Discussion keeps the world turning.
This is round table.
Counties have constituted the basic fabric of China's administrative system for more than 2000 years.
They have also been important players in the national economy and increasingly more so in recent years.
Hello, I'm Lai Ming and this is roundtable.
Today with my colleagues Niu Hauling and Guo Yan, we will look at some new consumption trends in the counties.
To begin with, what is a typical county in China?
I grew up in the county, so I think it's an easy question for me, to be fair.
I'll let you start.
Well, yes, actually if you talk about counties, you would have different imaginations about the image of a county and a county in China.
Typically it will have, you know, roughly the population of up to bill, up to millions.
And it will be the kind of places you can imagine between a city and a village.
Village.
That is a lot of, let's say, commercial activities are still there.
You do not expect to see many skyscrapers or fancy stores or trendy cafes if that's your imagination of a typical mega city.
But apparently that is changing in the over 2000 county level administrative regions here in China.
And we know that these places taking up 90% of the nation's land and half of the nation's population, but previously it only contribute to around 38% of the economic scale and that is about to change.
Or let's say we can definitely, I would assume, go to the assumption that the economic development in these places are surging.
When I said counties have constituted the basic fabric of China's administrative region system for more than 2000 years, it really meant that ever since the Qing dynasty achieved unification of the entire Middle Kingdom in China, counties have always been the last or the lowest tier of administrative system.
So county and then shire, if we were to translate it literally, and then the central government.