3. From urban to rural
Urbanization has become the most important engine for China to stimulate its
domestic economy (Hu 2003). It is easier to provide efficient logistics service for
an urban population than for rural people who live far away geographically. There
were 607 million urban residents, i.e., 45.7 % of the whole Chinese population, at
the end of 2008 (China’s urban population 2009). There are 655 cities in China.
Among these, 118 cities have more than one million people; 39 are ‘‘super-big’’
cities with more than four million residents. China’s urban population will rise to
over 700 million people by 2015, when city dwellers will outstrip the rural population
for the first time (Some 1.4b Chinese 2010).
Urbanization has changed people’s shopping style and created huge opportunity
for retail chain stores and for the logistics industry. Modern living definitely needs
an efficient logistics system. But China’s citizens still live mainly in undeveloped
regions except for the east and southeast. However, as pointed out in the previous
paragraph, the logistics infrastructure there is insufficient, nor is it efficient. Furthermore,
with local municipal governments’ protectionism and potentially different
jurisdiction systems, the implementation of integrated logistics in rural areas
remains challenging and difficult. So, we believe that is where there exists huge
opportunities for China’s logistics industry