New urbanization policy in China: Causes and prospects

More than forty years passed since the start of the reform and opening policy in China, which made millions of peasants move to the city. Urbanization has become one of the most important social processes in China, which helped the country gain a powerful economic potential based on the accelerated industrialization. Social-economic development is impossible without the expansion of cities and their populations. Until recently, cities have been centers for developing human capital and ensuring economic growth. However, urbanization has negative consequences as it leads to an outflow of workforce from rural areas, thus threating their social development. To confront such a threat, the Chinese government introduced a new type of urbanization for the simultaneous revival of rural areas. These two national strategies may seem opposite in terms of goals and objectives: the first stategy aims at developing cities and improving urban living conditions; the second strategy aims at developing rural infrastructure; but both strategies have a common goal - to ensure social modernization with Chinese specificity, which implies harmonious development and urban-rural balance. The article aims at identifying social, managerial and economic features of the new urbanization policy in China as a two-pronged strategy of the simultaneous development of urban and rural areas. The implementation of this new type of urbanization is to solve a number of problems of internal migration, since peasants who have not managed to arrange their lives in the city cannot return to the countryside for different reasons. Local authorities of both cities and villages struggle to increase the size of their population, which determines conflicts and ineffective management decisions in many Chinese regions. In many cases, there is a clear discrepancy between the interests of society as a whole and the interests of regional administrative bodies implementing social-economic policies. China needs to solve these problems to ensure sustainable urban development while improving living conditions in rural areas.