The National New-Type Urbanization Plan is a Chinese government plan to urbanize formerly rural residents in order to help transition China from an export-oriented economy to one with increasing amounts of domestic consumption.
Overview
The National New-Type Urbanization Plan was announced in 2014. Its goal is to transition China's economic focus from production-for-export to increased domestic consumption. The Plan's emphasis on developing the domestic consumer economy is explicit. To do so, China seeks to relocate hundreds of millions of rural Chinese to cities which are being built on a massive scale to accommodate new urban citizens. The plan seeks to urbanize 250 million rural Chinese by 2026. The Plan thus reflects an underlying assumption that consumer purchases by urbanites are key to China's continued economic development.
In addition to urbanizing formerly rural people, the National New-Type Urbanization Plan seeks to optimize urbanization patterns, improve urban sustainability, and promote urban-rural coordination. To increase urban-rural coordination, the state incorporates rural planning as part of municipal governments' planning processes.
In the logic of the National New-Type Urbanization Plan, approaches to urbanization should advance the Chinese political concept of ecological civilization. The Plan requires 20% of municipal regions to be zoned as ecological protection areas.
Impact
Prior to the National New-Type Urbanization Plan, development planning processes were more decentralized. The methods of planning it requires now coordinate planning processes that were previously separate and spread across separate bureaucracies dealing with urban and land planning, economic planning, environmental planning, and tourist planning.
The state investment in infrastructure for newly urbanized residents, as well as their concentration in urban areas, has increased China's industrialization and gross domestic product.