A Study On Social Security System For Urbanized Landless Farmers

China is entering a period of fast industrialization and urbanization, which puts a huge demand on land resources. In recent years, there have been a big increase on the amount and scale of governmental requisition of lands and therefore the increase in the number of landless farmers. According to statistics, there are so far 40 million landless farmers in China. Generally, these landless farmers can be divided into two categories. The first group is the farmer living in the suburban area of cities, or the overlapping area of cities and villages. The other groups of farmer live in rural area and lose their land mainly because of road construction or other major national construction projects. The first groups of farmer live in the forefront of industrialization and urbanization. They are not only the main body of landless farmers but usually the"new residents"going to move into the cities, facing the difficulties of transforming their working and living forms. This paper will refer them as"urban landless farmers".Although the government strictly controls the land use for construction, the amount of land to be requisited and landless farmers will go up for sure taking into account of the speed of industrialization and urbanization. Due to historic and realistic reasons, the landless farmers in China lack proper support of social security. The urban landless farmers in particular often become farmers with"3 Nos"—i.e."no farmland, no jobs and no minimum social security". They tend to have difficulties with basic living and are dissatisfied with the society. In recent years, there have been cases that issues arising from land take-over cause disruption to the harmony of social development. Therefore, how to help the landless farmers to resettle down is of crucial importance to China's economic growth and the harmony between economy and society. This paper will discuss, in the context of China's goal of"building a well-off society in an all-round way", the necessity and practical ways of establishing effective mechanism for safeguarding the social welfare of landless farmers. The paper intends to shed some light on the policy-making of the establishment of landless farmers social welfare mechanism.Besides foreword, the paper will be composed of the following parts. The first part is on the necessity of establishing proper social welfare system for landless farmers. It goes into the details about the status quo and impact of landless farmers on society, the lack of proper social support for landless farmers and the significance of establishing the social security system. The second part covers the basic content of social welfare for landless farmers, mainly analyzing why landless farmers need the minimum support for living, medical care and old-age pension. The third part introduces some thoughts on the establishment of the social security mechanism. The main focus is on how to improve the compensation policies for land take-over, improve the mechanism of"land for social welfare"and the practice of"gold-wrapped silver"project. The fourth part puts forward suggestions on the establishment of social welfare system for the farmers. Suggestions are made from the perspective of policy-making and legislation, transparent process of land requisition, guidance and the job skills training for the landless farmers.