China’s current rate of urbanisation, which is around 50 percent and well below the more industrialised Asian economies, could trend higher for another two or three decades (figure 7). Higher incomes, and greater access to refrigerated products, mean that urban dwellers’ per capita consumption of dairy products in China is about three times higher than that of rural dwellers.
Figure 7: Urbanisation rates in industrialised Asian countries  Source: World Bank. An important issue is whether China can maintain a 7–8 percent growth rate over the long term. Such growth rates would continue to make China an outlier compared with the development of other middle income economies.