Promote new urbanization model

The economic work conference of the Chinese central government held over the weekend set a new urbanization model as a sustainable driving force for China's economic growth， according to Beijing News Daily.

In fact, a new urbanization model is a necessary step for China in the near future, as well as a timely reflection on the problems arising from China's earlier urbanization model.

Megacities used to be popular among city planners in China. Some scholars say that the three major urban areas in Japan concentrate 90 percent of the country's population, and that China should transform its Bohai Bay, Pearl River delta, and Yangtze River delta areas into similar large-scale megacities.

If so, the three areas would accommodate 1.2 billion people in only 9.42 percent of China's land.

But China cannot blindly apply models followed by other countries.

Human history has seen urbanization in countries with populations of about 400 million people at most, but not China's more than 1.3 billion people. And we also need to consider China's unique characteristics, with big disparities from west to east and between urban and rural areas.

China does not lack big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, which boast about 20 million permanent residents and millions more migrant workers.

Many people live and work in those cities for years and can't get local residence permits, or hukou, which has an impact on their pensions, as well as on their access to education and medical services. There are about 145 million such people in China now. They are not counted as rural residents anymore. But they do not have urban residents IDs and its affiliated rights yet, despite the 51.2 percent of urbanization rate in China today. That's why the real urbanization rate is estimated at only 35 percent.

China should avoid turning the false urbanization rate into another GDP to evaluate the government's performance. The new urbanization model should ensure that all citizens, who are labeled as urban residents, enjoy similar welfare and public services. If urbanization cannot guarantee the fairness and justice of the process, it may become another round of exploitation of the rural population, who lost their land and remain secondary citizens in the city.

The central authority believes that urbanization can increase China's economic growth because not only of the investment in infrastructure construction, but also the formation of a large middle-income group of citizens. However, if the new citizens remain low-skilled manual workers in the city, as they are now, they will not become real consumers and it will be very difficult to realize the transformation of China's growth model.

The crux of turning an old urbanization model to a new one lies in stopping the infrastructure construction fervor and establishing a mature social security network, granting the new citizens the same welfare and same access to resources and services to pursue a better life.

The prosperity of the whole country rests with each citizen's well-being.