Reform And Opening Up Process Of Industrialization, Farmers' Identity Changes

Changes of farmers' identity is not just the change of household registration type. The process of such changes is the process of changes of survival approaches. The fundamental driving force is the industrialization of economic life. In certain sense, the farmers' identity change is equivalent to the "three rural" issue. The transformation from farmers to urban residents across the country or across regions (such as provincial and municipal) generally follows a certain pattern: "farmers - vagrants - jobless/homeless/income-less - off-farm workers - migrant workers - new citizen - citizen". Such evolutional process is important to state strategic policies such as reform and opening-up, industrialization speeding up and the reform of rural region. It might take decades even centuries to complete, and the specific paths it takes at different time in different regions will be diverse complicated.The thesis focued on a particular perspective of the region, X town, a historical town in southern Jiangsu, which has clear geographical advantage, a good industrial foundation, and now facing new opportunities. By analyzing the farmers' identity change process in X town, the advantages of critical urbanization steps to occur are highlighted. First of all, during 1980s to 1990s, the development of rural collective economy has build a solid foundation for further industrialization and urbanization. Secondly, the type of household registration as "Farmers" no longer exits since 2003. Lastly, at the time of the thirtieth anniversary of reform and opening up, Wuxi New District has reached late stage of industrialization after 16 years of rapid development. X town is officially become part of Wuxi New District since 2005, right at time for an excellent chance of urbanization.The thesis pointed out that, to the residents of X town, farmers to citizens or rural area to urban area, only two things matter: 1. how to find other ways to increase the income of farmers who have entered the public insurance system; 2. how to a complete and perfect public facility environment including education, healthcare etc. The core issue is to increase income. X town and Wuxi New District both have strong economic foundation. Public finance system was ready to invest in urbanization, problem lies in how to use best utilize the public finance policies to facilitate such transition.In this paper, different cases of demolition and resettlement of rural residents are studied and compared. The paper performed a detailed study on a special form of demolition and resettlement which is called "FUMIN Cooperative Association". The name literally means an association that makes the people wealthy. And the effect of this approach is verified, suggesting it is a feasible alternative to increase new residents' income. The paper also prospected and analyzed the meaningfulness and feasibility of state rural reformation strategies on promoting urbanization of rural citizens from region wide to nation wide.