Researches On The Urban Population Reduction Of Zheiiang Province In The Early1960s

Reducing urban population is a key policy and measure in the national economic readjustment of China in the early1960s. Based on files and documents collected at Zhejiang Provincial Archives and other materials obtained by investigation and interviews, this paper analyzes and discusses the background, process and results of urban population reduction and residual problems at Zhejiang province.After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party determined to develop industry, especially heavy industry first. The implementation of the first "Five-Year" plan set the primary foundation of national industrialization. However, the succeeding "Great Leap Forward" campaign resulted in heavy difficulties to the national economy and people’s life. This radical industrialization not only heavily disrupted the economic structure but also resulted in an abnormal expansion of urban population in a short time and thus imposed great stress to national finance and market supply. The way to get out of this situation is to conduct overall readjustment to national economy, and reducing urban population then turned into a key measure.Urban population reduction is a nationwide task and during the implementation of this work, the achievements Zhejiang province obtained, both the absolute reduced urban population and the descent rate of urban population in general population, ranked above average among all Chinese provinces. The population reduction task lasting for more than three years involved various departments and different places of Zhejiang province. Analyzing from regions, reduced urban population at different regions are equally-distributed, except for Taizhou which has less inhabitants itself. As for analysis from different departments, reduced population and the compositions hereof are different from one department to another due to the characteristic difference of different departments. As for the actually reduced population at Zhejiang, different documents give different data due to different statistics means and other reasons. anyway, investigations show that the total reduced urban population of Zhejiang in general should be923,000, however, the compositions of these923,000population are rather complex.Rehousing is a key link of this task. The execution of rehousing policy directly influences the overall progress and the actual effect of the reduction task. Therefore, both the central and local governments set up a series of detailed rehousing policies and measures. As for these policies and measures themselves, they took various during-reduction and post-reduction links into consideration and were relatively perfect. Nevertheless, these rehousing policies and measures appeared complex and diversified during the execution and left a great many of problems and questions which have seldom been thoroughly solved by now.The reduction gave rise to three difffernt effects. Looking from the policy field, the reduction has obtained its designed target and thus is successful. Then looking from the society, a great number of urban residents left their homelands for the rural and thus brought various impacts to the urban, rural even the whole society. As for individuals, the reduction changed the survival conditions and historical destinies of more than20million people and several millions of families. Although many policies were formulated by the central and different local governments since1965in order to subsidize part of reduced population, such subsidy involved only a few reduced people due to the low subsidizing standard. That is to say, these subsidizing policies haven’t truly improved the lifes of these reduced people. Even today, those reduced people who lost jobs as well as related social security and other welfares during the reduction are still with living difficulties and problems in their pensions, families and offspringsThe urban population reduction is a "reverse migration" driven by "political instructions" and its success at the policy aspect is jointly contributed by various elements such as the social encouragement from the executive party, the national system, the urban and rural differences and the social psychology of the public.