 Thank you very much for your kind words and so urbanization in China is that I've been engaged in a project four year project by the European Union on urbanization in China which finished last year so as well which is not four years is definitely not enough to go into all the aspects of urbanization so I'm still working on the area and probably still kept on working you know until I have not no longer able to do so so what I want to do is just to outline some salient features if something is not clear please stop me when I'm going because it may be easier just to clarify that issue so let me start with basic information in 2011 that's about five years ago the first time in China long history that majority of population was ever so for all of China's long history China has been and rural society and really pedantry and rural areas have played a very important role in in Chinese history so in some sense in a more fundamental sense it changes the social dynamics of Chinese society we have yet to see is full implication but in general it would work very differently from what it has done in the past and the second point I want to make is China obviously might say China has a long history so urbanization in China must have a long history too so if you look at the present urban population almost sixty to seventy percent of it is really days from the period of reform so in fact urbanization in China most of it has taken place in the last thirty to thirty five years so when the economic reform started in China in 1978 urban areas something like eighty percent of the population was actually rural so China was overwhelmingly a rural society I should mention that rural and urban in China have a very distinct Chinese meaning and a lot of areas rural in China doesn't really look rural but it's more like very urban because population density in China especially along the coast is extremely high so if you compare as I did some years ago looking at the rural population density and comparing with the United States and Europe by American standards a lot of Chinese rural areas look very urban rather so there are certain implications for urbanization which I'll come to so in terms of if we look at the main features of Chinese urbanization it is huge in scale in terms of population so just to give you an idea that in thirty four years from 1980 to 2014 China's urban population grew by five hundred sixty million and numbers always big in case of China this is sixteen million per year roughly a city size of Shanghai per year it does depend on how you measure Shanghai but by world standards it's huge and it's going to accelerate for the reason is that now the Chinese leadership has decided that instead of resisting urbanization as they've done for most of the period in 1952 they're going to welcome it and facilitate it so a lot of people who were treated as rural migrants living and working in cities are going to be in next twenty years or so granted full ever residency rights so the process is going to accelerate the second thing is really the physical aspect of urbanization is anybody who's been to China regularly goes to China is amazed at the rate at which skyscrapers appear so if you don't go to Beijing for about three or four months then you go back sometimes you cannot recognize the place because the main landmarks are changed and second is the work proceeds at a very rapid pace in fact my experience in Beijing is that building laborers work for twenty four hours and so in the middle of the night you will see people still working because many of the building laborers are peasants and they come to do a contract job and it's in their interest to finish it as quickly as possible and then go and do another something else and the third thing which is important about China and it's also true for India and other Asian countries that is urbanization is taking place under very tight or stressful environmental constraints so in general in European sense we say think that before urbanization industrialization the air was cleaner the water was unpolluted and so on but in China given population density and what I said very urban density it means the rural areas in China already have a lot of urban features so if and the problems which are like urban problems also apply to rural areas so in that sense the second is very very serious problem of water shortage in China the northern half of China is seriously short of water and its long term consequences are huge for example much of water in northern China is underground water so underground aquifers are being rapidly depleted it means that field agriculture the future of field agriculture in northern China plain is extremely doubtful unless you find some other sources of water and with urbanization more and more water is going from farming to urban areas so this is a long term consequence of what is the future of agriculture and farming as an industry in northern China so the way I would look at urbanization in China is the urbanization everywhere consists of basically two processes so I would say what are these two processes and what forms do they take in the Chinese context so first is the rising share of urban population in the total involving mass rural to urban migration is actually a feature of Chinese urbanization second is urban scrolls that is steady diversion of rural land for urban development and so if you've been to China, I start my first visit to China was in 1987 and so I went to attend a course in Beijing Chinese course and also traveled over China and went to Shanghai and so on so one of the cities called Wusi which is traditionally known as land of fish and rice and very famous for its farming so I went there a year and a half ago and what I find very shocking is that there's no countryside there is almost continuously urban similarly I went to Canton in