More than 100 million rural Chinese people will settle in towns and cities in the next decade, testing the provision of welfare and other services as a new generation of migrants turn their backs on farming, according to a new government report.
The National Population and Family Planning Commission report forecast that by 2020, China’s urban population would pass 800 million and many of the new residents are rural migrants who lack old-age and medical insurance in the towns and cities they want to call home, media reports said yesterday.
The study, based on survey data from last year, is the latest to underscore how important, and how challenging, the ramifications of China’s tide of urbanization are.
“Our country still faces many challenges in achieving healthy urbanization,” said the report, according to a summary from Xinhua news agency.
“At present, we still have not formed a sensible array of cities and towns, and overall urban capacity urgently needs to be strengthened,” it said. “The migrant population strongly desires to be absorbed into the areas where they live, but there is a stark conflict between supply and demand of urban public services.”
China’s census last year found that the country had 1.34 billion people, 670 million of which were residents of towns and cities.
Many new urbanites are young rural migrants with no plans to return to villages and farming after years in factories, unlike their parents’ generation.
Although their wages have risen in recent years, this “new generation” of migrants also needs better housing, healthcare and schooling opportunities. The report found that 52 percent of Chinese rural migrants had no social welfare insurance.
In June, migrant workers rioted in southern China’s manufacturing belt, trashing government offices and police vehicles after a pregnant peddler was roughed up by guards, triggering anger about mistreatment.
China has about 153 million migrant workers living outside their hometowns and by 2009, 58.4 percent of them were “new generation” migrants born in 1980 or after, according to an earlier National Bureau of Statistics survey.
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