In 2024, approximately 67 percent of the total population in China lived in cities. The urbanization rate has increased steadily in China over the last decades. Degree of urbanization in China Urbanization is generally defined as a process of people migrating from rural to urban areas, during which towns and cities are formed and increase in size. Even though urbanization is not exclusively a modern phenomenon, industrialization and modernization did accelerate its progress. As shown in the statistic at hand, the degree of urbanization of China, the world's second-largest economy, rose from 36 percent in 2000 to around 51 percent in 2011. That year, the urban population surpassed the number of rural residents for the first time in the country's history.The urbanization rate varies greatly in different parts of China. While urbanization is lesser advanced in western or central China, in most coastal regions in eastern China more than two-thirds of the population lives already in cities. Among the ten largest Chinese cities in 2021, six were located in coastal regions in East and South China. Urbanization in international comparison Brazil and Russia, two other BRIC countries, display a much higher degree of urbanization than China. On the other hand, in India, the country with the worlds’ largest population, a mere 36.3 percent of the population lived in urban regions as of 2023. Similar to other parts of the world, the progress of urbanization in China is closely linked to modernization. From 2000 to 2024, the contribution of agriculture to the gross domestic product in China shrank from 14.7 percent to 6.8 percent. Even more evident was the decrease of workforce in agriculture.

The share of urban population in China amounted to 64.57 percent in 2023. Between 1960 and 2023, the share rose by 48.37 percentage points, though the increase followed an uneven trajectory rather than a consistent upward trend.

In 2023, the urbanization rate in different provinces of China varied between 89.5 percent in Shanghai municipality and 38.9 percent in Tibet. The national average urbanization rate reached around 66.2 percent in 2023. Urbanization and economic development During China’s rapid economic development, the share of people living in cities increased from only 19.4 percent in 1980 to nearly 64 percent in 2020. Urbanization rates are now coming closer to those in developed countries. However, the degree of urbanization still varies significantly between different regions in China. This correlates generally with the level of economic development across different regions in China. In eastern Chinese regions with high personal income levels and high per capita GDP, more inhabitants are living in cities than in the countryside. Influence of geography Another reason for different urbanization rates lies in the huge geographic differences of regions in China. Basically, those regions with a low population density often also display lower urbanization rates, because their inhabitants live more scattered across the land area. These differences will most probably remain despite further economic progress.

China Population: Urbanization Rate: Usual Residence data was reported at 67.000 % in 2024. This records an increase from the previous number of 66.160 % for 2023. China Population: Urbanization Rate: Usual Residence data is updated yearly, averaging 40.530 % from Dec 1982 (Median) to 2024, with 43 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 67.000 % in 2024 and a record low of 21.131 % in 1982. China Population: Urbanization Rate: Usual Residence data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by National Bureau of Statistics. The data is categorized under China Premium Database’s Socio-Demographic – Table CN.GA: Population: Urbanization Rate.

Here we used remote sensing data from multiple sources (time-series of Landsat and Sentinel images) to map the impervious surface area (ISA) at five-year intervals from 1990 to 2015, and then converted the results into a standardized dataset of the built-up area for 433 Chinese cities with 300,000 inhabitants or more, which were listed in the United Nations (UN) World Urbanization Prospects (WUP) database (including Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan). We employed a range of spectral indices to generate the 1990–2015 ISA maps in urban areas based on remotely sensed data acquired from multiple sources. In this process, various types of auxiliary data were used to create the desired products for urban areas through manual segmentation of peri-urban and rural areas together with reference to several freely available products of urban extent derived from ISA data using automated urban–rural segmentation methods. After that, following the well-established rules adopted by the UN, we carried out the conversion to the standardized built-up area products from the 1990–2015 ISA maps in urban areas, which conformed to the definition of urban agglomeration area (UAA). Finally, we implemented data postprocessing to guarantee the spatial accuracy and temporal consistency of the final product.The standardized urban built-up area dataset (SUBAD–China) introduced here is the first product using the same definition of UAA adopted by the WUP database for 433 county and higher-level cities in China. The comparisons made with contemporary data produced by the National Bureau of Statistics of China, the World Bank and UN-habitat indicate that our results have a high spatial accuracy and good temporal consistency and thus can be used to characterize the process of urban expansion in China.The SUBAD–China contains 2,598 vector files in shapefile format containing data for all China's cities listed in the WUP database that have different urban sizes and income levels with populations over 300,000. Attached with it, we also provided the distribution of validation points for the 1990–2010 ISA products of these 433 Chinese cities in shapefile format and the confusion matrices between classified data and reference data during different time periods as a Microsoft Excel Open XML Spreadsheet (XLSX) file.Furthermore, The standardized built-up area products for such cities will be consistently updated and refined to ensure the quality of their spatiotemporal coverage and accuracy. The production of this dataset together with the usage of population counts derived from the WUP database will close some of the data gaps in the calculation of SDG11.3.1 and benefit other downstream applications relevant to a combined analysis of the spatial and socio-economic domains in urban areas.

