Answer to One China Travel Question
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Q: What percentage of the population lives in rural areas?
| | A: According to the census data collected by the Chinese government in 2004, about 542 million Chinese live in urban areas, and over 757 million reside in rural areas. This means that approximately 60% of China’s total population lives in countryside.
Much of this depends on how “urban” and “rural” are defined. In the U.S. and Europe, a community with a population over two or three thousand are often defined as urban. If we go by this standard, probably 80 or 90% of the Chinese population must be considered urban. So, instead of going with definitions such as the ones mentioned above, we probably should consider rural population as those Chinese who still largely live on land – through growing crops, that is. But even this is no longer a sure thing nowadays, as many Chinese villages have set up their own factories and other businesses, and hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants also work in urban areas year-long but officially still have their residencies back in the villages.
Still, officially, and most scholars seem to agree, that about 60% of China’s 1.3 billion people are rural population. This is a significant drop from roughly 80% about thirty years ago. Urbanization has certainly made headways in the past few decades in China, for better or worse.
For a foreigner who travels in China, a big difference between this eastern country and a country such as the United States or Canada, is that there seem to endless cities, towns and villages in the Chinese land. Urban or rural, the land seems to be very heavily populated. Actually not so in the Northernmost and the Western part of China such as Inner Mogolia, Tibet or Xinjiang, where population density considerably lower.
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