In its new urbanisation plan, China’s government is setting its targets low. The goal of reaching a 70% urbanisation rate in five years’ time could be met with far smaller increases in the urban population than have been seen in the past few years. And increases in the urban population don’t necessarily even require people to move: more than half of recent new urban residents won that status when the rural locations they lived in were reclassified as urban. Migration from the countryside and the boost it can give to the economy has declined considerably since the early-2000s.
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