 |
Rising Two-Way Flow in China's Rural, Urban Population
As China's reform and open-up drive expands in depth, the two-way flow of the country's rural and urban population has been on rise.
Urbanites are making investments in the countryside and engaging in businesses such as breeding, land reclamation, growing trees, and processing farm and sideline products, while owning apartment flats in urban districts, along with regular jobs or business offices in cities.
Meanwhile farmers have also learned to amass money and start to make investments in urban districts so that their hard-earned money will increment more quickly than what they could earn from just farming.
Statistics show that the number of people who lead an " amphibious" life amounts to 7 million in the country, where household registration has been a procedure strictly followed.
Gong Qizhou, chairman of the board of the Shanghai-based Jiacheng Electronics Co. Ltd., invested 2.5 million yuan (301,200 U.S. dollars) to reclaim 100 hectares of a tidal zone for breeding of prawns, fish and crabs four years ago. He chalked up 400,000 yuan (48,190 U.S. dollars) in sales last year.
Gong has decided to further enlarge the scale of seawater breeding. Even more urbanites from Shanghai and cities in Zhejiang, Fujian and Liaoning provinces, as well as Hong Kong have been following Gong's suit.
The two-way flow in the urban and rural population is a new phenomenon in the country's economy and culture. Experts point out that behind the physical flow are exchanges of factors in production, reorganization of the market resources, and resetting of people's view of value.
Zhang Ziyi, a farmer from Sheyang County in Jiangsu Province, began to engage in crab breeding with startup financing of 150,000 yuan (18,000 U.S. dollars). So far, his assets have increased in value to one million yuan (120,480 U.S. dollars).
Zhang's three sons have all bought housing in urban districts and all his family members have acquired urban residence registration cards and become legal urban dwellers.
Now every morning, Zhang Ziyi and his three sons all ride in a car of their own and go to work in the countryside company and shuttle back to the town houses for rest in the evening.
"The culture, economy, transport and services in cities are still better than those in the countryside though the previously much admired civilized urban life of 'living in high-rise buildings with electric lights and telephones, and having bread and milk for meals' has now been realized in rural areas," said senior Zhang, trying to explain why he and his family members prefer working in the countryside but living in an urban district.
Zhu Baoshu, a professor with the Institute of Population of Southeast Normal University, said the rising two-way flow in the urban and rural population is a sign of social progress.
"The city-countryside amphibious people help advance the flow of personnel, capital, information and technology between cities and rural areas, which will in turn help advance the country's urbanization drive, and play an active role in narrowing and eventually wiping out the gap between cities and rural areas, workers and farmers," said the demography expert, who added that the two-way flow will also change people's traditional ideas toward urbanites and rural dwellers.
Professor Wang Guixin from the same institute where Zhu works also said that population migration has already and will continue to be one of the important forces powering the country's modernization drive.
Wang backed his claim with a research result, citing inter- regional migration of people in the 1980s in China as an example, showing that each one million transient population increase brought about an additional rise of over 3 billion yuan (362 million U.S. dollars) in the national income.
With an unprecedented influx of capital, culture and technology in the wake of the two-way flow in the rural and urban population, China's rural areas have undergone earth-shaking changes.
Farmers who have made fortunes have started to make investments in cities, while more and more young and able rural laborers are moving from tilling the farmland to working in urban factory workshops instead, said Wang.
In the meantime, the vast rural areas of the country have also become a gold-mine for more urbanites to explore. Laid-off workers from urban factories, among all, account for quite a proportion of the urbanites who have ventured to start up new businesses in the countryside.
In This Section
|