricultural persons in the urban sector since mid 1984 has thus greatly exaggerated the actual urbanization level.2