Rural Development In China

China, considered as one of the miracles in rapid economic growth in the past three decades, has shown the world its enormous potential in economic development and has been able to bring millions and millions of people out of poverty. Nevertheless, China still faces a lot of issues during the development: The huge income inequality gap not only exists when comparing rural and urban China, but also can be commonly seen regionally, especially between the east and the west. The environmental damage is also a tough issue for China to maintain sustainable development. To explain the status of China’s current development, I will focus on the theoretical frames that incorporate the structure of the international system as well as the domestic institutions.

For China, specifically, institutional factors are also accountable for the current development issues in the nation. As we know, China is a country with the world’s largest population of more than 1.3 billion. Aiming to limit the population in the cities and to restrict the migration from rural to urban, the Chinese government created a system of permanent registration in China known as “Hukou”. Referred to as a location-specific registered permanent residence, Hukou is a system that the Chinese government implements to restrict labor migration (Whalley et.al 2004). As quoted from the article Inequality Change in China and (Hukou) Labour Mobility Restrictions, “Not having Hukou in urban areas means that migrants receive no education or health benefits and cannot purchase housing, since title to it cannot be registered by them” (Whalley et.al 2004). Hukou, enforced by the government institutions since the late 1950s, acts as a barrier to urban-rural migration and therefore limits the labor mobility among different regions in

People in China who live in the rural or the western part of China desire to move to the urban or the eastern part of China where the wages are higher and more opportunities are available; however, restricted by the system of Hukou, many of them are banned from chasing their dreams. Hence, the majority of rural migrants who actually work in the major cities, unlike the urban residents who have Hukou, barely have access to the social resources like education and health insurance. This type of domestic institutional factor, although keeps the population in major cities under control (the government has to make sure that the limited resources are available for the elites and middle-class who live in the urban regions), hinders the labor mobility inside China, creating a huge income gap between rural and urban China as well as the east and the