China pledges steady, human-centered urbanization

China on Saturday pledged proactive yet steady moves in pushing forward human-centered urbanization as it looks to balance urban-rural development and unleash domestic demand.

Urbanization is the road China must take in its modernization drive, and it offers an important way to address rural issues, according to a statement released after a central urbanization work conference.

While promising to focus on the quality of urbanization and improve the living standards of urban residents, the statement said the primary task is to enable migrant workers to win urbanite status in an orderly manner.

This was the most high-level meeting the Chinese leadership has ever convened on urbanization.

The conference came as China's rigid "hukou" (household registration) system has prevented migrants from gaining equal access to services in cities, posing a major barrier holding back the country's urbanization process.

Although China's urban population exceeded its rural population for the first time last year, with city-dwellers accounting for 51.27 percent of the population, a considerable portion of them have no official city hukou.

The document promised to gradually allow migrant workers to become more integrated in cities, fully remove hukou restrictions in towns and small cities, gradually ease restrictions in mid-sized cities, setting reasonable conditions for settling in big cities while strictly controlling the population in megacities.

The statement also said China will uphold the philosophy of green and low-carbon development in future urbanization.