Non-coordination in China’s urbanization: Assessment and affecting factors

Urbanization is a comprehensive concept, a trinity process that is based on the interactions and mutual influences among the population urbanization, economic urbanization and space urbanization, in which, people are the central and leading players in this process, while economic activities serve as the driving force and space is the carrier—the physical or material setting as well as the product. So the coordination among these processes is crucial for a country or region’s sustainable development. China is experiencing rapid growth of cities and a surge in urban population, with the basic national condition of many people and little land, which calls for a systematic study of the issue of coordinated urbanization from theoretical, methodological and practical perspectives. Based on the concept of urbanization and non-coordination of urbanization, this article built a quantitative method to identify and evaluate the urbanization and non-coordination of urbanization, and made an empirical analysis in China between 2000 and 2008. The results show that the non-coordination overall level of China’s urbanization declined during the study period, because population urbanization, economic urbanization, and space urbanization exhibited different trajectories of change. This study also reveals that performance assessment system, household registration system, and urban land expropriation system, etc., are the main affecting factors. At the end, we put forward some suggestions to achieve sustainable development of China’s urbanization from the aspects of improving the local government’s objective function, implementing the urban planning system, enforcing public participation aspects and so on.