China has decided to initiate a three-year national scheme to rebuild run-down areas in its latest effort to speed up urbanization and improve people's lives.
The State Council, China's cabinet, plans to build 18 million apartments in urban areas, and renovate dilapidated rural houses for 10.6 million households, according to an executive meeting on Wednesday chaired by Premier Li Keqiang.
Supporting infrastructure, such as transportation, communication, and supply of water, natural gas and heating will be completed in the same period, the cabinet agreed.
Governments should channel more money to renovation projects and attract private investors to support the projects.
The program was dubbed as a strong push to China's urbanization drive while the country has been striving to expand urban areas, build city clusters, improve housing conditions and help farmer-turned migrant workers settle in cities.
The central authority in 2014 unveiled the first top-down guideline to promote urbanization in the world's second largest economy, which is struggling against an unrelieved economic downturn.
Given the slowdown, policymakers have high hopes that urbanization will help revive sluggish investment, stimulate domestic demand and provide sustainable impetus to economic growth.
Economists recognized urbanization's role in fueling the economy.
Li Shantong with the Development Research Center of the State Council cited huge and growing demand for infrastructure during urbanization, which will "continue to drive economic growth in the period of the 13th five year plan [2016-2020]."
There were 749.16 million urban inhabitants by the end of 2014, making up 54.77 percent of the total population.
The ratio, up from 26.41 percent in 1990, was still markedly lower compared with developed countries, indicating much room for improvement.
Liu Hongyu, vice president of the School of Civil Engineering, Tsinghua University, believes China's urbanization was still on a fast track and expects the permanent resident population of cities to grow by 15 million each year from now to 2030.
In addition, the renovation program aims to improve people's livelihoods.
"This work concerns millions of impoverished families, thus, requires bolder steps based," the cabinet said.
Minister of housing and urban-rural development, Chen Zhenggao ordered Wednesday swift and extensive renovation of buildings that were safety hazards, after a number of collapse accidents.
Local governments were urged to check buildings as the country enters rainy season, prioritize dangerous buildings in the renovation scheme and provide financing aid.
Dilapidated buildings that collapsed in southwest China's Guizhou Province and north China's Tianjin city in the past week killed dozens of people.
