SMU Associate Professor of Sociology Forrest Zhang noted how China is currently witnessing a trend of reverse urbanisation, with a growing number of urban residents moving to the countryside. This trend is most noticeable in rural areas surrounding major metropolitan clusters such as the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, the Chengdu-Chongqing region and the Beijing-Tianjin area. Assoc Prof Zhang explained that the phenomenon is driven both by push factors from the cities, such as high housing prices, employment anxiety and lifestyle imbalance, and pull factors from the countryside, including better ecological environments, emerging industrial opportunities and increasingly modern infrastructure.
