Advertisement
China’s rural workers face bleak choice: stay in emptying villages, or move to job-scarce cities?
- Survey from Chinese university shows rural residents’ desire for middle-class lifestyle is superseded by low incomes and lagging social services
- Researchers find lower quality of life still present in countryside – and weak job market in cities means fewer alternatives for those who’d leave
Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
2
Many of China’s rural residents, who for years sought middle-class prosperity by becoming urban migrants, now feel trapped between two unenviable choices – stay in villages with insufficient resources, or move to population centres with dour employment prospects – a no-win situation which threatens to impede the country’s plans for rural revitalisation and its efforts to narrow the lifestyle gap.
Advertisement
Though it has brought benefits, China’s rapid urbanisation has also led to pressing issues in rural areas, including insufficient access to care for the elderly, rising divorce rates and declining fertility, according to a survey by Wuhan University.
The research, conducted in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the social media platform Weibo, was based on data collected from 115,000 residents – 34,000 rural and 81,000 urban – over the Lunar New Year holiday in mid-February.
Due to a mismatch between household income and expenditures … an urbanised lifestyle in rural areas is facing a dilemmatic trap
“China is currently undergoing an unprecedented urban-rural integration,” the report said, pointing to an increasing number of farmers buying homes and cars in cities and the popularity of online shopping in rural areas brought on by the development of digital infrastructure.
Two-thirds of the Chinese population lived in cities last year compared to 40 per cent two decades ago, government data showed.
“However, due to a mismatch between household income and expenditures,” said the Wuhan University researchers, “an urbanised lifestyle in rural areas is facing a dilemmatic trap, a pseudo-middle-class life.”
Rural residents are finding it increasingly difficult to sustain a high-quality life, as evidenced by a pronounced “hollowing out” of villages, authors warned.
Advertisement
Advertisement