Zhou Yezhong
As pointed out in the Central Economic Work Conference of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) held on December 16, 2012, urbanization is a historical task in China’s modernization drive, and is where the greatest potential lies to expand domestic demand. We should actively pursue healthy development of urbanization by focusing on improving its quality, making the best use of the circumstances, as well as seeking advantages and avoiding disadvantages. Perhaps because the notion of new urbanization originated from the economic work conference, economists have conducted broad discussionsabout this issue, while law and political science scholars have paid little attention and have had few discussions about the relationship between new urbanization and human rights development. In fact, new urbanization is not only an important policy for resolving current economic difficulties, but a key strategic measure of the Party for improving the level of human rights development. Only by developing new modernization well, can we truly improve our human rights protection. Highlightingthe function of protecting human rights and developing human rights values in the construction of small towns should be key to the effective development and everlasting vigor of new urbanization.
I. Improving the level of human rights development through new urbanization
After reform and opening-up, Chinese society began its journey of urbanization. During this process, the development of eastern cities and big cities has driven China’s economic boom, improved the people’s living standards, and promoted the continual improvement of our human rights condition. However, as Chinese society continues to develop, the negative effects of traditional urbanization are becoming more and more obvious, which constitutes a great barrier to the further development of human rights.[page]
1. Promoting equal protection for citizens’ development rights
As Chinese villages have undergone a population outflow against the background of traditional urbanization, a large segment of the rural population has left their hometowns to go to cities for work. However, it’s difficult for these rural residents to get accepted into the urban social, institutional and cultural systems, and obtain effective support for their work and livelihood, thus triggering in them a feeling of estrangement or even nonrecognition. Some scholars believe that the urbanization of rural residents must be completed through three aspects of integration: first is systemic integration. The urban and rural economic, social, cultural and institutional systems should be connected rather than disjointed. The urbanization of the rural migrant population will not be achieved if they are accepted only into the economic system but rejected by other systems. Second is social integration. There should be no big difference between the rural migrant population and urban residents in behavior and lifestyle. Third is psychological integration. They should identify with urban society and have a sense of belonging.1 Obviously, there are institutional difficulties and real barriers to all of these three types of integration at present.
In the previous social environment, the main goal of these migrant workers was to gain wealth in the city. Normally speaking, their wishes for human rights were satisfied if they received economic benefits. However, after the 1990s, the second generation of migrant workers largely emerged, and became a major part of the mobile population. They crave opportunities for development and won’t stop merely at making money. They are educated to some degree and long more for city life. Their main purpose, different from that of the first generation, is to settle down and enjoy the same treatment as urbanites. They put more emphasis on their economic development rather than subsistence in a place far away from home.[page]
However, the limited resources in the city cannot accommodate such a big population. Large factories in Guangdong, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces are taking in tens of thousands of migrant workers almost in a captive way. They work and live in those factories, but cannot get a hukou (registered permanent residence) nor a house to blend in with the city. Due to lack of a sense of belonging, they wish to go back to work in their hometown. But it is hard to find job opportunities to support their families in the countryside where they were born and raised, while the city cannot satisfy their needs for development, which unavoidably triggers sharp contradictions and conflicts. Such problems in recent years as the successive Foxconn employee suicides by jumping from buildings and a scarcity of migrant workers reflect such intensified contradictions.
The fundamental approach to solving these problems is new urbanization, which is quite different from traditional urbanization. Although the development of both types has made farmers become workers to some degree, the new type has a smaller radius and absorbs farmers for work through developing the county economy so that they can seek development in an area closer to their homes instead of having to move to the few big cities or industrial regions in the country. In this sense, new urbanization can better promote the protection of development rights on an equal basis and help the whole society share the results of reform and opening-up. Specifically speaking, there are the following two significant aspects: (1) new urbanization highlights balancing regional differences to promote the movement of industries from developed areas to underdeveloped areas, especially the movement of labor-intensive companies or those with low production capacity from coastal to inland areas. In reality, the cost of investment is greater in developed areas than in underdeveloped areas, which areintensifying efforts to attract investment. Various types of economic development zones have been founded in different places,facilitating industrial movement and undoubtedly creating preferential conditions for improving a region’s image and promoting comprehensive development of the society. (2) New urbanization highlights balancing the differences between the city and countryside, achieving an integration of urban and rural infrastructures and equal access to public services, promoting economic and social development and realizing common prosperity. Since towns are not replicas of cities, it emphasizes economic development driven by the county economy and rural development driven by cities and towns. Urban and rural areas can differ in their economic modes but should gradually realize balanced development in income distribution and development opportunities.[page]
2. Promoting the popularization of social security rights
In traditional urbanization, though migrant workers can pay for their social insurance according to law, they are reluctant to apply for it due to their high mobility and practicalproblems in the social welfare system like being too regional, poorlycoordinated and hardly connected between different places. Thus they are unable to obtain sufficient social welfare. Meanwhile, the reality of underdevelopment and a poor urban environment in some places makes it hard to achieve full development of thesocial welfare system, which hinders the popularization of social security rights.
