After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the process of urbanization in China has continued to accelerate and the level of urbanization has continued to increase. The acceleration of urbanization is mainly manifested in the rapid increase in the number of cities. In 1949, there were 132 cities in China. In 1978, the total number of cities nationwide increased to 193. In this nearly 30 years, only 61 cities have been added. In the first 10 years after the reform and opening up, in 1988, the number of cities reached 434, an increase of 241, which is equivalent to four times the increase in the previous 30 years. The rapid increase in the number of cities reflects the basic characteristics of the urbanization process after China’s reform and opening up. The calculation results of the national population change sample survey released by the National Bureau of Statistics in 2008 show that as of the end of 2008, China’s urban population exceeded 600 million, and the proportion of the urban population continued to increase. In terms of city size, small cities with a population of less than 200,000 have increased the fastest, followed by cities with a population of 200,000 to 500,000, and cities with a population of 500,000 to 1 million and more than 1 million have increased relatively slowly. This reflects from another aspect an inevitable result of China’s rural economic development in the past 20 years-the transition to urbanization.

In 2006, the total urban population of the country was about 577 million, accounting for 43.9% of the total population of the country, and the level of urbanization was 34.8% higher than that in 2002. In terms of subregions, the urbanization levels of eastern, central and western China in 2006 were 54.6%, 40.4% and 35.7% respectively. In terms of regions, Shanghai has the highest level of urbanization with 88.7%, followed by Beijing and Tianjin with 84.3% and 75.7% respectively. In 2006, the total number of cities in China was 661, of which 287 were prefecture-level and above cities, an increase of 8 over 2002. The GDP of prefecture-level and above cities (excluding municipal counties) increased from 6,429.2 billion yuan in 2002 to 13,32272 billion yuan, an increase of 1.1 times, and their share of national GDP rose from 53.4% in 2002 to 63.2% in 2006 . The number of cities with a GDP exceeding 100 billion yuan increased from 12 in 2002 to 30 in 2006, and 12 of them exceeded 200 billion yuan. In 2006, the local fiscal budget revenue of cities at prefecture-level and above (excluding municipal counties) reached 1.0862 billion yuan, an increase of 1.1 times over 2002, accounting for 59.3% of the country’s local fiscal revenue.

Accompanying urbanization is the rapid development of the construction industry, and there has been an unprecedented upsurge in urban construction in China. A survey data shows: China’s urban construction area doubled in five years, from 7.7 billion m² in 2000 to nearly 15 billion m² in 2004, and the growth rate far exceeds the rate of doubling China’s total construction volume in 10 years as predicted by the World Bank in the mid-1990s. This figure has become 18.2 billion m² in 2007. The growth rate of housing is much higher than the growth rate of urban population, and the per capita floor space is also increasing at an extremely fast rate. At present, China’s annual housing construction area is about 1.8 billion to 2 billion m². It is estimated that by the end of 2020, China’s newly added housing construction area will reach nearly 30 billion m².

Due to my country’s geographical location and climate characteristics and the continuous improvement of people’s living standards, most buildings need to use heating and air conditioning systems, and some buildings need to supply domestic hot water. Especially residential buildings in cities and towns basically need domestic hot water supply. The demand for domestic hot water in rural buildings is also increasing. The rapid development of these requirements has brought huge development potential to the development of solar building applications.

Read more: Overview of China’s solar energy building application development.