Opinion

Special group, equal treatment

By Chi Fulin (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-08-12 15:41

Granting urban citizenship rights, and reforming the land and educational system will help migrant workers

Transforming China's development model during the 12th Five-Year Plan period (2011-2015) is directly related to the reform and development of rural areas.

Unlocking the consumption demand of the nation's 1.3 billion people is key to enabling China to lay the foundation of a consumption-driven development model.

To achieve this, the process of urbanization must be accelerated. Cities must be made the chief centers of consumption. The rural-urban integration process must also be hastened to translate the potential demand of 700 million farmers into actual demand.

During the said plan period, the role of migrant workers in the consumption matrix will become an important facet of continued urbanization or urban-rural integration.

Granting citizenship rights, with basic entitlements, to these migrants from rural areas will lead to a breakthrough in urban-rural integration.

This will ensure that the term "migrant worker" is consigned to history books.

Migrant workers are a huge and special social grouping. This group has contributed enormously to China's industrialization and urbanization over the past three decades, yet they do not share in the fruits of the nation's reform and development.

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Migrant workers do not come under the purview of affordable urban housing schemes. Public services that urban citizens routinely make use of are denied to them. Still, surplus rural labor continues to migrate to cities.

There were 230 million migrant workers in 2009. They have become the mainstay of the urban industrial workforce, accounting for 57 percent of the labor force in the secondary industry, 68 percent in the manufacturing sector, and 80 percent in the construction industry.

One big reason for the spurt in urban populations has been due to the influx of migrant workers. Of the 230 million migrant workers from rural areas, 150 million work in cities.

If they are given citizenship rights in cities during the 12th Five-Year Plan period, the urban population will touch 700 million, accounting for between 52 and 55 percent of the country's total population.

The demographic structure of rural migrant workers is undergoing significant change.

The new generation of migrant workers, born in the 1980s and 1990s, is set to become the mainstay of the industrial workforce during the 12th Five-Year Plan period. This post-80s generation has been swarming into the urban market in search of not only jobs, but also self-advancement.

Therefore, this is the right time to grant them citizenship rights.

The China Institute for Reform and Development recently asked experts for their opinion on rural reforms during the 12th Five-Year Plan period. Nearly 80 percent of the respondents said basic requirements to fundamentally solve the problems of rural migrant workers will be in place during the plan period.

This is not only imperative but also feasible due to quite a few conditions in its favor.

Granting migrant workers urban citizenship will help dismantle the dual urban-rural hukou system.