The first nationwide survey of ''municipal facilities and urban ecology'' of more than 600 cities completed last year showed that China's cities by and large resemble cities of developed countries in the mid-1960s. Only 70 percent of urban households use gas. The rate of ''safe disposal'' for garbage stands at only 40 percent, and for treatment of water, just 19 per cent. Public green areas average 5 sq. In urban transportation, there are an average seven public vehicles per 10,000 persons.
Experts say the complex picture of Chinese cities has historical roots.
China was one of the first countries in the world to have cities, but these remained ''walled cities'' and administrative centres and did not develop into trading centres. After the founding of Communist China in 1949, the years of fast urbanisation came to a halt when Chairman Mao Zedong proclaimed the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Thousands of young intellectuals were forced to go to the countryside and learn from peasants how to build a socialist life, creating a tide of ''reverse urbanisation''. Urbanisation picked up again in the early eighties, when China's late patriarch Deng Xiaoping launched economic reforms that by some accounts heralded one of the world's largest migrations of people from the countryside to the towns. In the years of Deng's reforms, the country favoured smaller, not larger, cities, based on the assumption that large and medium cities cannot absorb the vast surplus of rural labour force.