Move ... or else: why is China's government forcing millions of farmers to move into cities?

• Author: Johnson, Ian
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

Imagine government officials showing up at your house and ordering your family to move. You don't get any say about where you're going. Your parents have to give up their jobs, and you have to switch schools. Then they bulldoze your house.

That's exactly what's happening to millions of people in China. The country's Communist government is going ahead with a plan to move 250 million rural residents into towns and cities over the next dozen years. That's nearly 10 times the population of Texas.

The government hopes that the move--one of the largest human relocations in history--will boost the country's massive economy, which has recently started to slow down. But many worry that the forced migration will create even bigger problems for China for generations to come. Either way, it will change the country forever.

Over the years, urbanization has taken place in China naturally, as farmers with big-city dreams have ditched their plows and headed for Beijing, Shanghai, and other rapidly growing cities. In the 1980s, about 80 percent of China's population lived in the countryside, compared with 47 percent today.

But China's government says the country needs to urbanize faster. Officials want at least 70 percent of the nation's 1.4 billion people--the largest population in the world--living in cities by 2025. The idea is that more city-dwellers will mean more people spending money, making China's economy less dependent on exports for growth.

Today, almost every Chinese province has large-scale programs to move farmers into towns and cities. As farmers trade in their huts for high-rise apartments, their plots are leveled and built over or given to agricultural companies to manage.

Losing 300 Villages a Day

In Communist China, all land belongs to the state, even if a family has lived there and farmed it for centuries. That means families have no way to fight the forced relocations. In recent years, dozens of people have set themselves on fire rather than move. Families rarely get sympathy from local officials, who often profit from the evictions by selling long-term leases to developers.

Rural residents who do move are given free apartments and compensation payments. But for many of them, that isn't enough to start a new life in the city.

"We know how to farm but not how to work in an office," says Wei Dushen, a former farmer who now lives in Huaming, a newly created town in northeast China. "Those are for educated people."

This rapid urbanization means that villages are disappearing at a rate of about 300 a day. In 2000, China had 3.7 million villages, according to research by Tianjin University. By 2010, that figure had dropped to 2.6 million.

The widespread destruction of villages reveals a deep cultural bias against rural life: A common insult in China is to call someone a farmer, a word equated with backwardness and ignorance.

One city taking in the rural population is Chongqing, in central China. There, former farmers live in skyscrapers dozens of stories high. China's government is even building entirely new...