Next year’s Shanghai World Expo will feature more than 200 of the world’s most innovative pavilions filled with the most advanced technology and inspiring exhibits about modern urban life. But piles of rubbish, dirty surfaces and lack of potties would make a joke of the theme, “Better City, Better Life.” [...]

Shanghai’s population is expected to grow to 19.5 million in 2010, about 3 percent more than last year. And by 2020, the city’s total should hit 23 million, due to an increase in births, a large influx of new residents and longer life expectancies, according to a conference recently held by the Shanghai Population and Family Planning Commission [...]

Huang Wenqing grew up in a remote village in China’s Anhui province, where his family were pig farmers. Today he is a team manager in a car components factory in the suburbs of Beijing. Huang, 32, is part of a huge wave of rural workers streaming into China’s cities in search of better opportunities [...]

Nearly one out of three people in Beijing belongs to the mobile population, according to the capital’s population and family planning commission. The municipality’s mobile population reached 5.4 million in October, accounting for nearly 30 percent of the total, according to a recent report by the commission’s deputy director, Li Yunli…