Administrative Changes and Urban Population in China

Abstract The lack of well-defined and standardized terms for urban settlements in China has created much confusion among Chinese as well as Western scholars regarding the size of China's urban population and the nation's urbanization level. In this paper we identify the major types of China's urban population and explain their relationships to areal units. The aggregate population of the officially designated cities and towns, which has been widely used in China and elsewhere as an indicator of China's urbanization level, should no longer be used because of changes after 1979 in the designation of urban areas; these changes had the effect of adding agricultural households to the urban population. According to the official indicator, China's population was 31.9 percent urban in 1984. A more realistic measure of urbanization, which excludes the agricultural population of cities and towns, shows that China was actually 15.7 percent urban in 1984.