Zhao Chang, a farmer from Jinzhou, Hebei province, started his business as a tailor and now runs the largest clothing supermarket in the city of Jinzhou -- the Tianbirong Supermarket where he hired more than 40 farmers at present. Jinzhou has invested 260 million yuan in building a large-scale comprehensive market covering an area of 26.7 hectares with more than 4,000 stands -- New Century Commercial City in order to encourage farmers to engage in trade, attracting farmers to go downtown for business with preferential treatment in the areas of license applications, taxation and the school education for children.

Enormous contributions brought by the transfer of agricultural population

Zhao Chang is an epitome that farmers start to engage in commerce and transport services. In the view of economist Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner "the urbanization in China and the high-tech development in the United States will be the two keys to influence the human development in the 21st century deeply ... China's urbanization will be a locomotive for the regional economic growth and produce the most important economic benefits''.

Since the reform and opening-up, more than 200 million farmers have been transferred to non-agricultural trades with doubled labor productivity, offering enormous driving force for Chinese economic growth. The transfer of the rural population to non-agricultural industries will also be one of the power sources for China's economic development in the future. "Only by reducing rural population can China solve the issues of Chinese villages and agricultural development fundamentally, which will create the conditions and offer the space for the transition of the whole economic system'', pointed out Lin Yifu, director of the China Economic Research Center of Peking University.

Accelerated China's urbanization

The urbanization rate in China has already risen to 42 per cent at present according to international experiences and statistics, and China is in the acceleration period of urbanization. In recent years, the urbanization growth rate has been kept at nearly two percentage points on average annually. The number of China's inland cities has risen to 660 from 193 in the initial stage of reform and opening-up period, among which the number of the big cities with a population of more than 1 million is 40; the number of cities with a population of 500,000 to 1 million people is 54 and the number of medium-sized cities with a population of 200,000 people to 500,000 is 217. The urban economy has already contributed to more than 70 per cent of the Chinese gross domestic product (GDP).

Pave the way for rural population transfer

How to realize the shift of the agricultural population to the non-agricultural industries is the key question of China's urbanization instead of the simple issue of how many people live in the cities. From this angle, it is more important to create job opportunities for paving the way for the shift of the agricultural population than the reform of the household register system.

For the key question of China's urbanization, namely, the transformation issue of the agricultural workforce to the non-agricultural industries, says Professor Lin Yifu, the main breakthrough point should be made in the traditional agricultural areas in the central part of China so as to realize the shift of the rural labor force in the central part successfully, promoting the industrialization and the workforce flow in the central areas.

Professor Lin Yifu proposes that there are two ways for solving the population shift in the rural areas in the central part of China: First, develop medium- and small-scale labor-intensive industries and commercial trades in a big way; Second, remove various obstacles hindering the workforce flow, and then promote the development of small towns.

By People's Daily Online