CN: Population: Usual Residence: Urbanization Rate: Ningxia data was reported at 67.310 % in 2023. This records an increase from the previous number of 66.340 % for 2022. CN: Population: Usual Residence: Urbanization Rate: Ningxia data is updated yearly, averaging 21.480 % from Dec 1949 (Median) to 2023, with 75 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 67.310 % in 2023 and a record low of 7.090 % in 1949. CN: Population: Usual Residence: Urbanization Rate: Ningxia data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by National Bureau of Statistics. The data is categorized under China Premium Database’s Socio-Demographic – Table CN.GA: Population: Urbanization Rate.

In 2024, about 943.5 million people lived in urban regions in China and 464.8 million in rural. That year, the country had a total population of approximately 1.41 billion people. As of 2024, China was the second most populous country in the world. Urbanization in China Urbanization refers to the process by which people move from rural to urban areas and how a society adapts to the population shift. It is usually seen as a driving force in economic growth, accompanied by industrialization, modernization and the spread of education. Urbanization levels tend to be higher in industrial countries, whereas the degree of urbanization in developing countries remains relatively low. According to World Bank, a mere 19.4 percent of the Chinese population had been living in urban areas in 1980. Since then, China’s urban population has skyrocketed. By 2024, about 67 percent of the Chinese population lived in urban areas. Regional urbanization rates In the last decades, urbanization has progressed greatly in every region of China. Even in most of the more remote Chinese provinces, the urbanization rate surpassed 50 percent in recent years. However, the most urbanized areas are still to be found in the coastal eastern and southern regions of China. The population of Shanghai, the largest city in China and the world’s seventh largest city ranged at around 24 million people in 2023. China’s urban areas are characterized by a developing middle class. Per capita disposable income of Chinese urban households has more than doubled between 2010 and 2020. The emerging middle class is expected to become a significant driver for the continuing growth of the Chinese economy.

CN: Population: Usual Residence: Urbanization Rate: Fujian data was reported at 71.800 % in 2024. This records an increase from the previous number of 71.040 % for 2023. CN: Population: Usual Residence: Urbanization Rate: Fujian data is updated yearly, averaging 59.320 % from Dec 2000 (Median) to 2024, with 25 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 71.800 % in 2024 and a record low of 41.960 % in 2000. CN: Population: Usual Residence: Urbanization Rate: Fujian data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by National Bureau of Statistics. The data is categorized under China Premium Database’s Socio-Demographic – Table CN.GA: Population: Urbanization Rate.

Urban population (% of total population) in China was reported at 65.54 % in 2024, according to the World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially recognized sources. China - Urban population (% of total) - actual values, historical data, forecasts and projections were sourced from the World Bank on September of 2025.