the south and went to a town called Foshan we drove back there was no sign saying this is Foshan and this is where Canton began so what we see in China come to is actually consequences is the emergence of urban collaboration which have no boundaries as the boundaries are there they're constantly shifting so it means that in some sense what we are going to get urban pattern in China is not just growth of large cities but actually giant urban collaboration and that's something which the government actually accepts so what is urbanization with Chinese characteristics what the Chinese say Junko Thursala and so like the two institutions which are particular to China one is the household registration system who call Kukho and the second is the public ownership of land and its division into collective and state ownership so Kukho is really part of daily life of Chinese citizens it affects their lives in many different ways so in some sense for example in case of education this is something which parents have to worry about and I've come to that so what is Kukho which is a population wide system for recording data on individuals and also commonly referred to by the locality where the whole race is resident so you get named like Beijing, Kukho, Shanghai, Kukho and so Beijing, Kukho can be have its way in gold and I'll come to reason why there is such privilege attached to a particular locality so it is used for two purposes it is used for individual identification so in that sense it is very similar to the European ID system so like France and Germany you have to have an ID like United Kingdom and United States don't believe in it but on the other hand they have something equivalent to the United States when he said three pieces of identity with your photograph on it so instead of ID card but the second use of Kukho which makes it particularly Chinese is really sorting or dividing people for determining access to certain facilities so when I say access to certain facilities for example a lot of social security in Tartar Men are only available to people who are actually resident in a city second and in fact the preferential treatment goes much deeper so one which has attracted attention recently is for young people that is the university entrance exam which has a huge influence on a young person's life is you only allowed in most provinces of China you only allowed to take the university entrance exam if you have the local Kukho and so there has been a lot of problems like two years ago there was a big scandal where a girl who originally parents came from Anhui which is an interior problem she studied all her life in Shanghai but she was not allowed to take the university entrance exam in Shanghai on the grounds that although she has never been to Anhui she is still officially treated as an uncaught person so at 30% of students in Beijing schools are actually migrant children and who are not allowed to take the university entrance exam in Beijing and why does it matter? it matters greatly because if you have Beijing Kukho then you get privileged access to leading universities in Beijing so for example Beijing University, Tsinghua University, two leading universities if you have Beijing Kukho you get much lower marks than if you have an outside Kukho so they are still trying to change the system so and this is accepted in China so just to point out that certain things would be regarded as very out in the European context some others are regarded as almost a southern nation in China that is in most European countries the idea that a leading public university so that discriminates against even depending on the locality where they lived in there could be on two or three years basis these are students who spend all their lives in the locality it's certainly strange but I will come to reason why it still is there so let me just point to one of the reasons why Kukho is so odd that is the two entries in Kukho which are very important one is the official place of residence and the second is the Kukho statement so although these categories are factual in some sense place of residence every ID document will have your address but in China because they are used for granting preferences they are actually control category so it's very much similar to what in French called Appellation Contrôle that is to call it worthwhile something you need not just say Kukho is champagne you have to observe certain conditions so in some sense these categories are actually no longer factual in that sense I would come to that is the large number of people in China who actually their official residence is not where they live and work and they may be living and working completely different the second thing classification which was introduced in 1958 was between agriculture and non-agriculture at that time it actually corresponded to the occupation so basically agriculture was some people who were dependent on farming one way or the other and non-agriculture basically urban population with certain exception but now this is the label agriculture is really inherited so if your parents are classified as agriculture then you will automatically inherit the label agriculture so let me give an example I come to that the China urban population is meant to be account 55% but if you look at the people who are classified as non-agriculture it's only 35% so it means 20% each point of people who are misclassified so let me just indicate the size of what I call anomalous a misclassified population in 2014 there were some 298 million people so not a small number that is over 20% of the total population of China were living and working in a long temple in a locality other than the one recorded at their home in the Hukou and the proportions and a large majority of them are rural migrant living in urban areas so in fact if you take it what proportion of