2010-09-01 17:48

Rural intrusion

The city is undergoing an unprecedented expansion, which means the local government is acquiring evermore rural land for construction.

"A rural resident can earn tens of thousands of yuan from the requisition of land, and the compensation is likely to rise," says a city official who refused to be named.

Wang Huizhong, director of the Zhejiang Provincial Public Security Department, says the change of the residence status of the civil servants from urban to rural was an "intrusion" into the benefits of the farmers.

The amount of the compensation for land requisition in each village is fixed and evenly distributed to each resident as a dividend under the joint-stock system of the rural collective economy.

More rural residents means less money allocated to each person, says Wang.

"Obviously, the actions of the civil servants infringed on the rights of the farmers, which could lead to social unrest if our government just stands by and watches this trend grow," Wang says.

Increasingly rural migrants are unwilling to change their hukou from rural to urban even when they qualify after years of working in cities.

Only 189,000 rural migrants gave up their rural hukou last year in Zhejiang, down 67 percent from the 577,000 who changed in 2004. By contrast, the number of rural residents migrating to cities to work rose from 2.04 million in 2004 to 3.06 million last year.

But the high costs of living and falling incomes in Chinese cities is also driving city residents to seek rural hukou.

Zhao Wenqi quit Hangzhou, where he lived for 40 years, and moved to a town to the north.

"I sold my small house in downtown Hangzhou and bought a big house in the rural area," says Zhou. "Life in a small town is so much cheaper."

Pan Changsheng, 40, a migrant worker in Wenzhou City, is considering going home to the countryside.

"The incomes of many migrant workers are far below those of rural residents," Pan says. "More and more migrant workers are going home to do business."