Crossing the 50 Percent Population Rubicon: Can China Urbanize to Prosperity?

Abstract

A U.S. geographer and noted authority on China's urbanization reacts to the historic change in the country's 2012 population (breaking the 50 percent urban threshold) by challenging the popular narrative that equates China's advancing urbanization with a forthcoming consumption boom fueled by a burgeoning middle class. Through a penetrating analysis of China's recent urban population and hukou statistics at both the national and local levels (and employing a hukou population series rarely utilized by Western specialists), the author argues that "rural migrant workers," a group popularly presumed to act as a major driver of China's consumption in coming decades, actually have played only a minor role in the process to date. Rather he demonstrates that much of the recent urban growth, including growth in the "nonagricultural population" (a group whose access to pension, health care, and other social security benefits best positions it to assume the role of a mass-consuming middle class), is due not to the genuine assimilation of rural-urban migrants into urban lifestyles. Instead the trend represents partly a nominal (not substantive) redesignation of the hukou status of residents of exurban areas where some peasants' land is being expropriated for new development. The paper concludes by suggesting that an urbanization-consumption scenario will become realistic only after the hukou system is thoroughly reformed or altogether abolished.

Keywords:

• China
• Beijing
• Wuhan
• hukou
• middle class
• urbanization
• rural-urban migration
• consumption-led growth
• nonagricultural population
• urban reclassification
• natural population increase
• local hukou converters