Implementations of China’s new-type urbanisation: a comparative analysis between targets and practices of key elements’ policies

China’s new-type urbanisation, as a national strategy, is one of the reasons why the leap in development has been made in the last decade. Existing studies mainly focus on the status and outcomes of china’s new-type urbanisation while stressing not enough the overlooked aspects of new-type urbanisation policies that are currently in use. This paper aims at exploring the highlighted and overlooked aspects of policies of three key elements in China’s new-type urbanisation: population, land, and industry and their implementations. The complicated process and contradictions between formulation and implementation of the policies are extracted by analysing set goals and implemented situations of relative indicators from the three elements. The policies drove the population from separation to unity between household registered and actual residences, land from human land allometry to balance, and industry from traditional industrialisation to emerging service. Although these policies had significant achievements in the transitions of formulation, they still needed to be further implemented. Furthermore, this paper discusses corresponding reasons and potential directions to better the adoption of these policies for greater inclusion and systematic efficiency. The findings could not only highlight directions that improve existing policies of China’s new-type urbanisation but also provide guidance for inclusive and sustainable urbanisation practices in China as well as other cities in similar situations all over the world.