Urbanization will trigger rural land sale rights in China

ARTICLE: "On the Move: Chinese officials want more farmers to migrate to the city. But they are also aware that migration brings problems," by Andrew Batson, Wall Street Journal, 12-13 April 2008, p. R5.

The biggest peacetime migration in human history, inside one country.

Forty-four % of Chinese live in cities now. When Deng kicked this whole thing off in 1980, 80 percent lived on the farm. By 2050, China's looking at 1B in cities and only 400m on the farm, or about half of the rural population it had in 2080.

All of this in response to the opportunities afforded by connectivity to the global economy.

After so many years of trying to keep farmers down on the farm, now China encourages the migration, because it needs the supply of cheap labor to continue for as long as possible while shifting more and more of the population to higher-paying jobs as the demographics tilt dramatically older.

So the old household-registration system, called hukou, is being dramatically relaxed, meaning people are more able to choose where they want to live. As it is, more than 100m Chinese simply "float" right now, living in urban areas while retaining—officially—farms back in the village.

Here's where it links then:

Indeed, the most pressing issue raised by China's urban transformation may not be migrants' entrance into cities but their exit from the farm. Those who migrate permanently to cities and obtain urban hukou have to give up their rights to farmland. Not everyone is willing to take that chance, since farming is something to fall back on if the job doesn't work out.

But here's the additional dynamic: China needs to mechanize its ag production a lot more, meaning fewer bigger farms, otherwise the population's growing demand for more and better food will trigger even more dependency on foreign sources (which is inevitable, but why not meet as much of that demand as possible at home?).

My point? Once you open up to globalization, the secondary and tertiary effects never end. You simply have to feed the beast.

Comments

[Louis Heberlein]

The numbers would be different, and some words, but this story could have been written 100 years ago. Then stuff happened.

[Al]

Hi Tom,

What specifically do you mean by secondary and tertiary effects?

[Michael]

They have an industrial beast to feed, yet they won't bring in people from NK (who want to leave anyway)? And I haven't heard of them bringing people in from Tibet or Xinjiang, where they have bunches of people going without jobs and being tempted by radicalisation as a result.*shrug*