A Study On The Problems And Strategies Of Equalizingthe Basic Public Services In The Urban-rural Fringe Areas

Urbanization is an important social phenomenon after the Industrial Revolution,which is a historical process in our society. Along with this historical process, ourcountry is gradually transforming from a traditional rural agrarian society to anindustrial, service-oriented modern urban society. The transformation includes thechanges of career, the industrial structure and the geographical space, etc."End of thevillage" and “the citizenization of the farmers” are the unavoidable twin phenomenaborn in the process of urbanization.A typical urban-rural dual structure was formedbased on the Chinese household registration system. In the structure, the urban andrural communities are two relatively independent and closed space and the residentsin theurban-rural fringe areas are granted with different rights and treatment.Thequality and level of the basic public services supplied to the people in the urban-ruraldual structure is significantly different and non-equalized. In the process ofurbanization, a growing number of the migrant famer workers live in the suburbs. Itforms more and more special suburban communities. The level of public servicesdirectly affects not only the well-being of the people in these areas, but also the rightof subsistence, health and development of the people in the suburban communities. In2005, the5th plenary session of the16th central committee conference of CCPproposed the reforming proposition of "public service equalization". Two years later,the17th People’s Congress proposed that the fundamental reforming objectives of thepublic service is to improve the level of public services and ultimately achieve a fairand efficient public service system for the community. Thereafter, improving thepublic services has become an important task for the Chinese government in theprocess of social construction. Basic public services as an important condition forhuman development cover many aspects, which mainly includes education, healthcare, social security, employment and so on. Therefore,“public service” is the coreconcept in the reform of public administration of the government in the21st century.Providing basic public services for the citizens has become one of the typicalcharacteristics of a modern state. The equalization of the public services is one of thebasic objectives of the government’s public finances.The Chinese scholars have made extensive research on the equalization of basicpublic services in the rural-urban communities. The existing studies mainly focus onthe definition, evaluation criteria and strategy of the equalization of basic publicservices. There are some important findings in the existing studies, but there are twoimportant areas need to be improved: First, from the geographical perspective, theprevious studies divided the rural and urban areas as two separate communities,which made the urban-rural fringe areas as two opposite extent, ignored the study ofthe suburban community, which is aparticular geographical and social space s; Second, these existing studies in this area are mainly based on the theoretical framework ofpublic finance. These studies argued that the main cause of the non-equalization of thebasic public services is the imbalance of the fiscal transfer payment system. Theseresearches ignored the supplier of the public services in the rural areas.This study looks deeply into the two ignored perspectives. Firstly, this researchwill focus on the non-equalization problems of the urban and rural residents living inthe urban-rural fringe areas under the background of urbanization since the reformingand opening of China. This study is going to investigate the dynamic developingprocess of the equalization of the basic urban-rural public serves by making casestudies in the K district of C city during the process of social restructuring andinstitutional change. The population in the urban-rural fringe areas includes bothurban and rural residents, who live closely with each other. This community model isextremely complex. The public services are closely linked with the householdregistration system, which resulted in the vast differences in the level of publicservices enjoyed by the two. The uneven distribution of the public service resourcesduring the process of urbanization made people questioning about the social equityand justice. What’s more, it is apt to intensify various social contradictions and evenlead to serious social conflicts. Suburban rural community issues not only present newchallenges to the construction of public service system, but also provide opportunitiesfor pushing the integration of the urban-rural public service systems. As a result, theunbalanced public service system will be rebuilt and the goal of urbanization will beachieved. Therefore, improving the level of public services gradually and supplyingthe cities’ new immigrants with reasonable services and resources are a realistic andpractical developing mission in the process of “the end of the villages”,Secondly, this study constructs a development model of equalization of the basicurban-rural public services by deducing the real logic between the overalldevelopment planning and the equalization of the basic public services throughinvestigating the supplying mechanism of the public services in the urban-rural areas.The paper is based on the following investigation: First, investigating the full range ofsupplying mechanism in the K district to get a clear and dynamic picture of basicurban-rural public service policies and the non-equalized situation. The past, presentdevelopment situation will be included in the scope the analysis; Second, this paperanalyzes the non-equalization from the macro and micro perspectives, which not onlyincludes the macro analysis of the central government’s policies, but also the microanalysis of the local government as a major supplier of the public services of aspecific region; The third is to study the strategy and tactics of building andimplementing the equalization policies by investigating how the central and the localgovernment improving the equalization of the basic public services.This paper is featured by its case study analysis. This method enables the authorto analyze issues of equalization in a specific way which makes up for the previousresearches. The previous studies focus too much on the national layer, but ignored theregional layer. This paper conducts a deep analysis on the equalization issues inurban-rural fringe area of the K district to find out its extended meaning from both inand out of the region, so that a more objective analysis could be made. There are two major research methods used in this paper: literature research and field studies. Thesignificance of collecting and sorting the documents of the government’s policies isthat: First, the government is the supplier of urban and rural basic public services;second, the policy itself will be able to reflect the non-equalized supply of the basicpublic services in the urban-rural fringe areas. The field research is conducted bymeans of making unstructured interviews.