Research On The Development Of Urbanization In China Under The Perspective Of Ecological Civilization

Today, China is on the way to the urbanization. The urbanization process for China is similar to the process which other developed countries went through before. On the one hand, the rapid urbanization process promotes living standards and the economic development, but on the other hand, it causes various problems. Under the urbanization process, cities become more and more crowded and bigger and bigger without a sound order, land and resources are much consumed continuously, environment has worsened and the relationship between human and nature is imbalanced. Thus, China's current model and process of urbanization has drawn some attentions. Ecological civilization concept is the sublimation of the sustainable development theory. It refutes a certain economic development model which relies on extensive consumption of resources and overwhelms and dominates nature. It requires the all-round and well-balanced development of relationship between human and society internally and between human and nature. Therefore, ecological civilization concept changes the human development model greatly. China's urbanization process will be carried forward and the problems coming along with it will have to be solved, hence it is essential and necessary to discuss the China's urbanization process from the ecological civilization perspective.Based on the theory of sustainable development, this research analyzes the urbanization process with the help of systems thinking. The research breaks it down into population process, space process, economy process and nature process. These four processes are inter-influenced and interacted, and develop in the same time. They represent the overall urbanization process as a whole. Also, this research analyzes the problems arising from China's urbanization process and the causes of those issues on top of the theoretical discussion of urbanization process. Moreover, this research discusses China's urbanization process in the future from the perspective of ecological civilization. Last but not least, this research proposes a strategy on how to conduct the future urbanization process in China, compared to the current process.This research consists nine sections. Section1and Section2are the research foundation, which briefly introduces the research background and purpose, contents, methodologies, innovations, limitations and the theory basis in the research, defines the fundamental concepts and reviews the related researches. Section3reviews both international and China's urbanization development, summarizes general characters of urbanization process. It also brings up the horizontal division and vertical division of urbanization process, which forms the theoretical framework of the research. Section4to Section7discusses population process, space process, economy process and nature process respectively. Specifically, each section provides the definition, representation, interactions and development of each process. Meanwhile, these four sections take China's urbanization process into these four detailed processes, analyze problems and causes of issues in the China's urbanization process from ecological civilization view and suggests the adjustments to China's urbanization development. Section8is the empirical study. This section sets up system dynamics simulation model and simulates China's future urbanization development path under three different scenarios. It concludes that only rational economic development model, which asks the slow-down of the non-agricultural growth voluntarily, can meet the requirement of ecological civilization to urbanization development in China. Section9summarizes the main conclusions from the previous sections, and proposes that China's future urbanization need take ecological civilization into all consideration.This research has some innovation including theoretical analysis, technical method, and structural consideration. However, there are several limitations in this research. First, the divisions of urbanization process do not represent the development of society. Second, it is somewhat brief when presenting natural system in the empirical study. Also, it does not consider district differences of urbanization development in the empirical study. Some future improvement have to be made based on current research.