China risks an urbanization 'Great Leap Forward'
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The urbanization strategy in the Twelfth Five-Year Plan seems to address these problems. Some experts propose that migrant workers should be given full urban residence rights. But this suggestion is unrealistic. City governments will be very reluctant to offer them the same rights and welfare as permanent residents. They treat the migrant population as a workforce and hope they will disappear after they are no longer useful. Policies aimed at "driving low-quality people away" have been seen in operation in the Pearl River Delta and Beijing in recent years. We are a long way from establishing regulations and policies that protect the welfare of migrants.
Other experts have come up with a compromise solution. They suggest building small towns to absorb migrant workers returning from the first-tier cities, giving them city hukous. Migrant workers' own view of their future seems to support this idea. When asked about their retirement plans in a survey, most said they were saving up to open shops in their hometowns.
But the proposal has serious problems. A migrant worker would have to spend his or her life savings to buy a house and open a small shop. And if most residents in these small towns are retired migrant workers, where will the customers come from? How will these towns survive? In the 1990s when huge numbers of workers were laid off in the northeast China, they all decided to sell ice cream. Naturally, the sellers outnumbered the buyers.
In the central and western regions of China there are countless county towns. But most of them are decaying because there is no work available. As a result, young people leave for the big cities even though in theory they are already urban residents.
Developing these towns might lead to a more worrisome problem. As county and town governments sell land to real estate companies following the example of first-tier cities they will come into conflict with residents over demolition and relocation issues.
The past 30 years of opening-up demonstrates that urbanization is the result of the development of mass production for the market. Cities in China's coastal areas grew rapidly, in step with their economies. Migrant workers follow the same path. When they make the transition from farming to industry, their lifestyles change and they become urbanized. Unfortunately, officials seem to want to ignore this point.
If our policy makers are not careful, urbanization without proper economic foundations could turn into a new "Great Leap Forward" in the 2010s. Such an outcome would reduce potentially wealthy farmers to new urban poor and wreck the goal of building a moderately prosperous society by 2020.
Urbanization is not a matter of statistics. Children and old people left behind in small towns while breadwinners work in big cities are not genuine city dwellers. Neither are people who are formally urban residents but have no means of making a living.
The author is secretary-general, the Social Policy Research Center, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
(This article was translated by Ren Zhongxi.)
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