Op-Ed Contributors

Special group, equal treatment

By Chi Fulin (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-08-12 07:52

Granting urban citizenship rights, and reforming the land and educational system will help migrant workers

Transforming China's development model during the 12th Five-Year Plan period (2011-2015) is directly related to the reform and development of rural areas.

Unlocking the consumption demand of the nation's 1.3 billion people is key to enabling China to lay the foundation of a consumption-driven development model.

To achieve this, the process of urbanization must be accelerated. Cities must be made the chief centers of consumption. The rural-urban integration process must also be hastened to translate the potential demand of 700 million farmers into actual demand.

During the said plan period, the role of migrant workers in the consumption matrix will become an important facet of continued urbanization or urban-rural integration.

Granting citizenship rights, with basic entitlements, to these migrants from rural areas will lead to a breakthrough in urban-rural integration.

This will ensure that the term "migrant worker" is consigned to history books.

Migrant workers are a huge and special social grouping. This group has contributed enormously to China's industrialization and urbanization over the past three decades, yet they do not share in the fruits of the nation's reform and development.

Migrant workers do not come under the purview of affordable urban housing schemes. Public services that urban citizens routinely make use of are denied to them. Still, surplus rural labor continues to migrate to cities.

There were 230 million migrant workers in 2009. They have become the mainstay of the urban industrial workforce, accounting for 57 percent of the labor force in the secondary industry, 68 percent in the manufacturing sector, and 80 percent in the construction industry.