Land use in China
China has four times the population of the U.S., within roughly the same area. With 1.3 billion inhabitants, 20% of the world’s population lives in China. While the rate of population growth has been declining for decades, the total number of inhabitants has been growing and is expected to do so through 2030. China’s urban population is growing rapidly; between 1950 and 2009, the percentage of the population living in urban areas quadrupled from 14% to 48%. Meanwhile, the rural population is declining, opening the landscape in areas that are not urbanized. The forests and farming land of eastern China support far more people and major cities than do the grasslands, deserts, and high mountain regions of the west.
Standard of living in China
Since the 1990s there has been an increasing number of apartment built in China which remain empty. By 2010 approximately 65 million apartments, capable of housing some 250 million people, were unoccupied, due to there being too expensive for the majority of Chinese to purchase or rent. At the same time many millions of urban Chinese remained living in slums. But, as the urbanization rate in China remains high (approx. 20 million Chinese move from rural areas each year) this problem is not severe and many so-called "ghost cities" become inhabited. As for 2012, there is 35 sq.meters per person in average and construction rate exceeds 1.5 sq. meters per year which allows total living area to exceed 50 sq. meters per capital as soon as in the year 2020.