2024-04-08
24 分钟Discussion keeps the world turning.
This is round table.
Having a great number of megacities and city clusters, China commands a unique advantage in sustaining growth and injecting vigor to the world economy, which is yet to recover from the impact of COVID and geopolitical tensions around the world.
Hello, I'm liming and this is roundtable.
Coming up on today's show, my colleagues Neil Holling and Brandon Yates will discuss the growth potentials arising from and beyond the signs of megacities.
Now, this is not the first time we talk about megacities and city clusters on this show, and we begin with a very simple question.
What are the criteria that we use commonly to define a city cluster?
Well, to start with, I'd like to talk a little bit about a megacity, because a megacity is a very, very large city, typically with a population of more than 10 million people.
Tiny, just a handful of people.
That is not the standard just for China, because we know China is a populist country.
It's the standard around the world.
And actually, if we talk about people living in cities, China has urbanized with a really unbelievable speed.
About 20 years ago, only 30% of the chinese population lived in cities, and today it's over 66%.
I think those figures are more need to be reported on more than the fact that we have so many megacities in China.
The fact that it's urbanized so quickly, you know, I mean, mathematically it makes sense that China has the most mega cities just because, like you said, of the massive population, but the urbanization and the speed at which it's happened is phenomenal.
I don't think we've ever seen something like this in history.
Indeed, it's actually very fast because roughly 400 million people, that is more than the entire us population, moved to China's cities in the past two decades.
That's incredible.
Take a look at the number.
You would see that the same proportion transition took 90 years to happen in Europe and 60 years in the US.