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Four Hundred Million Chinese Live in Cities
Nearly four hundred million Chinese out of 1.2 billion, or 30.9 percent, live in cities, a document released Thursday by China's authoritative department said.
China's urbanization speed has increased at an average of 0.63 percent per annum over the past 20 years, double the world average, experts said during the on-going Sixth Major Cities' Summit Beijing 2000 here.
Although China has possessed the world's largest cities in its several thousand year feudal history, it was renowned for being a big agricultural nation. China's urbanization level was only 17.9 percent before its opening and reform in the late 70s.
Statistics show that China now has 668 cities and 19,000 administrative towns. Yet the country's urbanization level is still lower than the world average of 42 percent, experts said.
China hopes to lift the level of urbanization to 40 percent by 2010 and make itself an industrialized country with the majority of the population living in urban societies by the middle of the next century.
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