China will relax residency curbs and spur infrastructure in new urbanization push

China is on the verge of relaxing residency curbs in the country’s numerous smaller cities and increasing infrastructure spending in 2019. That’s what the state planner informed on Monday. It’s a new push to ramp up the urban population and stimulate decelerating economic surge.

As the National Development and Reform Commission told, it intends to ramp up China's urbanization rate by 1% by the end of 2019.

The latest push turns out to be part of its longer-term objective of bringing 100 million population into the cities for the five years to 2020. Last year, 59.6% of China's population resided in urban areas.

The NDRC stressed that the given measure will provide firm support for maintaining sustained as well as healthy economic development, not to mention social stability.

The NDRC is going to have limits in cities of 1 to 3 million on coveted household registration permits for out-of-towners scrapped that include migrant employees as well as college graduates. As for cities of 3 to 5 million, with many provincial capitals, such limits are going to be quite relaxed, but the NDRC didn’t comment on such moves.

By the way, such permits have been utilized to control internal migration in this Asian country for many years. As a matter of act, without such a permit, a city’s resident is unable to access many public services, in particular, healthcare and education. Exactly these limits have often been recognized as the reason for pushing migrants to the margins of society in this Asian country.

Additionally, under the country’s multi-year clampdown on the property investment bubble in China, internal migrants are also often found speculative buyers and have been exposed to local purchase curbs, contributing to the soaring pressure on these communities.

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