This paper tackles new problems concerning China’s urban population
figures and the annual urban population series arising from the use of a
new Census 2000 urban definition. The paper extends existing research
and incorporates crucial findings not available or previously overlooked.
The paper assesses major competing urban annual series for the 1990s,
including the latest released in the Zhongguo tongji nianjian 2002 and
checks empirically the different series of urban population estimates, bydecomposing them and comparing the trends to those derived from migration
and employment data from other sources. Based on the examination
of several sets of data, revised urbanization and migration trends in
the 1990s are presented. The paper also provides guidance on the use of
the current urban population data and helps to establish a critical baseline
for studying urbanization and migration in the 1990s, which was an
important decade of urban change in China.