The development of new urbanization is conducive to common improvement of our social welfare level: (1) since the social welfare system is regional, the new urbanization meets the regional requirements of social welfare, so it can universally improve the level of social welfare for our residents. As new urbanization is based on local development, farmers who settle down there naturally hope for better social welfare. We can also see the significance of social welfare systematicallyintegrated with local conditionsin improving the level of social welfare development, judging from the popularity of the New Rural Cooperative Medical Care System in the countryside. (2) Improving the social welfare system requires the accumulation of human resources. Take health care as an example，themedical resources in our country are largely concentrated in big cities, and medical talent is reluctant to move to small cities, thus hindering the popularization of health care in our whole society. Only by bettering our urbanization work can we effectively attract professionals to move to the grassroots level and further enhance social welfare. (3) Improving the social welfare system requires the joint effort of families and society. Against the background of traditional urbanization, the welfare effects of families and society cannot be realized due to the restrictions of our economic structure. A large number of empty-nest elderly have thus emerged, whose social welfare cannot be effectively achieved. The development of urbanization can drive migrant workers back to small cities and towns, which in turn improves the level of urbanization.[page]
3. Promoting full realization of the right to equal education
As education is necessary for people’s development, we cannot truly have social equality without equality in education. The Outline of China’s National Plan for Medium and Long-term Education Reform and Development emphasizes that equality in education is an important foundation for social equality. In this sense, the purpose of education does not only lie in cultivating talent, but enabling the public to enjoy equal access to education. This is not only a national development strategy of rejuvenating the country through science and education, but a significant issuethatrelates to the construction of a harmonious society, social equality and justice.
However, as urbanization develops, the phenomena of Chinese rural left-behind children and empty-nest elderly are becoming more serious, thus causing a lot of social problems. Since third- and fourth-tier cities cannot create enough job opportunities while first- and second-tier cities cannot provide “outsiders” with sufficient education conditions, many farmers have to leave their children at home and work alone away from home. According to the Statistical Communique on National Educational Development in 2011, rural left-behind children among enrolled students in compulsory education across the country totaled 22,003,200, among whom 14,368,100 were enrolled in primary school and 7,635,100 in middle school. Duringthese key periods of growth and development, it was easier for these children to have deviations in cognition and value judgment due to a lack of guidance and help in thought and values as well as emotional care and attention from their parents; some of them may even commit crimes. Poor guardianship and insufficient comfort and care have led to many problems. In recent years, many cities in China have done a lot of work to improve education for the children of migrant workers, but it is far from enough. However, it’s unrealistic to ask every city to fully guarantee the education of these children.[page]
To fully realize the right to equality in education, we must effectively solve this problem. As pointed out in the Notice for the National Education System Reform Pilot Project Issued by the General Office of the State Council (General Office of the State Council issue (2010) No. 48) in 2010, we should advance the standardization of school construction for compulsory education, explore effective approaches to the integrated development of urban and rural education, improve the compulsory education system and mechanisms for the children of migrant workers and try to establish a noncompulsory education guarantee system for children of permanent residents without local residence permits. What’s more, we should improve the management systems and mechanisms of boarding schools and explore a mode for the balanced development of compulsory education for ethnic minority and underdeveloped regions. However, there exist many barriers in carrying out this work. Of these, population mobility, separation of urban and rural areas and scattered residence in the countryside constitute the main barriers to the protection of education rights.
