Plenum offers new platform for urbanization

The Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China may be a good opportunity to push the country's ambitious urbanization bid - a major effort to change the development model of the world's second-largest economy.

The CPC's new leadership designated urbanization as a growth point of the economy and called for quality and new urbanization at its economic work conference in December, after China's exports were adversely affected by the lingering global crisis.

China's urbanization ratio hit 52.57 percent in 2012, increasing almost 1 percentage point each year from 17.9 percent in 1978. The per capita gross domestic product was about $6,102 in 2012. The steady and rapid urbanization seems sustainable for awhile along with the economic growth.