After 1949 the Communist Party recast the city as a site of production rather than consumption, suspicious of the "parasitic" treaty-port metropolis. Investment was steered toward heavy-industrial bases, often in interior cities, while consumer and service growth was suppressed. Urbanisation was deliberately constrained, and from the late 1960s tens of millions of urban youth were "sent down" to the countryside. Planning served industrial output and ideological goals over urban amenity.
It produced an unusually low and tightly controlled rate of urbanisation for a developing economy, the baseline against which the post-1978 explosion is measured.
See it on the timeline →