China is likely to roll out a blueprint this year to guide the country's urbanization process to advance in an "orderly and healthy" way, a senior economic official said on March 6.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the country's top economic planner, is coordinating related authorities to compile the blueprint, which is likely to be issued in the first half of this year, said Zhang Ping, head of the NDRC, at a press conference.

Zhang said that China needs better planning to improve the quality of urbanization, particularly to address problems such as inadequate services provided to new urban dwellers from rural areas, backward infrastructure and imbalanced distribution of resources between megacities and small and medium-sized cities.

China's urbanization rate rose by 1.3 percentage points to 52.57 percent last year, according to figures from the National Bureau of Statistics.