The nation's new urbanization drive will generate domestic demand and growth, an official with China's top economic planner said Thursday.
The "new-style urbanization" links the supply and demand sides of the economy, and it is a primary way to drive growth and raise living standards, Chen Yajun, an urban planning official with the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), told a press conference held in Beijing on Thursday.
In a State Council teleconference on urbanization on Tuesday, Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli said China will fully implement the urban registration system (hukou) so all city residents will have access to basic public services.
Also on Tuesday, officials called for fresh achievements to be made in the sector in 2016.
A top-level urban work conference held at the end of 2015 noted that the urbanization drive will focus on integrating migrant workers into cities. The government plans to provide urban hukou to 100 million rural migrants by 2020.
On Thursday, local officials from East China's Zhejiang Province and Southwest China's Guizhou Province talked about their respective experience in building up new townships at the press conference held in Beijing.
Zhejiang, for example, has sought to develop some of its towns into innovative and entrepreneurial platforms with cultural, tourist and social functions.
Each town focuses on one aspect of life such as fashion, the green economy or information. Currently, the province has 37 such towns, attracting 48 billion yuan ($7.35 billion) from some 3,300 companies.
Yunxi town, in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang Province, received investment from China's e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, and it has developed itself into an innovative stronghold of more than 250 cloud-computing firms.
In Guizhou, 100 towns have become part of a pilot program. In 2015, these towns absorbed nearby rural populations of up to 100,000, more than 80 percent of whom have found jobs in their new towns, Zhang -Meijun, an official from Guizhou, said at the press conference on Thursday.
"Local fiscal revenue, bank loans, and investment from companies outside the province provided a mixed source of funding for these urbanization programs," Zhang told the Global Times on Thursday.
From 2013 to 2015, these towns attracted 100 billion yuan for work on infrastructure, housing and public services.
Guizhou's Jiuzhou town built 500 houses to relocate rural residents who lived in distant villages or areas with poor environments or frequent natural disasters in 2015. The town's urbanization rate, based on the number of registered urban residents, rose to 45.2 percent in 2015 from 35 percent in 2012.
