Research On The Regional Differences Of Urbanization Level In China

The urbanization level is an important index to measure the social and economic development of a country or region. The urbanization of China shows an unprecedented speed, the urbanization level have greatly improved since it opened to the outside world. The study about urbanization has become the focus attention of the academic circles. However, the research on regional differences of urbanization just got little attention, most of the papers existing focused on the analysis of the urbanization course and the relationship between urbanization and industrialization.This paper reviews the theory of urbanization, and makes an analysis to the regional difference of urbanization since 1982.The study shows that the provincial and region difference of urbanization have a narrowing trend. The intern difference of four regions also reduce gradually except the northeast area. In addition, we also make a comparative analysis between China and America. The result shows that, although our country regional difference of urbanization is much smaller than that of America in the same urbanization development stage, the general trend of the regional differences are the same. The region internal difference of America are the mainly elements, and is becoming more and more parent. While in China, it is affected by the regional and internal region differences, and the internal region difference experienced a process of reducing and increasing, and gradually over the regional difference.According to the affecting factors of urbanization, we got that the level of economic development, industrial structure and social life, the freedom of development and natural resources, urban construction are the factors to affect the level of urbanization. These factors have different impact to different areas during different period. The urbanization of east and northeast area were mainly effected by the industrial structure and the urban structure, while in the central and western areas, the economic development and opening degree, the industrial structure are low.The possible innovation of this article is that,though the contrast of us and America in the regional difference of urbanization,think of China’s urbanization development accord with the general trend of the development of urbanization,and forecast the future area difference of China’s urbanization will continue to reduce ultimately stable in a certain level. In addition, the whole country is divided into east, middle, west and northeast four regions, found that the regional difference of China urbanization is narrowing, except the northeast increasing.