Top Chinese government officials have delayed a meeting on national urbanization development because they are unsatisfied with the draft plan, CBN Daily reported.

The development plan proposes upgrading the metropolitan regions surrounding Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta by 2020 to make them more internationally competitive. More city clusters will be also be built in central and western regions.

However, top government leaders are not satisfied with the plan because it did not have any detailed measures for specific areas, an insider said.

“The existing agricultural and urbanization policies failed to facilitate the urbanization of a large population, which the medium to long-term plan is expected to solve, otherwise it is incapable of pushing economic development and may even intensify social conflicts,” an anonymous government source said.

The country's urbanization level reached 52.57 percent in 2012, but only 35.29 percent of the population are urban residents. The State Council executive meeting on May 6 called for a medium to long-term plan on “new-type urbanization” that would focus on the urbanization of the population, not just the land in China.

Ba Shusong, a researcher from the Development and Research Center of the State Council said that rural migrants will be the key to the future development of urbanization.

“The main problem of the urbanization is the inconsistence between the residents and their household register; land and people’s urbanization rate. The central government’s concept of the ‘new-type urbanization’ features the reversal of population flow, slowdown in land expansion and more capital flow to regions that need it.

“Rural migrants and reversed flow of urban residents, deep processing in agriculture and low-end labor intensive industries in the formation of small cities and towns will be an important clue in the future urbanization,” Ba said.

A research on differentiated development policies has already been launched by the Ministry of Land and Resources. The research objects are small cities and towns.

Many important policies will come out in July and the end of this year, according to sources from the National Development and Reform Commission. Opinions on the overall draft urbanization plan are being sought from different departments and local governments, and will be published after the national urbanization meeting.