People-centered urbanization
As an important part of China's people-centered urbanization drive, also known as the New Urbanization Plan, around 100 million people with rural household registration, or hukou, living in urban areas and other permanent urban residents will be granted urban hukou by 2020, raising the urbanization rate to 60 percent and the proportion of people with urban hukou to 45 percent. In September 2016, the General Office of the State Council released a scheme to push forward the program.
Under China's current hukou registration system, urban hukou holders have better access to a range of basic public services in cities. So granting urban hukou to people coming from the countryside, like migrant workers, is both significant for those involved and for the country's push to build a moderately prosperous society in all respects.
According to NBS data, the number of permanent urban residents had reached 793 million by the end of 2016, an increase of nearly 22 million compared with the year before, while the urbanization rate had risen to 57.35 percent. Meanwhile, the proportion of urban hukou holders accounted for 41.2 percent of the population, according to data from the Ministry of Public Security. Both figures show strong headway towards the targets set in the 13th Five-Year Plan.
In addition, Chinese cities granted more than 28.9 million residence cards to urban residents without local hukou, including about 1.69 million in Beijing, 406,000 in Shanghai, 810,000 in Guangzhou and 1.72 million in Shenzhen. The residence cards enable their holders to enjoy the right to access compulsory education, employment, medical care and other public services in the cities.
The government also made huge investment in infrastructure construction in rural areas such as building new roads and upgrading power grids, technological advancement in farming and green agriculture in 2016, while deepening the reform of the rural collective property rights system. Such efforts have contributed to the modernization of agriculture, the development of rural areas and the well-being of farmers in China.
