Social Inclusion Of The New-Generation Rural Workers From Underdeveloped Areas And Related Policies

With the generational shift of the rural workersand the change of the productive relationship between the urban and the rural areas as well as that within the city and the countryside itself in the recent decades, the new-generation rural workers are becoming the mainstream workforce, playing an increasingly significant role in the economic growth and social management. As compared to their predecessors, the new-generation rural workers are much more competitive, with higher expectations for their lives, a broader horizon for development and more active motivation for the achievement of self value. However, in similar situations as those of the first-generation rural workers, the new generation, having moved away from their original environment and life style, are faced with a big problem of assimilating into the new, urban community because of the man-made and institutional prejudices and other obstacles. Without effectively assimilating into the mainstream society, they will remain isolated within themselves, turn to a sub-cultural, subversive group and eventually slip into abnormal and even law-violating forces detrimental to the stability and harmony of the urban community. Thus, the social inclusion of the new-generation rural workersis an issue that comes inevitably with the transition of the economic system from planned economy to market economy, a question that both developed areas and underdeveloped areas have to confront. From the perspective of the social system, this inclusion requires an absolute change of the current discrepancy between the rural and the urban; from the perspective of regional unity, this inclusion reflects the increasing gap between the rural and the urban; from the perspective of the market economy, this inclusion is the requirement of the unified regional and even national labour-force market. With the advent of the flourishing economic models such as the Wenzhou Mode and the Sunan Mode, this inclusion appears easy in relatively developed regions, but in the socially and economically underdeveloped areas, the capacity for the inclusion of rural workersis very limited. Researchers didn’t start paying their attention to the problem until very recently, and what researches there are now are defected because of the limited scale and coverage. Generally speaking, current studies in this field are focused on the following four aspects:economic inclusion, social inclusion, system inclusion and cultural and psychological inclusion. For all their high expectations, the rural workers will take long to assimilate into the urban communities as far as these four aspects are concerned. Compared with those in developed areas, the rural workers in underdeveloped areas are shortchanged in employment, income, social interaction, life style, communal psychology and cognitive capacity. The difficulties for the rural workers in the underdeveloped areas to assimilate effectively in the urban surroundings lie in the following:the hukou system and the employment and social security insurance based on it, the dual criteria concerning the city dwellers, social acknowledgement, traditional prejudices and the rural workers’own personal factors, etc. Although these problems have been tackled by researchers, no concrete measures have been taken to settle them.The present paper aims to expose, with statistics obtained in Gansu Province, the problems in the inclusion of rural workers, and the disadvantages as compared to the better-developed areas of the east and the south, and to propose substantial measures that ought to be taken by the authorities to solve these problems. The main content and tenets of the present paper are as follows. First, status quo and features of the new-generation rural workers in the underdeveloped areas, the characters and difficulties they are faced with in their effort to assimilate into the urban community; Second, analysis of the reasons for the difficulties of the rural workers’inclusion, maintaining that the urban-rural dual criteria, the age-old hukou system, lack of social security, conventional prejudices and the workers’own disqualifications are the major factors blocking their inclusion. Third, attempts for the policy-making concerning the rural workers’inclusion, particularly in such aspects as regional economic development, regional management innovation, governmental involvement, strategies concerning the labour-force shift from the country to the city, human rights protection on the part of the rural workers, employment and occupational training services, etc. Forth, migrant worker-oriented policy making in the underdeveloped areas, namely, the gradualist transformation from government mandate to market guidance, the inclination of national strategic policy-making to underdeveloped areas, and special measures in favour of the new-generation rural workers. With particular attention to the situation in Gansu Province, the author proposes the following priorities in solving these problems:the change of the urban-rural dual system, occupational training for the new-generation rural workers, the improvement of the work competence of government agencies, and the possibility of the rural workers to return to their hometown for the construction of the new countryside.With reference to relevant theories from both China and the West, the paper is endowed with novel perspectives:the practical investigation of rural workers, city residents, enterprises and businesses, and government agencies of Gansu Province concerning the inclusion problem, along with a comparison of Gansu Province with better developed areas, is used as the foundation for the analysis of the status quo, features, and difficulties of the inclusion. An analysis of the current policy-making concerning the rural workers’inclusion in underdeveloped areas is used as a foundation for the proposal of ideal policies for the same problems. The guiding methodology of the present research is empirical study and comparative study, with questionnaires and interviews as complementary instruments, and statistic analysis as the operational tool. Strategically, macroscopic, microscopic, and what comes in between, as well as specific system element, are employed as perspectives in order to achieve a multi-lateral and multi-angle scrutiny of this problem.The present paper has achieved two innovations. First, the study locates the problem of the new-generation rural workers in the system of regional development, particularly in the development modes of regional economy, urbanization patterns and regional planning and innovation, maintaining that the government has a significant role to play in the inclusion of the migrant works in the urban community, this role being assessable in the evaluation of government performances. Second, The present paper holds that the difficulty of the new-generation rural workers’inclusion into the mainstream society lies not only in social injustice, but also in more deeply-rooted conventions, and based on this assumption, goes on to posit that gradualism is the best solution, in that any city or economic community has a limit to their capacity for absorbing incomers. The ideal settlement of the problem will be accomplished only through the unflagging implementation of innovative coordination between the city and the countryside.