New urbanization is conducive to the benign development of our education system, which has the following two meanings: (1) We can better solve the problem of education for left-behind children so they can achieve equality in education. The key to the problem of left-behind children lies in their parents. To solve the problem, we should help their parents find jobs near their homes as much as possible. (2) We should promote the development of the education system through new urbanization efforts to realize a fair distribution of educational resources. Education requires not only money, but also much more excellent teaching staff. In recent years, the phenomenon of good teachers being concentrated in big cities is getting more and more common, which results in even poorer faculty in rural middle schools. This can be mainly attributed to the fact that the countryside, where living conditions are pretty bad, cannot keep talented teachers. New urbanization can provide better and more convenient living conditions in order to avoid the loss of talented teachers and produce a more evenlydistributed education pattern.[page]
II. Building new urbanization based on the requirements of human rights development
In traditional urbanization, there have been acts that went against human rights. For example, some local leaders took urbanization as a way to concentrate residences, develop the real estate industry and so on. Such urbanization, instead of promoting human rights development and advancing urbanization,creates barriers or even leads to the opposite.
1. New urbanization cannot infringe upon citizens’ property rights
New urbanization involves a series of complicated questions, including the rural house site system and the right to land through contractual management. Article 10 of the Constitution and Article 8 of the Land Management Act stipulate that house sites are owned collectively by villagers. Article 152 of the Property Law says that the person who has the use right for housing sites can enjoy the right to own and use, and is entitled to build houses and ancillary facilities on the land according to law. The use right of house sites is an important right of villages, which is protected by the Property Law from infringement by other civil parties and by the Constitution from unscrupulous occupation by government agencies.However, in traditional urbanization, some local governments, out of consideration for land finance, deprived farmers of their right to choose and forced them to move into concentrated buildings, which indirectly deprived them of their right to use their house sites.[page]
What’s worth our attention is that the construction of concentrated residential areas involves the occupation of contractual land of other farmers across groups or even villages. According to the Law of the People's Republic of China on Land Contractsin Rural Areas, the period of a second-round contract for land in rural areas remains unchanged for 30 years (the second round began in 1997 and lasts to 2027). Therefore, the land for the construction of most concentrated residential areas is now rented from farmers’ contract land, which should be adjusted when the contract is over. Thus, farmers cannot obtain legal property rights for those new buildings they’ve recently moved intobut they have lost their legal right to use their house sites. As a result, their legal right to get residential land as planned according to law has not been fully protected and their property rightshave been seriously infringed.2
Meanwhile, in traditional urbanization, the farmers’ right to land contractual management is actually infringed. The changes in their lifestyle lead to a rise in their living and farming costs. Some scholars question that though the farmers are still farmers and continue to contract the land, their traditional lifestyle is radically changed as they are forced to move into apartment buildings. Various living costs have risen rapidly. Farmers even need to drive to the farmland and have no place to put farming equipment, raise poultry, plant vegetables and store crops. Is this the New Countryside the local government wants to build?3 This kind of urbanization damages farmers’ property rights, does no good for the protection of our citizens’ basic human rights, and thus cannot achieve wide social support.[page]
2. New urbanization cannot infringe citizens’environmental rights
In traditional urbanization, our environment and energy have beenregularly sacrificed in the process of economic development. China’s economy has relied on an extensive growth mode featuring large investment, high consumption, heavy pollution and low efficiency for a long period of time, and the development mode of growth at the expense of the environment and resources commonly exists. This kind of development mode gravely infringes on our citizens’ environmental rights. In addition, during the development of urbanization in recent years, companies characterized byhigh energy consumption and heavy pollution have started to move to the inland areas. We cannot encourage the spread of this phenomenon by using urbanization as an excuse.
