Research On Citizenization Of Peasant Workers From The Perspective Of Dual Economic Transition

After 40 years of transformation and development through reform and opening up,China’s industrialization and urbanization levels have been greatly improved.At the same time,China enters the ranks of middle and high-income countries from low-income countries(1).However,the urban-rural dual structure still exists obviously.The binary contrast coefficient which reflects the strength of the dual-economic structure is not only lower than the level of developed countries,but also lower than the level of developing countries at the same development degree.Since the dual structure is the basic structural feature of the Chinese economy,the huge binary contrast between workers and peasants,urban and rural areas is still the crux of restricting the sustained and healthy development of the national economy.In this sense,the dual-economic transition is not only an important part of the supply-side structural reform,but also the key to release economic growth potential and achieve the high-quality development of China’s economy.Since the reform and opening up,China has transferred 288 million agricultural laborers to non-agricultural industries(2).However,these transferred populations only basically completed the transformation of non-agricultural occupation,but did not complete the transformation of their status from farmers to citizens.Hundreds of millions of peasant workers travel long distances between towns and cities like migratory birds.The huge differences between them and urban residents in terms of enjoying public services had caused many economic and social problems.If it is said that the separation of non-agriculturization and citizenization of peasant workers has significantly promoted China’s industrialization with low labor costs,then,under the new historical conditions,the negative impact of the transition way of labor force is increasingly apparent.Therefore,the citizenization of peasant workers has become the primary problem to transform the economic development mode and promote the dual economic transformation in the current stage.Although the classical dual economic theories take the non-agricultural transfer of agricultural labor force as the core problem of the dual-economic transition,they assume the non-agricultural occupation change of agricultural labor force and the transformation of citizenship as the same process.Influenced by this,foreign scholars seldom study the citizenization of the migrant agricultural population.Although Chinese scholars have done a lot of research on the issue of peasant workers’ citizenization and obtained rich research results,these studies mostly focus on the meaning,the process,the cost-sharing,the influencing factors of peasant workers’ citizenization,as well as countermeasures to promote peasant workers’ citizenization.This thesis tries to use Marxism political economics,development economics,new institutional economics,labor economics,econometrics and other theories to study the urbanization of peasant workers from the perspective of dual-economic transition.The main contents are listed as follow.Firstly,it uses a systematic theoretical analysis to analyze how the citizenization of peasant workers promotes the transformation of the dual economy.The connotation of peasant workers’ citizenization is expounded from the two aspects: economic integration and social integration of peasant workers.The citizentation of peasant workers is regarded as a highly complex social system engineering project and a gradual and dynamic evolution process.On the basis of summarizing the core content of the Lewis-Fei Jinghan-Lannis model,the basic meaning of the dual-economic transition is demonstrated.This paper mainly discusses the mechanism by which the citizenization of peasant workers promotes the dual-economic transition.The citizenization of peasant workers can increase the average area of cultivated land and promote the process of agricultural modernization through the scale operation of land.The citizenization of peasant workers can improve the peasant workers and villagers’ human capital investment willingness and investment capacity,which in turn promotes a virtuous circle of industrialization and agricultural modernization.The citizenization of peasant workers can provide market conditions for the coordinated development of agricultural and non-agricultural industries by releasing the potential of consumer demand and investment demand.The citienization of peasant workers can promote the coordination of workers and peasants and urban-rural integration by giving full play to the urban agglomeration effect and the radiation and driving effects on the countryside through urbanization transformation.Secondly,it investigates the present situation of China’s agricultural labor transfer and the citizenization of peasant workers.With the combined methods of historical and realistic analysis,this paper analyzes the path characteristics of non-urbanization and semi-urbanization of China’s agricultural labor transfer since the reform and opening up under the background of the non-equilibrium system transition from a planned economy to a market economy.It investigates the current situation of China’s agricultural labor transfer and analyses its changing trend.The present integration situation of peasant workers’ citizenship is examined from two aspects: economic integration and social integration.The citizenization degree of peasant workers is measured with the Anker method based on living wages.The conclusion is the citizenization degree of peasant workers is about 54% at present.Thirdly,it analyzes the impact of separation of non-agriculturization and citizenization of peasant workers on the dual-economic transition.The separation between the non-agriculturization and citizenization of peasant workers is not conducive to the investment of human capital of peasant workers and rural residents,which restricts the transformation of China’s economic development mode.The separation of the non-agriculturization and citizenization of peasant workers is an important reason for China’s urbanization to lag behind industrialization.This not only affects the development of the tertiary industry,restricts the expansion of consumer demand,but also affects the urban agglomeration effect,the radiation and driving effect on the rural areas,which restricts the coordinated development of agricultural and non-agricultural industries,towns and villages.The fact that the separation of non-agriculturalization of easant workers and citizenization makes it difficult for peasants to withdraw from agricultural production completely.Therefore,the scale of agricultural operation has not only expanded correspondingly with the transfer of agricultural labor,but also seriously affected the process of agricultural modernization in China due to the continuous reduction of factors bringing agricultural land non-agriculturalization.The poor employment stability,the low-income level and poor public services treatment has made peasant workers a marginal group in towns.It also leads to the dual differentiation within the towns.A large number of young and middle-aged laborers enrer cities and towns for employment,while elderly,the weak,women and children are left behind which led to the rural hollowing.Fourthly,it discusses the predicament of the peasant workers’ citizenization and institutional causes.At present stage,the citizenization of peasant workers in China is confronted with four major difficult problems.The first problem is the deviation between employment situation and living cost and difficulty in setting down.Secondly,the citizenization ability of peasant workers does not match their willingness.Thirdly,the demands of the citizenization of peasant workers are not equal to the impetus of the citizenization of local governments.Fourthly,it is very difficult to fit the income sharing and cost sharing of peasant workers’ citizenization.There are also four main reasons that cause the above-mentioned dilemma.Firstly,the historical accumulation problem of the urban and rural dual household registration system is very severe.Secondly,the urban-rural dual land system reform lags behind.Third,the political achievement appraisal system and the resource allocation system are in short supply.Fourth,under current financal system the administrative power does not match with financial power.Based on the analysis to the predicament of peasant workers citizenizaiton and its institutional cost,this paper also uses the fixed effect regression model and the breakpoint regression model to test the impact of China’s household registration system reform on the citizenization of peasant workers.The conclusion is that the reform of household registration system has a significant positive impact on the degree of citizenization of peasant workers.At last,it puts forward some suggestions on promoting the citizenization of peasant workers from five aspects on the basis of theoretical analysis and empirical evidence,aiming at the cruxious problems faced by the current urbanization of peasant workers and their institutional causes.The first is to improve government governance in order to promote the rational allocation of resources between urban and rural areas and regions.The second is to deepen household registration and its related institutional reform for the purpose of promoting the equalization of urban and rural public services.The third is to deepen the reform of rural land system on behalf of the increasing property income of peasant workers.The fourth is to deepen the reform of fiscal system,so that the financial constraints of peasant workers’ citizenization can be broken down.The fifth is to perfect the labor market and improve the citizenship ability of peasant workers.