Characteristics and Prospect of China's Urbanization Development

China has experienced a booming development of urbanization since reform and opening-up. China's urbanization level reached 51% in 2011, thus achieving “urban transition”. However, China's urbanization level is currently overestimated, which is mainly reflected by a high proportion of agricultural population in the urban population. China's urban population contains more than 300 million agricultural population who cannot enjoy the urban social security system and are not real urban residents.

Analyzing characteristics of China's urbanization, this paper reveals the existing problems in China's urbanization and emphasizes the need for China to solve these problems and realize a complete urbanization. In addition, the projection of the proportion urban of China is carried out and the future direction of China’s urbanization is also explored. The paper argues that, to make China’s urbanization advance efficiently, attention must be paid to deepening the reform of the household registration system and a series of related policies, consolidating the contribution of population migration to China's urbanization and allowing rural-urban migrants to be urbanized.

Previous Chinese census data, previous China 1% population sample survey data and other data published by National Bureau of Statistics of China are used in the paper.