URBAN LIFE IN CHINA
right
According to the 2010 census, 49.7 percent of China's population lives in urban areas. This is up from 36.1 percent in the 2000 census, which used a different counting system The urban population of China in 2007 was estimated to be 44 percent, compared to 90 percent in Great Britain and 13 percent in Ethiopia. The urban population of China has risen from 18 percent in 1970 to 26 percent in 1990 to 36 percent in 2001. When the Deng economic reforms were launched in 1978 there 172 million urban residents. In 2008 there were 577 million.The percentage of people living in urban areas is expected to rise to 60 percent by 2030. Already around 20 million Chinese move to the cities every year and that figure could rise.
An additional 300 million to 400 million people---more than the entire population of the United States---are expected to move from the countryside to the city over the next 30 years, according to China's Development Research Center, causing the China's population urban to rise from 47 percent to 75 percent. With consumption levels and wages three times higher in the city than in the countryside, this will put an enormous strain on energy and water resources unless there is a change in the urbanization model.
Urban populations are fragmented into urban residents and migrant workers, those who work for the private sector, those who for state enterprises, the political elite, a small emerging middle class and the disenfranchised masses. Chinese cities, in contrast to those in many developing countries, contain a high proportion of workers in factories and offices and a low proportion of workers in the service sector. The average income of urban dwellers nearly doubled between 2001 and 2005. Monthly income in Guangzhou in 2010 was $164, four times what it was in 1993. City people are also becoming more educated. By contrast in rural areas, incomes have remained stagnant and schools have gotten worse and more expensive. The demographic trends in Shanghai are similar to those of other Chinese cities. Eight million of Shanghai's 13 million people live in the downtown area, twice as many as in 1949. The government has helped build over a million new housing units and helped workers set up saving plans to afford them.
Legal status as an urban dweller in China is prized. As a result of various state policies and practices, contemporary Chinese urban society has a distinctive character, and life in Chinese cities differs in many ways from that in cities in otherwise comparable developing societies. The most consequential policies have been the household registration system, the legal barriers to migration, the fostering of the allembracing work unit, and the restriction of commerce and markets, including the housing market. In many ways, the weight of official control and supervision is felt more in the cities, whose administrators are concerned with controlling the population and do so through a dual administrative hierarchy. [Source: Library of Congress]
“The two principles on which these control structures are based are locality and occupation. Household registers are maintained by the police, whose presence is much stronger in the cities than in the countryside. Cities are subdivided into districts, wards, and finally into small units of some fifteen to thirty households, such as all those in one apartment building or on a small lane. For those employed in large organizations, the work unit either is coterminous with the residential unit or takes precedence over it; for those employed in small collective enterprises or neighborhood shops, the residential committee is their unit of registration and provides a range of services.
See Real Estate