The historic milestone spotlights a trend that China’s government says will be a key driver of economic growth over the next two decades as hundreds of millions more people move into urban areas in search of higher-paying jobs.

But it also points to the challenges facing Chinese leaders as mass migration places an increasing strain on urban housing, transport and welfare, while fueling pollution, social unrest and demands for political reform.

Urban dwellers account for 51.27% of China’s entire population of nearly 1.35 billion—or a total of 690.8 million people—the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced at a news conference in Beijing on Tuesday.

City dwellers represented just 10.6% of China’s population in 1949, when the Communist Party took power, and just under 19% in 1979, when it launched the market reforms, according to official Chinese statistics.

Reuters looks at what this means for the global labor market, which has largely relied on a seemingly endless supply of cheap labor from China’s rural population:

Factories along the Pearl River Delta boomed in the same period as hundreds of millions headed to cities in search of jobs, helping to keep costs low. But an expert on development in the delta said workers are now increasingly demanding higher wages and better terms as urban property and living costs soar.

“It’s a clear signal to all investors — China’s cheap labour is fading into the past and will never be back,” said Cheng Jiansan, a professor with the Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences, the top think-tank in China’s export hub.

“As far as I know, many plants here are relocating to places like Vietnam and Cambodia — simply for cheap labour.”

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Post tags: demographics, migrant workers, population, urbanization
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The census released on Thursday showed the population in China, the world’s second biggest economy, grew by 5.84 percent from the 1.27 billion in the last census in 2000 and to a level that was smaller than the 1.4 billion some demographers had projected.

The results also showed China is fast urbanizing and becoming older. These trends augur big changes in the labor market in coming years, as the number of potential workers, especially from the countryside, shrinks and the elderly dependent population grows.

“What’s significant is that China is for the first time crossing a historical landmark from a country that’s dominated by people engaging in agriculture, living in the countryside, to an urbanized society,” said Wang Feng, a demographer who is director of the Brookings Institute Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing.

“Such low fertility and population growth means that China will face a future smaller cohort of young labor for labor supply, and also a much more serious aging process than people anticipated even 10 years ago or two decades ago.”

Read a previous post on CDT about how the effects of China’s urbanization are playing out for those stuck in the villages.

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Nat Geo went on a search for the most typical human face. After crunching the numbers, they discovered their candidate: a 28-year-old Han Chinese male.

According to the magazine, there are nine million people in the world who fit that description.

Not surprisingly, China scores the top spot for both nationality (19% of people are Chinese) and language (13% of people speak Mandarin as their first language).

To discover more about the “most typical person”, see here.

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China is now the world’s second-biggest economy, but some of its provinces by themselves would rank fairly high in the global league. Our map shows the nearest equivalent country. For example, Guangdong’s GDP (at market exchange rates) is almost as big as Indonesia’s; the output of both Jiangsu and Shandong exceeds Switzerland’s. Some provinces may exaggerate their output: the sum of their reported GDPs is 10% higher than the national total. But over time the latter has consistently been revised up, suggesting that any overstatement is modest.

What about other economic yardsticks? Guangdong exports as much as South Korea, Jiangsu as much as Taiwan. Shanghai’s GDP per person is as high as Saudi Arabia’s (at purchasing-power parity), though still well below that in China’s special administrative regions, Hong Kong and Macau. At the other extreme, the poorest province, Guizhou, has an income per head close to that of India. Note that these figures use the same PPP conversion rate for the whole of China, but prices are likely to be lower in poorer provinces than in richer ones, slightly reducing regional inequality.

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Post tags: exports, GDP, municipalities, population, provinces, The Economist
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The speed and size of economic development going in China right now has never happened before. In just ten years, a small emerging market has transformed into a geopolitical bruiser that can go toe-to-toe with Ben Bernanke.

Like it or not, China plays a critical role in the global economy from here out. Let’s hope it hope doesn’t crash.

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Post tags: economic growth, population, statistics
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More than six million people – a number almost three times the size of the People’s Liberation Army, and larger than the population of Denmark – will on Monday fan out across this country’s 31 provinces to begin China’s first national census in a decade. Though a population survey carried out at the end of last year estimated the population of the People’s Republic of China at 1.334 billion, there are far too many unknowns for that number to be considered definitive. Some demographers believe the real number of Chinese may be closer to 1.5 billion.

