Society

10m to get hukou in Chongqing's urbanization plan

By Song Wei (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-07-14 13:42

Southwest China's Chongqing vowed to raise its urbanization rate from the current 28 percent to between 60 percent and 70 percent by 2020, at the 75th Executive Meeting of the Municipality on Monday, 21st Century Business Herald reported.

The goal of increasing the urbanization rate means that nearly 10 million rural population will get an urban hukou. The move is regarded as a brave attempt to change the country's hukou, or household registration, reform.

Nearly 1.2 million migrant workers, and their family members (600,000), who have been working in Chongqing for more than 10 years, will be the first batch to get an urban hukou, within two years.

The municipality's urbanization has been slowing down in recent years. From 1997 to 2009, there was only a 3 percent increase – from 25 percent to 28 percent.

As China's largest municipality (the other three are Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin), Chongqing has a population of over 31 million, and 61.7 percent are rural.