China’s urbanization 2020: a new blueprint and direction

AbstractChina released its first national urbanization plan in March 2014. The plan outlines a bold move to grant urban hukou (household registration) to 100 million people, mostly migrants, in the next six years. If successfully implemented, the plan will help China to achieve genuine urbanization and alleviate some major social and economic problems. It has also brought forth a new vision of urbanization with an emphasis on the human aspects. This article presents a preliminary evaluation of the new plan.Keywords: hukouChinaurbanizationmigrants Notes1. A useful analysis of the issue is in Lan (Citation2014) and Ming (Citation2013).2. Shanghai, one of leading cities in migrant children’s education in the country, covers about 80% of migrant children in the compulsory education age-group. See Chen (Citation2014).3. The plan proposes to reduce the percentage of urban population without hukou by 3 percentage points in the next 7 years. The current percentage of the floating population is 18% (in 2013). It will take about 43 years to completely grant all the floating population based on the speed of hukou conversions proposed in the plan.