March 24, 2008
One billion people in China’s cities
Having reviewed Richard Florida’s Whose Your City the other day, I am unusually alert to stories about people flocking to cities from suburbs and the countryside.
So this FT story this morning caught my eye. It is about a McKinsey Global Institute study of urbanisation in China and includes this paragraph:
On top of the existing 103m urban migrants, Chinese cities will face an influx of another 243m migrants by 2025, taking the urban population up to nearly 1bn people. In the medium and large cities, about half the population will be migrants, which is almost three times the current level.
And I thought that Shanghai and Beijing looked crowded already.
