A landmark of sorts. Says the BBC:
City dwellers in China now outnumber rural dwellers for the first time as more people seek better economic opportunities, official figures show.
The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said that there were now 690.8m people - 51.3% of China's total 1.3bn population - in urban areas.
This misses something important which we've touched on before here. Moving to the cities doesn't make people urban in China if their household registration is still back in the coiuntryside. What you have are three categories: rural, urban and migrant, the last of which don't have the same rights of access to housing, education and welfare services as urban hukou holders, something that already has all sorts of social consequences. That's why the census takers are actually counting people where they are living, rather than as residentds of where they came from.
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