We must fully realize that new urbanization is intensive, smart, green and low-carbon. During the development of new urbanization, we should regard sustainable development as an important goal and take it as a legal basis for the development of urbanization. Only by building new urbanization while promoting the protection of our citizens’ environmental rights as its basis, can we make our urbanization efforts conform to the trend of human rights development and thus obtain the people’s general support. On June 26, 2013, the Report of the State Council on the Work of Urbanization, which was deliberated on by the National People’s Congress, pointed out that the path of new urbanization is one with Chinese characteristics. It is people-oriented, intensive and efficient, green and smart, and synchronizes with the Four Modernizations.[page]
III.A new pattern of human rights development against the background of new urbanization
The development of new urbanization is a favorable condition for the protection of human rights. We need to take advantage of this situation to promote human rights development and build a new pattern for it against the background of new urbanization. Specifically,it has the following three aspects:
First, we should closely integrate urbanization with economic development. We cannot simply equate urbanization with farmers moving into the city. The key to urbanization is employment, or economic development of small cities and towns. Urbanization is not closely integrated with economic development in some places where farmers are forced to move into apartments. To change this situation, the first step is to change our way of thinking about urbanization development. Urbanization firstly means urbanization for people, not land. Only by liberating the rural surplus labor force and enabling farmers to work in their hometowns, can they be willing to move into apartments and become wealthy in the urbanization process. In this sense, fundamentally speaking, we should develop the economy of small cities and towns, and promote farmers’ professional transformation to achieve urbanization for people. Then urbanization of land will come naturally after professional transformation. But before it comes true, we cannot be overambitious and overanxious to forcibly popularize this practice through administrative means and hurt our people in implementing a policy that is supposed to benefit them.[page]
Secondly, we should facilitate an economic restructuring in coastal developed provinces and inland provinces, creating favorable opportunities for urbanization development. The problems of traditional urbanization can be largely attributed to unbalanced economic development and a scarcity of job opportunities in the inland area. Thus, we must create job opportunities through economic development in order to keep farmers where they are and drive urbanization development. In recent years, developed provinces like Guangdong and Zhejiang have successively promoted a strategy of “emptying the cage for new birds,” which means moving industries with relatively low production capacity to inland provinces. This is undoubtedly a great opportunity for the new urbanization drive. If inland provinces can go with the tide and cooperate with coastal developed provinces to absorb surplus capacity into small cities and towns to create more job opportunities, they can surely ease many serious problems caused by traditional urbanization.
The incumbent Premier Li Keqiang is an active proponent of new urbanization. He pointed out we should closely connect industrialization with urbanization when he was the Secretary of the Party Committee of Henan Province. He said during a speech: “As the agricultural labor force in Henan makes up over 60 percent of its total population, a basic method for building a moderately prosperous society in an all-round way is to accelerate the development of industrialization and urbanization and transfer a large quantity of rural surplus labor and rural population to nonagricultural sectors and cities. We should transform and improve traditional industries based on the conditions of our province, and actively accept the transfer of competitive industries from abroad and the east [of the country]. We can develop advanced manufacturing industries and labor-intensive industries with certain technical content to provide industrial support for urban development and attempt to make Henan an organic part of the world’s manufacturing base in China.”4This is undoubtedly a valuable judgment based on concrete conditions of the province.[page]
Last but not the least, we should connect new urbanization with the personal development of the Chinese people, and create opportunities for brilliant lives for our people through the development of urbanization. On the morning of March 17, 2013, the closing ceremony for the first session of the 12th National People’s Congress was held in the Great Hall of the People. In this closing ceremony, President Xi Jinping pointed out during his speech that we must gather our strength to realize the China Dream, which means that “the Chinese people, who live in our great country and era, should share opportunities for a brilliant life, for fulfilling one’s dream, and for growth and improvement together with our country and era.” A brilliant life and dream fulfillment is a beautiful expression of our citizens’ right to development. As urbanization involves farmers’ professional development and lifestyle changes, we should set people’s development as its basic goal during the urbanization process. If we adopt some policies in eagerness for quick success and instant benefit instead of considering farmers’ personal development and thus createobstacles to their growth, our urbanization cannot achieve its supposed goal.
The author is Professor and also Executive Deputy Dean of the Graduate School of Wuhan University.[page]
1.Wang Chunguang, Research on the Problem of Semi-Urbanization of the Rural Migrant Population, Sociological Studies, Issue 5, 2006.
2.Huang Xuexian and Qi Jiangdong, Farmers Forced Upstairs: Happy or Worried—From the Perspective of Legal Planning During the Urbanization of Rural Areas, Oriental Law, Issue 3, 2011.
3.ShuShengxiang, Farmers Forced Upstairs: That’s Not a New Countryside, Xinhua Daily Telegraph, November 3, 2010.
4.Secretary of the Party Committee of Henan Province Li Keqiang (then), To Realize the Rise of Central China through Hard Work, People’s Daily, March 14, 2003.
