On The Sustainability Of Old-age Security For Land-lost Peasants In The Urbanization Process Of China

Urbanization is a transfer process of peasants into citizens, of agriculture to non-agriculture, during which the peasants come to cities. With a rapid development speed, the urbanization rate has reached51.27%as early as in2011in our country. It is widely acknowledged that when the urbanization rate reaches40%-60%the city enters a critical phase when the "city disease" will be more frequent than ever. The central working conference of urbanization held in2013believes that it is unprecedented to realize urbanization in a country like China, whose population is more than1,3billion for present. It means that we should be more prudent to face all the problems that might come into being in the development of urbanization.Generally speaking, it is inevitable that lots of peasants will lose their land during the development of urbanization and modernization. However, it is the irrational institution that results exerts a negative influence on the society. In China, the main way to realize urbanization is to requisition agricultural land through executive powers. By now, a growing number of rural collective land has become urban construction land, in the meantime, more and more peasants have lost their land, and become a new social group, that is land-lost peasants. However, because of the defects of current land expropriation system, the imperfect of land property rights, as well as the lacking of social security, the land-lost peasants find it’s hard to maintain their interests or ensure the quality of life. In recent years, the land-lost peasants are increasingly marginalized. Many of them have become a member of the "three have-nos"-have no land to cultivate, have no suitable job vacancy to fill, have no access to social insurance. Petitioners have increased spectacularly in recent years, which poses a great threat to social stability. Therefore, the author aims to put forward a sustainable security system for old-age land-lost peasants, which will both tackle the problem of land lost and conform to China’s policies.The old-age security system should be sustainable, and the latest policy is also designed to be widely-applicable, flexible and sustainable, which lays great emphasis on its equality, adaptability to liquidity and promise of being sustainable. Nevertheless, there exist few systematic discussions about the concepts of sustainable old-age endowment insurance or its evaluation system. This thesis will first review the concept of land-lost peasants and previous research on such topic before bringing up the definition of a sustainable old-age land-lost endowment insurance. Judging from the features of land-lost peasants and the development prospect of their social security, the author holds the view that the sustainable development of land-lost peasants and continuity of the country’s institutions should be two cornerstones of the security insurance of land-lost peasants. Policy makers should not only pay attention to the production and development rights of this generation, but also to the welfare of their offspring. In the conclusion part, author further analyzed change of the country’s policies and discussed the sustainability of the new old-age security system for urban and rural residents which is also applied to land-lost peasants.