Urbanization in China 1980-2022

In 2022, approximately 65.2 percent of the total population in China lived in cities. The urbanization rate has increased steadily in China over the last decades.

Degree of urbanization in China

Urbanization is generally defined as a process of people migrating from rural to urban areas, during which towns and cities are formed and increase in size. Even though urbanization is not exclusively a modern phenomenon, industrialization and modernization did accelerate its progress. As shown in the statistic at hand, the degree of urbanization of China, the world's second-largest economy, rose from 36 percent in 2000 to around 51 percent in 2011. That year, the urban population surpassed the number of rural residents for the first time in the country's history.

The urbanization rate varies greatly in different parts of China. While urbanization is lesser advanced in western or central China, in most coastal regions in eastern China more than two-thirds of the population lives already in cities. Among the ten largest Chinese cities in 2021, six were located in coastal regions in East and South China.

Urbanization in international comparison

Brazil and Russia, two other BRIC countries, display a much higher degree of urbanization than China. On the other hand, in India, the country with the worlds’ second largest population, a mere 35.4 percent of the population lived in urban regions as of 2021. Similar to other parts of the world, the progress of urbanization in China is closely linked to modernization. From 2000 to 2021, the contribution of agriculture to the gross domestic product in China shrank from 14.7 percent to 7.3 percent. Even more evident was the decrease of workforce in agriculture.