Population and Human Capital Trends in Metropolitan China: Case of Beijing

Abstract

Urbanization in China has been accelerating since the reformation and the opening up policy was put into practice. The urban population increased to 487 million in 2002 where as 172 million in 1978, with an annual growth rate of 2.83%, which was the world’s fastest rate of urbanization (NBSC, 2001; 2003). It was evident that, millions of rural population rushed into cities during the period of 1990—2000 due to income gap between urban and rural areas. Although the rapid development of urbanization in China is considered to be the result of economic reformation and social development, it can raise many challenges to various aspects like population, environment and energy etc. It can be noted that during the economic transformation from rural to urban economy in China, the differentials among the regions has been continuously expanded and those are especially in between the eastern coastal and western inland areas. The overall trends of China’s population migration also showed a southeast-trend flow. As one of the most developed areas in China, Beijing attracted large number of floating population and migrants. According to the Beijing’s 5th census, there were 13.569 million resident population in 2000 of which 11 million were permanent. There were 3.084 million immigrants in 2000 of which 2.586 million have left their permanent resident place or lived in Beijing for more than half a year. In recent 10 years, the increase of the total population in Beijing is mainly due to the increase of floating population, and the second important factor is the immigrant of permanent population while the natural increase contributes a little to the population growth. Now-a-days population and development is of great significance for the region’s socioeconomic development, and correctly projecting the size and structure (for example, age, gender, education, and urban or rural) is of even greater significance for the policy making processes. In this respect this paper introduced the PDE model, which is well accepted by international researchers, to predict the population size, age structure, education and urbanization level in Beijing in 2030. Thus below we will firstly review the methods of population projection, and introduce the principles, data requirements, parameter determinations and advantages and shortages of PDE model; then in the second part we will analyze the projection outcome of Beijing population, especially from the aspects of age structure, education level and human capital, migration and urbanization; and in the third part we will point out the influence that population and development will have on urbanization according to population projection outcomes.