'Unique' China defies world's predictions
By Xu Binglan (China Daily)
Updated: 2004-06-21 08:32

(Continued)

China Daily: Improving the incomes of farmers is seen as a significant task for China. Do you have any suggestions?

Huang: My point here is seven years ago, when we thought about rural poverty, we more or less just focused on rural areas. Today, because China is more integrated, people are more connected, no problem can be solved just by looking at that problem by itself. It affects so many things.

What is difficult today is that problems are both multi-sectoral they cut across different sectors and geographically, they cut across regions, rural-urban and provinces. Before it was very specific. You do an urban issue, its an urban issue. You do a rural issue, its a rural issue. You do a project in Hunan, its a Hunan issue.

We now realize that many of the new problems are broader problems.

Yes, there is a need to deal with rural areas, but you think about this problem differently from seven years ago.

Before I came here, if you wanted to improve the lives of the rural population, it would be very logical to think about rural policies, rural investment and rural infrastructure by itself. Today, if you want to think about improving the lives of rural people, you cannot think about it as solely a rural issue. It is a rural-urban issue.

Twenty years ago, China's population was 75 per cent rural (about 85 per cent by Chinese standards), 25 per cent urban. The official statistics are different compared to international standards. If you talk about if people's lives and services are connected with urban areas or rural areas, you see China is now 50 per cent rural and 50 per cent urban.

In another 10 years, China is going to be 75 per cent urban. It could be faster, it could be slower. That depends on whether the government encourages or discourages movement housing policies, residency permit policies, educational services and so forth.

If that is the case, a big part of the rural population will move to urban areas. That means processes need to be well managed and probably accelerated.

There are two consequences. The people that stay in agriculture, the true farmers, they will have more land. You must increase farm sizes to increase incomes in agriculture.

When the moving farmers go to the cities, they will get wages, income, which are much higher than their earnings in the rural areas.

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