Abstract

China's urbanization was at a low level 35 years ago, but now it is developing at a high speed and in a large scale. The urbanization rate has increased 1.02 percentage points and urban population has increased 15.96 million on average per year since the reform and opening up, both of which are rare in the world. By 2013, China's urbanization rate reached 53.7%, exceeding the world average. It took the world more than 50 years on average to promote urbanization rate from 30% to 50%, which took only 15 years in China. However, China's urbanization has a low quality, which is a typical“incomplete urbanization”. The rapid progress of China's urbanization is built on huge consumption of resources and energy, wide occupied of land and high emissions of the three wastes（waste gas, waste water and industrial residue）. The problems of high cost of resources and environment, low overall efficiency, and uncoordinated, unsustainable and non-inclusiveness in the process of urbanization are of increasing seriousness. Hence, China needs to explore a new urbanization road with Chinese characteristics actively, which must be based on China' national conditions, combining new urbanization and urbanization with Chinese characteristics organically and emphasizing human-oriented，intensive, intelligent, green and low carbon development, urbanrural integration, synchronization among industrialization, urbanization and agricultural modernization and cultural heritage. The new urbanization with Chinese characteristics has five principle features of diversification, gradualism, intensification, harmony and sustainability, which is an essential way for China to achieve social harmony and overall prosperity, and is also a fundamental road to realize the“Chinese Dream”. Now the strategic transformation from quantity-oriented to quality-oriented is happening to current urbanization of China, the core of which is to improve the quality of urbanization comprehensively. Therefore, in order to realize a healthy urbanization with higher quality, we must adhere to the human-oriented policy, conducting citizenization of rural-urban migrants orderly and gradually, dwindling the costs of resources and environment, promoting a more reasonable urban size-hierarchy structure with coordinated development of large, medium and small cities and small towns leading by urban agglomerations based on comprehensive carrying capacity, building a safe, orderly, balanced and efficient urbanization spatial pattern with polycentric-network, exploring different urbanization modes based on the diversity of local conditions, enhancing and promoting the quality of urban construction and governance, and establishing and improving the urbanrural integration institutional mechanisms.