China said yesterday the number of people living in cities exceeded the rural population for the first time, a historic shift that experts said would put a strain on society and the environment.
The change marks a turning point for China, which for centuries was a mainly agrarian nation, but has witnessed a huge population shift to cities during the past three decades as people seek to benefit from rapid economic growth.
Urban dwellers now represent 51.27 percent, or 690.8 million people, of China’s entire population of nearly 1.35 billion, the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics said.
In 1982, only one-in-five people lived in cities. By 1990, urban dwellers represented 26 percent of the total population, a figure that rose to 36 percent in 2000 and jumped faster during the next decade to 51.27 percent.
The bureau added that China had an additional 21 million people living in cities by the end of last year compared with a year earlier — more than the entire population of Sri Lanka — while the number of rural dwellers fell.
“Urbanization is an irreversible process and in the next 20 years, China’s urban population will reach 75 percent of the total population,” said Li Jianmin (李建民), head of the Institute of Population and Development Research at Nankai University. “This will have a huge impact on China’s environment and on social and economic development.”
A significant portion of those moving to cities are migrant workers, who have helped fuel China’s rapid growth.
A national census published in April last year counted more than 221 million migrants and a government report released months later predicted that more than 100 million farmers would move to cities by 2020.
However, migrants are often treated as second-class citizens in the towns or cities they live in because they are still registered as rural residents and have little or no social security.
“We’re already seeing some of the destabilizing aspects of [urbanization] because China’s political and administrative system hasn’t caught up with the economic and social reality,” China Labour Bulletin spokesman Geoffrey Crothall said.
He said many people still classified as rural residents now form major portions of the population in many cities throughout China.
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