Low-cost urbanization is not sustainable

In 2013, China's urbanization rate reached 53.7%, and 730 million people were included in the process of urbanization. Since the new century, an average of more than 20 million people have entered cities every year, which should be the largest and highest speed of population urbanization in a country in the world. In China, the urbanization rate in the eastern region has reached 62%, the central region 48%, the western region 44.5%, and there is still a gap of 18 percentage points between the western region and the eastern region. If it grows by 1 percentage point a year, it means that there is an 18-year gap between the central and western regions and the east, which is a very big gap.

This paper mainly talks about the emergence of low-cost urbanization model in China, the problems that have emerged, and how to solve it through reform in the future.

The rapid development of urbanization benefits from the low cost of land, labor and environment.

In the whole process of China's economic growth, more advantage lies not only in the role of marketization, but also in that the government can deploy resources through powerful means and special systems to artificially depress factor prices. Compared with other countries in the world, this low cost has improved the competitiveness, which has led to the rapid development of urbanization.

Low cost is reflected in three aspects: the first is land, the second is labor, and the third is environment. Low cost can enable enterprises to quickly complete capital accumulation, cities and towns can obtain more income, and finally lead to the rapid acceleration of urban construction. This mode of low-cost and rapid development is unprecedented in the world.

How does our country form a low-cost development model? This requires a study of China's special law of development. In the 1950s, two major institutional changes have been affecting the process of China's economic development.

First, the cooperative movement in the mid-1950s tried to complete an idealized, planned and public development model through the public ownership of land. This development model was solidified in 1958, leading to a serious economic decline. However, in the case of serious economic decline, public ownership of land did not withdraw completely, and after the 1980s, it has become a cheap basic resource for industrial development and urban development. Reducing the cost of urban development through the land system has led to the emergence of a land management system based on the separation of urban and rural areas, which has affected the process of urbanization in China in the future. no, no, no.

Second, the household registration management system distributes the public-owned rural land according to the welfare mode. The distribution mechanism of contracted land and homestead among the members of rural collective economic organizations, combined with the household registration management system, has led to huge obstacles in the circulation of urban and rural elements. The solidified land management system not only forces rural land to be expropriated by cities at a low price, but also strictly restricts the circulation of land as a basic economic element in rural areas. Household registration management system, by excluding a large number of rural population from urbanization, and then by depressing land prices and workers' wages, to achieve low-cost accumulation of industry.

After the 1960s, the economic growth was not sustainable, and the disadvantages of the system not only affected the economic development, but also made the society seriously depressed. Therefore, in the 1960s, there was an "exit mechanism". Although the land was publicly owned, the management right of the land was moderately liberalized. In the 1970s, the development model characterized by public ownership and the exclusion of labor force from the process of urbanization was severely challenged, and the country fell into a huge economic crisis.

This crisis was released after the third Plenary session of the Eleventh Central Committee. What is its performance? First, continue to return to the way of the 1960s, releasing the right to operate the land without touching ownership; second, in order to keep the cost of the city low, continue to exclude all the rural population from the urbanization process. Therefore, in the 1980s and 1990s, urbanization was not mentioned in the nearly 20-year policy, which continued to maintain the low-cost accumulation of cities and towns, while another new policy emerged at the same time, that is, the unfair exchange of urban and rural land.

Rural land can be converted into urban development land only after nationalization, which creates conditions for urban government to lower the price of factors for industrial accumulation and for the improvement of urban infrastructure. There is also a special phenomenon in the 1980s, that is, when the government solved the accumulation of urban economy by lowering factor prices, the same social changes were taking place in rural areas. A large number of farmers in Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shandong, Zhejiang and other areas have created their own industrial system and industrialization process with cheap land, which has promoted the economic growth and urban development process of the whole country.

The development of township enterprises in the 1980s has two most important characteristics. First, the use of the original public ownership of land, through public ownership to mobilize the lowest price of land resources. Second, due to the household registration system, a large number of migrant workers are excluded from the urban and rural public service system. In the process of development in the past few decades, due to the differences in development progress, a new urban and rural development pattern has been formed.