For First Time, China's Urban Residents Outnumber Rural

The Economist's daily chart focuses on the movement of China's people into urban areas. At the end of 2011, and according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, 1.35 billion, or 51.3 percent of China's residents lived in cities, meaning that for the first time the country's "city-dwellers now outnumber its rural residents." According to The Economist, as recently as "1980 less than a fifth of China’s population lived in cities, a smaller proportion than in India."

In the ten years that followed, the Chinese government "remained wary of free movement, even as it made its peace with free enterprise." It "sought industrialisation without urbanisation," only to ultimately realize that "it could not have one without the other." And although the percentage of city-dwellers is on the rise, it seems that the Chinese government's wariness toward urban development has slowed the movement of its citizens to cities. The Economist notes, "Even now, its ratio of city-dwellers is, if anything, low for an economy at its stage of development."