Until 2007, the share of the global population living in urban areas was always smaller than the rural population, but in 2021, the world's level of urbanization has risen to around 56 percent, and by 2050, it is estimated that two thirds of the world will live in urban areas. Urbanization on such a large scale is a relatively new phenomenon, and has a strong correlation with the industrial maturity of a society. For most of pre-industrial times, fewer than five percent of the total population lived in urban centers, which were generally trading and administrative centers. The main reason for this was the agricultural demands of the time, where subsistence farming was the primary method of food production for the general population. Compared to Japan and China, a larger share of Western Europe lived in urban centers in the 16th century, due to higher levels of trade along the Mediterranean and between northern states, but around 94 percent of the population still lived in a rural setting. Effect of industrialization With the onset of the first industrial revolution in the 19th century, the mechanization of agriculture and development of manufacturing industries saw a shift in labor demands in Western Europe. People began migrating to cities on a large scale, and migration to the U.S. also increased due to industrialization in the northeastern states. Urban populations then became more prosperous, although mortality rates were initially higher due to the more rapid spread of disease and poor sanitation infrastructure. This mortality also disproportionately affected children and more recent arrivals. Global trends Waves of industrialization in Europe saw further urbanization throughout the 1800s, and roughly a third of the population had urbanized by the end of the 19th century. Globally, it would take until the 1960s before one third of the population had urbanized, and it was not until the late 1990s where China's urbanization rate had reached this level. However, China's urbanization rate has grown rapidly since the 1980s, and is now around 80 percent of the EU's level, whereas it was closer to 50 percent just two decades previously. Japan's urbanization rate was comparable to Europe's for most of the 20th century, but increased further throughout the 2010s; today it has one of the highest rates among more developed nations, although this has presented some challenges for Japanese society.

CN: Population: Usual Residence: Urbanization Rate: Hubei data was reported at 66.350 % in 2024. This records an increase from the previous number of 65.470 % for 2023. CN: Population: Usual Residence: Urbanization Rate: Hubei data is updated yearly, averaging 26.810 % from Dec 1949 (Median) to 2024, with 71 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 66.350 % in 2024 and a record low of 8.790 % in 1949. CN: Population: Usual Residence: Urbanization Rate: Hubei data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by National Bureau of Statistics. The data is categorized under China Premium Database’s Socio-Demographic – Table CN.GA: Population: Urbanization Rate.

The urbanization rate of Beijing municipality has increased from 57.6 percent in 1980 to 88.2 percent in 2024. The administrative area of Beijing includes several rural districts and suburbs surrounding the central metropolis.

If you want to use this data, please cite our article:Xiong, S., Zhang, X., Lei, Y., Tan, G., Wang, H., & Du, S. (2024). Time-series China urban land use mapping (2016–2022): An approach for achieving spatial-consistency and semantic-transition rationality in temporal domain. Remote Sensing of Environment, 312, 114344.The global urbanization trend is geographically manifested through city expansion and the renewal of internal urban structures and functions. Time-series urban land use (ULU) maps are vital for capturing dynamic land changes in the urbanization process, giving valuable insights into urban development and its environmental consequences. Recent studies have mapped ULU in some cities with a unified model, but ignored the regional differences among cities; and they generated ULU maps year by year, but ignored temporal correlations between years; thus, they could be weak in large-scale and long time-series ULU monitoring. Accordingly, we introduce an temporal-spatial-semantic collaborative (TSS) mapping framework to generating accurate ULU maps with considering regional differences and temporal correlations. Firstly, to support model training, a large-scale ULU sample dataset based on OpenStreetMap (OSM) and Sentinel-2 imagery is automatically constructed, providing a total number of 56,412 samples with a size of 512 × 512 which are divided into six sub-regions in China and used for training different classification models. Then, an urban land use mapping network (ULUNet) is proposed to recognize ULU. This model utilizes a primary and an auxiliary encoder to process noisy OSM samples and can enhance the model's robustness under noisy labels. Finally, taking the temporal correlations of ULU into consideration, the recognized ULU are optimized, whose boundaries are unified by a time-series co-segmentation, and whose categories are modified by a knowledge-data driven method. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we consider all urban areas in China (254,566 km2), and produce a time-series China urban land use dataset (CULU) at a 10-m resolution, spanning from 2016 to 2022, with an overall accuracy of CULU is 82.42%. Through comparison, it can be found that CULU outperforms existing datasets such as EULUC-China and UFZ-31cities in data accuracies, spatial boundaries consistencies and land use transitions logicality. The results indicate that the proposed method and generated dataset can play important roles in land use change monitoring, ecological-environmental evolution analysis, and also sustainable city development.

