Abstract
Over the past few decades, China has experienced unprecedented urbanisation and economic growth, in terms of its both scale and pace. However, this economic boom has not resulted in equitable growth. Due to the housing registration (hukou) system, rural migrant workers are excluded from social welfare systems in cities. Many migrant workers have to leave their children and elderly behind in the rural areas. The negative consequence of family separation is becoming a pressing social problem. Land ownership is another issue of urban–rural social linkages. According to the law, rural land cannot be used for urban development without state expropriation. However, a substantial share of urban housing is built on rural land informally and without full legality providing affordable urban housing to the low- to middle-income groups. To address these problems, the government initiated a ‘New Urbanisation Plan’ (2014–20) which aims to achieve a more people-oriented urbanisation process. Also, there has been a recent shift in the focus of the policies from market-oriented approach to people-centric development towards achieving sustainability. Based on a review of urban policies and programmes, this article advocates that the priorities of national urban policy should be improvement of urban–rural socio-economic linkages and integration of the migrants in the mainstream policy framework.
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Notes
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- 2.
The housing registration system (HRS) classifying each resident as urban or rural is a major means of controlling population mobility and determining eligibility for state-provided services and welfare. The HRS separates urban residents based on their place of birth. The HRS has also excluded many migrants from housing ownership in urban areas.
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‘Left-behind children’ are defined as children below the age of 18 who remain at the place of origin, while one or both parents have migrated to the city. ‘Left-behind women’ are those whose husbands have migrated to city for work. On the other hand, ‘left-behind elderly’ indicate those aged above 60 years who have at least one of adult children who have out-migrated.
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Workers participated in mass in class struggle, and many factories ceased production. Millions of urban youths were sent back to rural areas under the programmes ‘up to the mountains and down to the villages’, ‘downward transfer’ and ‘third front’. Forced displacement was the result of economic stagnation, urban unemployment, national defence considerations, the ideologies of learning from peasants and the elimination of ‘three big differentials’ (between urban and rural areas, between industry and agriculture and between intellectual and manual workers).
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Retrieved from https://www.clb.org.hk/content/migrant-workers-and-their-children on 14 October 2018.
- 6.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/china-s-economic-outlook-in-six-charts accessed 03/02/2019 at 18:06 h.
- 7.
https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/41760-china-urban-transformation-strategy/ accessed on 03/02/2019.
- 8.
https://thediplomat.com/2017/07/chinas-hukou-system/ accessed on 03/02/2019 at 22:00 h.
- 9.
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/gdp-growth-annual accessed on 2/6/2019 at 16:00 h.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Dr. Arvind Pandey, National Institute of Urban Affairs, for his research inputs.
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Kundu, D., Debnath, T., Lahiri, B. (2020). Overview of Urban Policies in China. In: Kundu, D., Sietchiping, R., Kinyanjui, M. (eds) Developing National Urban Policies. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3738-7_8
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