Major growth will come from housing, automobiles and the service industry. This is because twenty years of reforms have made market forces play an important role in the consumer market. Although there are still many faults with the operation mechanisms of State-owned firms and the financial markets, the basic market framework in those sectors has been set up. However, things are quite different in the housing, automobile and service sectors. Housing and automobiles are still too expensive for most consumers.
Roads are also too crowded for most households to own their own cars.
In fact, behind the housing, automobile and transportation problems are the basic bottlenecks for China's economic development, that is, population, land and water problems. To solve the population, land and water problems, many water diversion projects have been introduced. Before the 1970s, the projects were mainly for agricultural purposes. By the late 1970s, industrial cities began to report water scarcity as industry burgeoned and most water was used up by agriculture in the upper reaches of many rivers. Since the beginning of the 1980s, water has been diverted into cities for industrial purposes.