Minority Areas In The Process Of Urbanization, Urban Poverty Research

With the accelerated process of urbanization, industrialization and marketization over the past three decades since China adopted the policy of Reform and Opening-up, minority areas in China have seen rapid and sustainable economic growths and notable improvement of people's living standards, and have entered the new stage of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects. However, despite the economic and social development, the problem of urban poverty in minority areas has become an increasingly evident social problem instead of being eliminated gradually. Owing to such factors as low production capacity, poor natural environment and backward social and cultural development, the problem of urban poverty in minority areas has been more prevalent, more profoundly felt, and more difficult to solve. Consequently, the long-run existence of the problem will not only result in the hard living condition of poverty-stricken people and their families, but more importantly, it will affect the healthy, rapid and sustainable social and economic development of minority areas, affect our nation's ethnic unity, social harmony and stability, and our country's modernization process.Against the background of the new phase of our country's economic and social development, with urban poverty in minority areas as its research subject, adopting Literature Research methodology supplemented by Positive Analysis and Normative Analysis, and making use of a joint method of Systematic Study and Case Study, based on the international and domestic research achievements in this regard by different academic fields, this dissertation has done a profound study on urban poverty in rapidly urbanized minority areas, has evaluated and analyzed its scale and reason, based on which corresponding anti-poverty strategies and policies have been proposed. The body has been divided into five parts:Part One is a general theoretical review on poverty, mainly on such fundamental theories of poverty as measurements of the connotation, type and the method. In addition, in sorting and summarizing poverty theories from home and abroad in terms of economics and sociology, it has been pointed out in this part that poverty, as a historic and developing concept, with the economic development, social progress and the enhancement of the human civilization, develops from the initial absolute poverty to relative poverty, from the income poverty to the ability poverty, from individual poverty to system poverty, from economic poverty to power and culture poverty, and becomes a broader, more comprehensive and more diversified concept.Part Two reviews the current situation of urban poverty in minority areas and analyzes the factors that cause the problem. As urbanization in China's minority areas is at an accelerating phase, it will intensify urban poverty in these areas for a certain period and will help to eradicate the problem as well. The underprivileged people in these areas are mainly made up of urban residents entitled to basic living allowances, the peripheral group who lives in poverty though their incomes are above the poverty line, and the rural migrant workers. Urban poverty is caused mainly by such factors as the co-existence of the contradiction of the total volume of workforce supply and demand and the contradiction of employment structure, the widening income gap, the unsound social security system, the low stock of human capital, the low level of the social relief, the prevalent culture of poverty.Part Three summarizes and comments on the current policies to tackle the urban poverty problems. At present, the governments in the minority areas have primarily implemented proactive employment promoting policies, established social security system, urban subsistence security system, medical relief system and education relief system to address the issue of urban poverty. Thanks to these efforts, the livelihood of the underprivileged has been basically guaranteed. However, as a result of such problems as low coverage of systems, large capital gap, low security level, and unscientific design of the systems, further improvements are needed to make the policies and systems more universal and fair, more scientific and effective so as to solve a variety of practical problems of the underprivileged. Part Four is a reflection on the experiences drawn from other countries to fight against urban poverty. One the one hand, such western regions as the EU, countries as the US and Japan have accumulated many beneficial experiences in tackling anti-poverty in their drive of urbanization, industrialization and modernization. On the other hand, we can learn from the lessons of India and Brazil, developing countries like China, to strengthen the anti-poverty legislation and government's role in aiding the poor, make more fiscal investment, carry out categorized and differentiated aid, attach importance to human resource development strategy, improve the all-inclusive social security system, and to strike a balance between fairness and efficiency in designing anti-poverty system, between the present development and sustainable development, etc.Part Five is on the designing of the anti-" urban poverty" strategy in minority areas. Guided by Scientific Outlook on Development, the local government should take such measures as accelerating the urbanization process in these minority areas, implementing the macro-economic polices to promote employment, building a sound income distribution system, improving a universal and sustainable social security system, establishing a new type of social relief system, and developing social commonweal projects, in order to establish and improve anti-poverty policies and systems which are corresponding to the level of economic development and balancing urban and rural development, in an effort to achieve the strategic objective to ensure that each person enjoys the basic living security and to basically eliminate poverty.This dissertation shows originality in the following aspects:Firstly, comprehensive studies and analyses on the structure and total number of urban people living in poverty in minority areas have been made in this dissertation. Fundamental principles and systematic strategies including the proactive employment policy, fair income distribution policy, universal social security policy, comprehensive social relief system, and the cause of social charity and social mutual help to tackle the urban poverty problem in minority areas have also been put forward.Secondly, in this dissertation, the poverty of rural migrant workers has been considered as part of the urban poverty of minority areas and an initial estimate of the number of rural migrant workers in minority areas have been made. Solutions to the problem of their poverty have been put forward in regard to the household registration system, housing policy, education policy for migrant workers'children, employment promoting policy, vocational training policy, social security policy and policy concerning employment transfer across the regions.Thirdly, this dissertation has made an analysis of the reasons causing the urban poverty in minority areas from the perspective of culture, pointing out that it is the unique natural environment, resources and ethnic psychology that create the unique culture of poverty in the minority areas, summarizing the main characteristics of the culture of poverty, namely, sticking to old ways, submission to the fate, satisfaction with the status quo, guarding the garden till death, the passive waiting, lack of belief, superstition and blind exclusiveness.