There are several reasons China’s government has a poor handle on the number of people it rules, but the biggest one is that the country is in the midst of the world’s biggest-ever peacetime migration. Over the past three decades, hundreds of millions of rural Chinese have flocked to the cities in search of work and better lives. Estimates of the number of migrant workers and their families range from 130 million to more than 200 million. To find the real number will mean going door-to-door in villages such as Daxing, and asking those who live here to tell the truth, even when it could have uncertain consequences.

…The numbers are imprecise because China’s hukou household registration system restricts where people can live and work, forcing migrants to live in the shadows of places such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. An unknown number – believed to be in the millions – have had second or third children in violation of the country’s once-child population control laws. While their parents are registered in the wrong place, the children often aren’t registered at all, leaving them without the necessary documentation to even attend school.

Read more about conditions in Daxing and other migrant villages via CDT.

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For three decades China’s one-child policy helped power this nation’s economic rise. With fewer mouths to feed, families saved. Poverty fell. Living standards improved.

But a social experiment that worked well in some respects is now threatening the country’s hard-won gains. China’s working-age population — the engine behind its prolific growth — will start shrinking within a few years.

Meanwhile, the ranks of elderly are projected to soar. By the middle of this century, fully a third of China’s population will be age 60 or older, compared with 26% in the United States. China’s projected 438 million senior citizens will outnumber the entire U.S. population.

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The numbers are overwhelming: Over the next 17 years, 350 million rural residents (more than the entire U.S. population today) will leave the farm and move to China’s cities. That will bring the Chinese urban population from just under 600 million today to close to 1 billion, changing China into a country where more than two-thirds of its people are city dwellers, says Jonathan Woetzel, a director in McKinsey’s Shanghai office. The change will reverse China’s centuries-old identity as a largely rural country. Thirty years ago, when China started modernizing its economy, more than 80% of Chinese lived in the countryside. And just six years ago it still was about 60%. Today China is just under 50% urban.

The newly urbanized population will live in eight megacities, those with a population of more than 10 million, as well 15 big cities with populations between 5 million and 10 million. In addition, by 2025 China will probably have at least 221 cities with a population over 1 million, estimates Woetzel. That compares with 35 cities of that scale across all of Europe today. These new urbanites are expected to be a powerful booster of growth: Urban consumption as a share of gross domestic product will most likely rise from 25% today to roughly 33% by 2025. “Urbanization is the engine of the Chinese economy—it is what has driven productivity growth over the last 20 years,” says Woetzel. “And China has the potential to keep doing this for the next 20 years.”

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“Population bonus,” the abundant supply of working-age population in a country, is contributing 27% to China’s per capital GDP growth, said Cai Fang, director of the population and labor economics institute with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. But with an aging population in China, the population bonus will be exhausted by 2013.

Chinese policy makers are increasingly aware that China not only needs to worry about the overgrowth of population, but also about a changing demographic, especially when China’s baby boomers enter retirement age. Now, these people born in the 1960s and 1970s were or have been at the stage in their lives of getting married and buying homes late last century and early this one. But since 1990, China’s birth rate has been decreasing. According to the 2000 census, there were 69 million of those aged 0-4 years old, half the number for the range aged 10-14.

Many worry that while the baby boomers have pushed up the housing market over the last decade, China will soon be dealing with dwindling demand from the new generation coming of age but with a dramatically small population scale. And this will mean a slipping real estate market and dipping house prices.

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The pressure of rising food prices has afflicted not only China, but reflected a greater global trend driven by complex factors such as population growth, changes in dietary trends as groups were lifted out of poverty, increased demand for biofuels, and climate change.

…Ehrlich was an early force in alerting the public to the problems of overpopulation and resource scarcity, and the environmental consequences of public policy. He has co-authored several books on the subject, including Food Security, Population and Environment, and Population, Sustainability, and Earth’s Carrying Capacity.

To tie these issues to China and discuss the greater global food supply situation, the EO conducted an email interview with Ehrlich.

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