Opportunity to till land with dignity(2)

Confidence boost

"I feel disadvantaged because I have received no professional training to help me survive in the cities and I have no idea what I can do back in my hometown in Yiyang, Hunan Province," Cheng Min, a 28-year-old migrant worker at the infamous Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, told the Global Times.

But Cheng is confident that he will marry his girlfriend and raise their children in Yiyang when his small business in the village booms.

"The urbanization rate will reach 65 percent and farmers' income will more than double because whoever stayed in the rural areas in the next 10 years must be professional farmers. Their income will approach the levels of people living in the city. They will no longer feel inferior to other professions," Dang Guoying, a professor at the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.

"Agriculture might not need special policies when farming is mechanized. Some farmers will be richer than city residents because they have the farmland when the local government no longer need land appropriation to increase their fiscal revenues," Dang said.

In 10 years' time, Chinese may prefer living in rural areas rather than the central urban areas just like Westerners now. And farmers will be a profession rather than seen as inferiors by society.

"My kids will enjoy the same education as their peers in the city even though they are born in the village," Cheng said, excited that his hypothetical children won't have to leave their hometown and crowd with three roommates living on a wage of 3,000 yuan a month, as he does.

But Gan Chaoying, professor of law at Peking University, warned that if villagers can't find work after losing their land, there will be a hidden social crisis.

Villagers in coastal areas already lead a life where many envy their wealth but their peers in the Central and Western parts of China are still struggling to survive.

Qi, a member of the Lisu ethnic minority in her 20s living in Southwest China's Yunnan Province, said she was so grateful that she had received donations from warm-hearted people across the nation.

As a result her 15-member family is able to survive the winter with warm clothes while they have to live on farming in the mountains because they can't find work in the city. The next 10 years for her will probably still be very tough.