Migrants responsible for booming urban population
The world’s most populous nation has more urbanites than rural dwellers, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics. For the first time in China’s history, most of its citizens now live in cities: more than 690 million of 1.3 billion people, or 51.3 per cent of the population. The BBC reports the shift represents a 14 per cent increase in urban dwellers as a proportion of the total population over the past ten years, and includes 21 million citizens who moved to cities in 2011. Many of these were migrant workers, who for the first time have been counted in a census according to where they live, rather than where they are registered based on their place of birth.