the population they constitute in urban areas is over 40% so over 40% of China's urban population is not classified as residents of the locality where they are actually living and working proportion is much higher for Beijing and Shanghai both Beijing and Shanghai majority of residents actually do not have local Hukou so I just say why does it matter because access to a lot of social services such as education entitlement to social security benefit non-contributed social security benefit access to certain jobs and even getting certain qualification actually it depends on whether you have Hukou of the locality or not so it means that basically urbanization in China has created a very segmented population that is in big cities almost and more than half of the population do not have access to the facilities which are not provided to the population so let me give an example of Beijing and second thing which is more serious is that this disadvantage is inherited and passed to generations so for example not only affects a migrant living in Beijing but also equally well applies to migrant children because Hukou is inherited so more than 30% of school children in Beijing are actually migrants and most cases they cannot go to the local school the local school do not have places for them so they go to special school where the education level may be very poor so in some sense the disadvantage is being transmitted across generations and to education it can be serious because the work done at Beijing University says that in many some cases if the child has stayed in rural area and not migrated to Beijing or Shanghai his or her education attainment would have been higher if he hadn't migrated so in general if he says migration to town actually improves education qualification it does not apply to all migrants in China now I turn to question why do these anomalies persist if this question of change in name you can change the name and some Chinese cities actually tried to do that some years ago but really it persists because of public finance reason historically when China was found this because government resources were limited it was decided there is better to concentrate government subsidies in education social security on the urban population so as not to dissipate the effect but it more or less got institutionalized so subsidy per urban citizen is much higher than subsidy per rural citizen of person classified as agriculture so if you change a person whose status is rural resident to an urban resident there is government expenditure to be taken it's quite substantial so and the numbers we are dealing with as I pointed out is 298 million people most of them so it's a problem which actually cannot be solved simply by changing name and but in 2013 the Central Committee of the Communist Party did decide that is this the segmentation has to end so the plan is by 2020 something like 100 million people numbers always big for China are going to transfer status from rural migrant to urban resident and then also another 100 million would be transferred from coastal area to interior area so the first one is the most important because it requires a very radical reform of the China's public finance system so let me just indicate in 1994 China undertook a very important fiscal reform but it only affected the relationship between provinces and the central government did not have an effect at the relationship at the sub-provincial level and the peculiarity in some sense of China is that most of social expenditure almost all of social expenditure is undertaken at the sub-provincial level so it does not affect education it does not affect social security so that reform still has to conduct it and it has to be part and parcel of any reform of the Hukou system so my own guess is and actually with the challenge that the system and the present distinction would disappear but it will not disappear quickly in some sense it might take 10 to 15 years even with considerable commitment and parcel of the central leadership land is publicly owned in China and in India for example it isn't so one natural question one would ask what difference does it make to urbanization and obviously should be important because an important aspect of urbanization is physical that is expansion of urban areas into the surrounding rural areas but in China the public ownership is divided into state ownership which is equated with urban areas and rural public ownership in rural areas is equated with collective ownership collective is basically he refers to public institutions we do not regard status of government so it really applies to grassroots rural areas so the important point for present purpose is that because the division between state owned and collectively owned coincides with urban and rural so with urbanization there has to be constantly shifting boundaries between urban and rural so before a piece of rural land can be used for urban purposes it has to be first acquired and transformed into state property and then auction lease auction for urban development and this process can only be conducted by city so in some sense like every country there is a piece of land agricultural land can be used for urban purposes value goes up maybe 300% or 1000% but in China most of that is appropriated by cities very small proportion actually accrues to peasants so first there is a great deal of disenchantment in the rural population with the low level of compensation but it also means that it has provided cities with ready source of money so what is very striking in China compared to other Asian cities is the infrastructure in China is so much better than other areas so part of it is explained by public ownership of land there is the cities actually we get most of the most of the revenue but there is like all good stories there is a limit to that the limit is