China plans to increase the percentage of its population living in urban areas in the next nineteen years to 230 million people, which would be equivalent to the total of the above ten urban areas. China wants 70 percent of its people to live in urban areas. that is the percentage of people in America who live in urban areas. It took America fifty years to make that change.
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In July, the Chinese government announced that a revision to the one-child policy had been implemented throughout the country's provinces and regions. The announcement of the revision, which allows couples in which either partner is an only child to have up to two children, heralded the end of the controversial policy. More relaxed family planning measures have long been in place for rural and ethnic minority communities, and most urban Chinese of childbearing age now were the only children in their families, so the revision dramatically narrows the portion of China's population to which the original one-child policy still applies.
The purpose of the one-child policy -- limiting the population shaping demographic trends -- was superseded many years ago by the far more fundamental forces of industrialization and urbanization. Two decades ago, China's fertility rate fell below 2.1, the generally accepted population replacement rate. Since then, it has dropped to roughly 1.5 or, by some measures, as low as 1.4. These are comparable to fertility rates in Russia and Italy but well below those of the United States, Australia, the Netherlands and many other more advanced economies.
China's urban population may grow by as many as 230 million people in the next 15 years. But most growth will take place not in metropolises like Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing but in the myriad small- and medium-sized satellite cities around them. And as residents flock to these cities, China's working-age population will begin to decline, and its elderly population will grow dramatically.
Finally, there is the question of how the Chinese government will manage the social stresses created by decades of uneven demographic growth between male and female populations driven at least in part by the one-child policy in its early years. In the next decade, this imbalance will come to a head as tens of millions of Chinese men, especially from rural regions where male children have traditionally been prized above female, come of age with little to no prospect for finding partners and forming families. This demographic will be of particular concern for Beijing as the low value-added manufacturing and construction industries best suited to absorb it decline further.
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