For decades, there have been differences, both in quantity and quality, in the public services offered in urban and rural areas. The situation has improved in recent years, but problems still exist.

In the 12th Five-Year Plan period, the State should make it a priority to ensure that the transfer of labor and rural land can be made according to the law and market rules so that farmers can have a better life in cities and land can be used in a more reasonable way.

This requires us solving three problems: reform of the current hukou system, so rural residents who give up agriculture can become urban residents; the setting up of a unified market for urban and rural land resources; and establishing the basis for a unified welfare system to cover urban and rural residents.

Currently the central government only has guiding principles on the three issues and local governments are following different practices. As a legal framework may not be established within five years, the local governments should try to overcome the difficulties and meet these goals, while the central government should press ahead and deepen the reforms.

The third objective, of raising farmers' incomes, also needs deeper reforms. We are still facing the problem of inaccurate or incomplete data when it comes to farmers' incomes. Statistics provided by some departments include rural residents' income from non-agricultural sources. In other words, the data includes the wages of migrant workers who are no longer farmers. This accounts for a large part of rural incomes and it is still increasing.

In fact only the incomes of those who depend on agriculture for a living should be counted as farmers' incomes. But as yet, we do not have a clear picture of the incomes of this group of people.

From a long-term perspective, the key to promoting farmers' incomes should be supporting more professional farmers, expanding their business scale and making them more competitive in the global market. To this end, farmers' rights to their contracted land should be protected for a long period of time and new types of rural cooperatives should be cultivated.

The author is a rural development researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

China Forum