Since the launch of the reform and opening-up policy, China has significantly increased its urbanization rate through industrialization, with the rate reaching 66.16 percent by the end of 2023. However, data from the seventh national census indicates that about three-quarters of China’s new urban population is actually an “amorphous population”, who have permanent residence permits as they live and work in urban areas, but still hold on to their rural hukou, or household registration, and homes in the countryside. Therefore, accelerating the transformation of these people into real urban residents has become the primary task to promote the new-type urbanization.
The central authorities have vowed to improve the system that helps lubricate the new-type urbanization. Attracting rural people to settle in the cities requires offering them stable employment. Therefore, the country should build a benign interactive mechanism for industrial upgrading, population agglomeration and urban development. New-type urbanization will depend on industries prospering in the cities and integrated development of urban and rural areas. At the same time, the system of providing basic public services based on the number of urban people with permanent residence permits should be established and all people with such permits should be able to enjoy the same rights in social insurance, housing guarantees and children’s education as those with urban hukou do.
For a long time, hukou has been one of the obstacles affecting the transfer of rural people to cities, given that this involves cost sharing, benefit distribution and use of land. China should do more to protect the legitimate land rights and interests of farmers who settle down in the cities, safeguard their land contract rights and the rights to use homesteads, gain incomes deriving from collective land, and explore ways to establish the exit of such rights based on a voluntary and compensatory principle.
The central authorities also said the country will deepen reform aimed at promoting the separation of ownership, contracting rights and management rights of rural contracted land, and improve the transfer mechanism of rural contracted land, to inflate farmers’ property rights and interests, boost the rural economy, and promote agricultural modernization. This will also help release more workers from rural areas, improve the country’s social wealth distribution, expand domestic demand, and narrow the gap between urban and rural areas, promoting common prosperity.
-21st Century Business Herald