摘要：Urbanization in China has been accelerating since the reformation and the opening up policy was put intopractice. The urban population increased to 487 million in 2002 where as 172 million in 1978, with an annualgrowth rate of 2.83%, which was the world’s fastest rate of urbanization (NBSC, 2001; 2003). It was evident that,millions of rural population rushed into cities during the period of 1990—2000 due to income gap between urbanand rural areas. Although the rapid development of urbanization in China is considered to be the result of economicreformation and social development, it can raise many challenges to various aspects like population, environmentand energy etc. It can be noted that during the economic transformation from rural to urban economy in China, thedifferentials among the regions has been continuously expanded and those are especially in between the easterncoastal and western inland areas. The overall trends of China’s population migration also showed a southeast-trendflow. As one of the most developed areas in China, Beijing attracted large number of floating population andmigrants. According to the Beijing’s 5th census, there were 13.569 million resident population in 2000 of which 11million were permanent. There were 3.084 million immigrants in 2000 of which 2.586 million have left theirpermanent resident place or lived in Beijing for more than half a year. In recent 10 years, the increase of the totalpopulation in Beijing is mainly due to the increase of floating population, and the second important factor is theimmigrant of permanent population while the natural increase contributes a little to the population growth.