that cultivable area in China is very limited so for example China covers large territory but only 15% of it is actually cultivable in India area is not as large but 50% of Indian territory is actually cultivable so what it means is that urban expansion we look at into the cultivable land so the central government has to constantly control this process of urban sprawl in order to preserve cultivable land so it means that process of relying on the way local governments collect revenue from land is really not sustainable over time they have to find some other ways of actually collecting income so let me just press on to just look as I want to look at what do cities and towns look like in China there is something like 666 cities in China they are archically divided four cities have the status of provinces these are Beijing Beijing, Shanghai, India and Chongqing and then some cities in the middle that really constitutes the core of urban area are called prefecture level cities of which about 260 and then there are small cities which are country level cities and I want to comment on one aspect of policy of the Chinese government that is traditionally Chinese government has always emphasised that it favours the expansion of a smaller medium sized town and really restrict the growth of large towns but it hasn't really happened for example in fact big towns have grown much faster than small towns second towns on the eastern seaboard have grown much faster than in the interior for simple reason they offer better economic opportunity so it means that this is an area where the policy the second thing is the policy is actually non-sustainable if you think of this way that if the policy were really successful then small towns and medium sized town will grow into big cities so after some time what you will see is really expansion of a small and big sized city and there will be automatically classified big cities what is happening apart from growth of big towns is given the high population density in China's rural area what we see imagine that cities grow and they might enter next to them so what an effect what you see in China is rise of urban commemoration where you get a continuous urban area and without any boundaries so in some sense ordinary sense of time actually disappear so next two or three decades what we will see in China is the urbanization rate will continue and growth there will be obviously towns and cities but also we see the emergence of 5 to 6 giant urban metropolitan region that is one in northern China that is already Beijing Cienji and Hubei province with a population of 120 million then one around Shanghai which is really linkable to Nanjing is more or less like already an urban commemoration with a population of 160 million people one in south of China which is Guangzhou and Hong Kong that we are dealing with well over 200 million people so these are the metropolitan regions something which we never experienced in world history the largest urban commemoration now is Tokyo Bay with 28 million people so I will just say what problem why do they pose a particular problem pose a particular problem if you ask the question who will finance the infrastructure for this entity because they do not fit in any administrative boundaries so now in Beijing the central government is supporting the development of what we call Jing Jing Di which is Beijing, Cienji and Hubei and a lot of infrastructure is being financed by the central government but after it is completed how is the responsibility divided second the idea is that administrative region the second is what actually happens through economic division so this is one way the Chinese government wants to contract so-called the tendency of cities to replicate each other so if China has too many steel wheels not because central government actually authorize them if such a city has steel wheels we are going to have one too so the idea is that competitive industrialization is what partly responsible for example huge surplus capacity in steel and we also going to get it in car so this idea that if you have a bigger region then it might control it and second why it is important is why environmental purpose Beijing environmental problem such a well known but one idea is that Beijing has been clothing down all factories so capital steel wheels has been closed down in Beijing but pollution levels are not affected so they move next door to Hubei province so instead of pollution originating from Beijing one originating from the neighboring province and by the general situation remains the same so the idea of what economists said if you have a bigger region then you would you would take into account the environmental aspect so it remains to be seen but that's the thinking behind the emergence of this region in the northern area so I think what other things we would want to say in China it is generally accepted that really there is no alternative in China that is but to accept rapid urbanization so really the question is not whether to have towns or not towns because you get exactly the same problem in areas classified as rural so having much rural population is actually often turned amount to according an area which is urban in all respect except name the part of it accepting people who are urban citizens because that's the reality they are urban citizens so I think and it's only then that China can have an urbanization policy and the second is that what is very clear that government cannot control the size of town cities is because in China government is powerful leadership is powerful it can do many things but what it cannot do is to say Beijing's population cannot go beyond 20 million because it will grow but it will just take form which are never intended so let me end here and I'd be happy to take comments and answer any questions you may have. Thank you