Chart - Agricultural and Non-Agricultural Population in Provincial Capitals

This chart illustrates one of the difficulties with Chinese urbanization statistics. It shows the total population of provincial capitals and special planning cities in 1997. The city of Fuzhou (the capital of Fujian province), for instance, has a total population of 5.75 million. However, it would be a grave mistake to consider all of these people part of the urban population, because the city also includes rural counties. This (partly) explains the large percentage of agricultural population in Fuzhou: 4.25 million (or 71%) of its population was classified as agricultural in 1997.
One might think that a good measure for urban population would then be the nonagricultural population in these capital cities. Unfortunately, this would also be wrong, because some of the agricultural population actually lives in the inner areas of these cities; also, the agricultural population does not necessarily work on a farm; they were just classified as agricultural by residence committees, because the state-run distribution system would not supply them with housing, jobs, and subsidized food (for details see Shen, 1995). In other words, neither the territorial definition ("city") nor the functional definition ("nonagricultural") leads to a consistent and realistic concept for an urban / rural grouping of the population.

Related Tables & Charts