National Development and Reform Commission: there are four major problems in China's urbanization: extensive land use

The Information Office of the State Council held a press briefing on the afternoon of March 29, at which relevant responsible persons of the Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the Ministry of Land and Resources, the Ministry of Housing, Urban and Rural Construction, and the Ministry of Agriculture introduced the relevant situation of China's urbanization development and answered the reporter's questions.

At the press conference, Li Shouxin, director of the Development and Planning Department of the National Development and Reform Commission, said that due to a variety of historical, institutional and stage of development reasons, there are also some problems in China's urbanization.

First, from the perspective of the composition of the population, it can be said that the quality of China's urbanized population is not high. Among the 622 million urban population, statistics are among the urban population, but in fact they still belong to the agricultural household registration population, and such people are mainly migrant workers. There are roughly 167 million people. They actually work and live in cities, but they do not have the same social rights as urban residents. Their production and life are still in a very unstable state. This is a prominent problem.

Second, from the perspective of spatial distribution, the development level of urbanization in the eastern, central and western regions of China is also very uneven. What is prominent is that the level of urbanization in the central region is obviously on the low side, and the development of urbanization lags behind. To some extent, this also widens the development gap between regions. The problem that the spatial layout of cities and towns does not adapt to the carrying capacity of resources and environment is becoming more and more prominent. Among the 655 cities, nearly 400 cities are short of water, of which about 200 cities are seriously short of water. In addition, as we all know, the south-to-north water diversion project and the west-to-east natural gas transmission project are actually aimed at the mismatch and mismatch of the city's economy, population, resources and environment, and are forced to carry out large-scale and long-distance transportation of energy and resources.

Third, from the form of urbanization, the scale development of different scales and levels is not coordinated. For most urban agglomerations, just now I mentioned that the economic strength of the three major urban agglomerations around the Bohai Sea, the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta is relatively strong, but in terms of the country as a whole, most cities are still in the primary stage of urbanization. Especially in small and medium-sized cities, the capacity to absorb population is still insufficient, and there is still great potential. In the past, small towns blossomed everywhere, occupying too much precious land resources, and the blind development of small towns also caused environmental pollution. These problems are also more prominent.

Fourth, from the point of view of factor input, the sustainable ability of urbanization which relies too much on land support is not strong, or it is not sustainable. Driven by the interests of making money from the land, some places have caused some cities to blindly expand the building framework and build large squares and highways. In fact, the use of land is very extensive. Finally, it can be summarized in one sentence, that is, the urbanization of land is faster than that of population. This is how the concept of this sentence comes from. From 1999 to 2007, the area of urban built-up areas expanded by 7.2%, but the population absorbed increased by only 4%.