Urbanization, Consumer Power Shaping China

BEIJING — To better understand and predict China, we need to pay attention to six major factors shaping the country: urbanization, Chinese consumers, manufacturing scale, money, brainpower and the Internet, according to two Peking University professors.

Speaking to a group of journalists in Beijing on Friday, Jeffrey Towson and Jonathan Woetzel, professors at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management, said moving from farm to factory will triple the average income for the urban Chinese. Over the next decade, China plans to move 250 million rural dwellers to the city. Woetzel said Chinese migration will drive 70 percent of urban population growth by 2025. By this time, there will be over a billion urban Chinese.