CN: Population: Usual Residence: Urbanization Rate: Zhejiang data was reported at 75.500 % in 2024. This records an increase from the previous number of 74.230 % for 2023. CN: Population: Usual Residence: Urbanization Rate: Zhejiang data is updated yearly, averaging 62.910 % from Dec 2000 (Median) to 2024, with 25 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 75.500 % in 2024 and a record low of 48.700 % in 2000. CN: Population: Usual Residence: Urbanization Rate: Zhejiang data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by National Bureau of Statistics. The data is categorized under China Premium Database’s Socio-Demographic – Table CN.GA: Population: Urbanization Rate.

Population: Usual Residence: Urbanization Rate: Anhui: Chizhou data was reported at 62.110 % in 2024. This records an increase from the previous number of 61.390 % for 2023. Population: Usual Residence: Urbanization Rate: Anhui: Chizhou data is updated yearly, averaging 53.670 % from Dec 2010 (Median) to 2024, with 15 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 62.110 % in 2024 and a record low of 44.500 % in 2010. Population: Usual Residence: Urbanization Rate: Anhui: Chizhou data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Chizhou Municipal Bureau of Statistics. The data is categorized under China Premium Database’s Socio-Demographic – Table CN.GE: Population: Prefecture Level City: Urbanization Rate.

CN: Population: Usual Residence: Urbanization Rate: Inner Mongolia data was reported at 70.700 % in 2024. This records an increase from the previous number of 69.580 % for 2023. CN: Population: Usual Residence: Urbanization Rate: Inner Mongolia data is updated yearly, averaging 42.500 % from Dec 1949 (Median) to 2024, with 59 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 70.700 % in 2024 and a record low of 12.370 % in 1949. CN: Population: Usual Residence: Urbanization Rate: Inner Mongolia data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by National Bureau of Statistics. The data is categorized under China Premium Database’s Socio-Demographic – Table CN.GA: Population: Urbanization Rate.

This raster layer shows the areas of Beijing, China which were developed between 1990 and 2000. Categories of new development represented in these data include: infill, extension and leapfrog. Infill represents development within all the open spaces in the urban footprint of the earlier period excluding exterior open space. Extension represents development in contiguous clusters that contained exterior open space in the earlier period and that were not infUnited States Leapfrog represents development entirely outside the exterior open space of the earlier period. These data are part of the Atlas of Urban Expansion.

Nowhere has the scale and scope of urbanization been larger than in China over the last few decades. We analyze Chinese city development between the years 1996 and 2014 using data for the urbanized components of prefecture-level cities. We show that, despite much variability and fast economic and demographic change, China is undergoing transformations similar to the historical trajectory of other urban systems. We also show that the distinguishing signs of urban economies—superlinear scaling of agglomeration effects in economic productivity and economies of scale in land use—also characterize Chinese cities. We then analyze the structure of economic change in Chinese cities using a variety of metrics, characterizing employment, firms and households. Population size estimates remain a major challenge for Chinese cities, as official numbers are often reported based on the Hukou registration system. We use the information in the residuals to scaling relations for economic quantities to predict actual resident population and show that these estimates agree well with data for a subset of cities for which counts of total resident population exist. We conclude with a list of issues that must be better understood and measured to make sense of present urban development trajectories in China.

Average CV and imbalance of population urbanization and land urbanization in four regions of China (2006–2019).

This dataset is derived from the article: Huang, M., Wang, Z.C., Pan, X.H., Gong, B.H., Tu, M.Z., & Liu, Z.F. (2022). Delimiting China's urban growth boundaries under localized shared socioeconomic pathways and various urban expansion modes. Earth's Future, 10, e2021EF002572. The dataset shows the urban expansion and urban growth boundaries of China in 2021-2100 under different socioeconomic scenarios and diverse urban expansion modes. To produce this dataset, the patch-based LUSD-urban model was used to simulate the urban expansion with 11 modes under the localized shared socioeconomic pathways, and the morphology approach was used to delimit urban growth boundaries according to the maximum extent of urban expansion. Using this dataset, the authors quantified the impacts of future urban expansion on ecosystem services under different scenarios and diverse modes, as well as the pressure of urban shrinkage, which is helpful to the Chinese government to demarcate urban development boundaries.