China’s New Urbanization and Development Bottlenecks

Abstract

This chapter first details the stages of China’s urbanization and proposes to view China’s urbanization from a four-stage instead of a traditional three-stage perspective. We observe that China’s urbanization experiences faster than the world’s average development. The chapter further proceeds to evaluate China’s contemporary urbanization and points out that China’s current urbanization is sub-healthy with numerous “urban diseases.” We contend, however, such sub-healthiness of China’s urbanization is not what some scholars might call “pseudo-urbanization.” The chapter then details the four increasingly severe resource and environment constraints for China’s urbanization and the proposed New Urbanization, namely water, land, energy, and ecological/environmental services. In the end, we specifically distinguish the essential difference between New Urbanization and a seemingly “New Urbanization” movement, i.e., the urban new district construction.