Farmers left behind amid urbanization

For the first time in China, there are more urban citizens than rural residents in the country, but rural-urban inequalities remain, according to a research report released Saturday by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing.

The urbanization rate, indicating the proportion of urban residents in the total population, jumped to 51.3 percent in 2011 from 36.2 percent in 2000, a CASS green paper on medium-sized and small cities showed.

The urbanization, however, is "incomplete" because "a large amount of farmers, who are statistically considered to be urban residents, have not really been properly merged into the cities," the report noted.

Some argue that quality has been sacrificed for efficiency during the urbanization frenzy over the past decade.

Now many city governments have started to improve the basic social security for rural migrant workers, but schooling for children and getting household registration are still major obstacles that prevent rural people from fully enjoying their new-found status as urban citizens, Li Xiaopeng, a researcher at Beijing-based think tank Urban China Initiative, told a forum in Beijing Friday.

One solution may be the further development of medium and small cities, experts said.

China should set up a market where farmers can sell the rights to use their land in exchange for low-income housing in a medium or small city, so that more rural people can settle down in the cities, Liu Weixin, vice president of the Institute of Modern Urban-Rural Development Planning, told the Global Times Sunday.

Meanwhile, improving farmers' literacy is critical, as many are shut out of the competitive labor markets in the cities, and often their skills are not needed in the countryside anymore, as a result of agricultural modernization, Fan Ping, a deputy researcher at the Institute of Sociology at the CASS, told the Global Times.

The urban-rural income gap has reached an alarming level, with urban wages now 3.3 times higher than those in the countryside, according to a blue book on social management released Friday by the CASS.