In the afternoon of January 5th, the annual meeting on innovation and development of small towns with characteristics & new urbanization forum in 2018 were held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Various guests, including Bai Lichen, vice-chairman of the 11th CPPCC National Committee, Wei Jianguo, former vice-minister from Ministry of Commerce, Lu Zhongyuan, former deputy director of the Development Research Center of the State Council, and Liu Ming, deputy editor-in-chief of the Outlook Weekly of Xinhua News Agency, delivered keynote speeches, in order to make suggestions and contributions for the construction of new urbanization.

In the economic work arrangement in 2018, the Central Economic Work Conference held a few days ago emphasized "guiding the healthy development of small towns with characteristics", which attaches great importance to the development of small towns with characteristics. At the same time, the future development direction of the small towns with characteristics is more clear, that is, the high-quality development.

"In my point of view, the next step in the development of small towns with Chinese characteristics is lack of the “concept”. Wei Jianguo, former vice-minister for Ministry of Commerce, said that the competition in the future world will not be the competition of individual cities, but the competition of urban agglomerations. In particular, the construction of small towns with characteristics will become our greatest competitiveness to build the world's best urban agglomeration in the next step, Wei said.

He suggested that the construction of small towns with characteristics should focus on three aspects. First, to determine the construction of small towns with characteristics from the future supply-side reform; second, the industry must be sustainable, the small towns with characteristics are green, healthy and beautiful new industrial towns instead of tourist towns, processing towns, or polluted towns; the third and most crucial point is industrial innovation.

Wei Jie, the new urbanization leader and chairman of JC Group, said that the purpose of the city's forward development is to enable the people to have a more comfortable living and working environment. New urbanization is the most effective way to solve the problem of urban development.

He found that, in the process of promoting new urbanization, especially the construction of small towns with characteristics, there have been some trends that are not particularly good, e.g. some people use small towns with characteristics as a way to reinvest in government infrastructure. There are also some real estate developers engaging into small towns with characteristics in indirect manner, who are actually the identities of developers, which will undoubtedly create a new round of "city building" movement.