That's how the Hukou system works, there are two tiers: Farm/Country and Urban, and they want to urbanize farmlands, which will upgrade existing farmland hukou to city ones.
They are not talking about moving farmers into existing cities.
> What they want is urbanization of the less developed areas
Everybody wants that. Can't remember that any country ever got it, in the last century, anyway. That's akin to wanting water to roll uphill.
Argentine will prefer its population to not clutter around Buenos Aires. France will prefer everybody not move to Paris, same for Russia with Moscow. But that's just not what is happening anywhere.
If you're moving to a city, makes total sense to pick a powerful one.
USSR did it to some extent. By forced work assignments after university in bum-fuck nowhere. As well as scarce goods more available in those cities as a bonus.
On top of that, people were not allowed to freely move. You couldn't just move to a city, rent apartment and look for a job. For people in countryside, university and assignment after it was pretty much the only way to move to a city. University courses were highly limited though and far from everybody could get in.
USSR tried to do it to some extent, still Moscow grew from ~1.5mln to 8mln on their watch.
The key was that while theoretically the state wanted it to stop bulging, a huge number of influental state enterprises wanted more workers and wanted them now, and got their way more often than not.
And Russia still deals with millions of people who are spread around evenly across landscape in single-employer towns where there's no longer any jobs. And no economic reason for these towns to have any jobs in the future. Some of these in the far north or Siberia for no apparent reason.
Who said they tried to put a hard cap on Moscow at some lower number? Moscow grew to 8mln precisely because of government policies. Had they no limits, it could have been 2x that.
And yes, that policy is definitely baiting ex-USSR countries in the ass nowadays.
The fun thing with autocrats, they want everybody to be on short leash, on the distance of calling before eyes or local phone call.
So naturally, when they say they want to cap population of main cities - doesn't mean they're ready to delegate anything essential to 2nd tier cities! And they consider many many things essential being control freaks, so that's where you get additional growth.
E.g. in the USSR, the main filmmakers were in Moscow and SPb. Could you relocate them to e.g. Sochi as it happened with Hollywood in the USA? Sure, but would you be able to hold them as tightly? Hence they stay.
They're in a situation where they need to dramatically slow down debt accumulation, which will slow down economic growth a bit faster than otherwise anticipated. It's a whiplash action, going from the growth the last 20 years (in which people were aggressively encouraged to move into the cities) to needing to strictly control that growth and the correlated debt expansion.
Manufacturing stopped net expanding years ago, many of their largest state-corporate manufacturing enterprises are simultaneously loaded to the ceiling with debt and being heavily subsidized to maintain current levels of employment and output.
There is wide discussion about local governments being allowed to go bankrupt, because the debt burdens have gotten so extreme:
"China Central Bank Official Says Bankruptcy May Benefit the Country"
China's goal, in theory, is to transition increasingly to a services economy, to provide the next leg of its growth, as manufacturing can't provide that. Service economies grow far slower than the type of manufacturing fill-in-the-slack / join the WTO boom they saw from ~1992-2015. They can no longer afford to keep accumulating debt as they have been since 2007. S&P is forecasting another ~75% increase in their total debt position in just the next five or so years, which would push them to... ~550%-600% debt to GDP ratio (possibly worse when counting all the shadow debt), or nearly twice that of the US. It's untenable to say the least.
Bottom line: China has to start applying the brakes, and that likely means dramatically slowing the migration into the cities. That migration is unsustainable if China has to slow its debt expansion (which it does).
It takes extraordinary perpetual economic expansion to provide enough jobs for all of those people and pay for the infrastructure demands. China's financial reserves haven't kept pace with either their debt or GDP growth, with about 3/4 of those reserves untouchable. Their ability to continue to finance the wild debts that have gone with the local government & infrastructure splurges, is heavily restricted now (if cities like Shanghai or Beijing want to add millions of more people, it'd require continuing to fund all of that while the overall context gets more shaky).
It's simple. The rest 40M+ ppl in the city are "illegal immigrants". Which means no permanent residency, no health care, no education but only cheap labor.
Beijing is a province in itself with a lot of countryside and satellite cities (chanping, miyun, etc...). It would be weird to include nearby surrounding hebei.
Perhaps they meant Beijing and Tianjin combined + Langfang and Zhangjiakou? That could be around 40 million. Jingjinji (Tiānjīn, Beijing, Hebei) is around 130 million, but that includes all of hebei.
The problem they're trying to solve is city slums, which is common in Asia. I've worked in India before, and every major city (Delhi, Chennai) is filled with massive slums of migrant workers who obviously haven't kept up with the modern development. Without turning this into a pity post and sounding like an uncultured asshole, it was horrifying to see and really broke my heart that people are living in conditions like this. This is very common in SE Asia as well if you look at cities like Manila, Jakarta, etc. It's a tried and failed approach to have "open migration" policies in developing countries and have labor conditions race to the bottom.
To a lesser extend, Beijing + Shanghai has this problem as well. I was in BJ 7 years ago (so my experience may be outdated), but there are parts of the old city that still has Hutongs, which are slum like buildings that have largely been vacated but migrant workers have "illegally" occupied. (I put "illegal" in quotes because human beings aspiring for shelter shouldn't be illegal, anyways, off point)
The root of the problem is migrant workers moving into cities for slave-like labor and are commonly exploited by local residents and employers. They're offered "jobs" that are way below the legal minimum wage and are often paid under the table. They can't say no because their employers have power over them (threat to report to police, etc). In many sense, "illegal" migrant workers are not that different from "illegal" immigrants.
In order to raise the living standards of an entire area, you have to enforce issues like safe labor practice, minimum wage, vacation days, etc. Without heavy hand regulation in a developing countries, these things don't magically come at the kindness of employers. They must be forced. The developed countries all went through this stage much earlier this century (think back on all the activists who died pushing for labor rights in U.S. in early 1900s). When you have a massive population of people who are in dire situations and who don't have anywhere to turn, it's difficult to force employers to raise working standards.
It's a difficult issue. On one hand, it's pretty heavy handed and inhuman to tell a migrant worker they're not allowed to live in a city that's part of their own damn country. On the other hand, we don't want cities to race to the bottom with unsanitary and slum like conditions. What's the balance? I've no idea, but I'm glad Shanghai at least understands this is a problem instead of copying other Asian cities that have failed at this
What they want is urbanization of the less developed areas, many of which were farmlands from before.