CRI听力:China to Further Develop Urbanization with More Registered Permanent Residents: Official

Yang Weimin, vice minister of the Office of the Central Leading Group on Finance and Economic Affairs, says that some one third of permanent residents in urban areas are not able to enjoy certain rights because they are unregistered.

"Though China's urbanization rate has reached a comparatively high level of 55 percent, its quality is not that high. The major reflection is that among the 750 million permanent residents living in urban areas, some 250 million are not registered residents. Thus they can not enjoy the corresponding public services nor related citizen rights in the urban areas."

Yang made the remarks when discussing a proposal for China's development plan in the next 5 years during a press conference held on Monday by the Information Office of the China's Cabinet.

He stressed that the current urbanization mode does not provide a good chance for migrant workers from rural areas to settle down and become permanent urban residents, and gives prominence to the problem of a shrinking working-age population in urban areas as well.

"Many of the migrant workers will leave the cities at around 40 years old, because they can't settle down in the cities and have to return to their rural hometowns. That means their working life will be around 20 years shorter than those in the urban labor forces."

Yang said the fundamental resolution is to improve the quality and rate of urbanization and turn those migrant workers into real city dwellers with registered households.

To achieve that, the central government will take incentive measures to encourage local governments absorb more rural residents.

"For one thing, the amount of incremental construction land that a city is to receive will be correlated with the number of incremental registered population it has. More generally, it means the more registered permanent population a city receives, the more land it is to gain, for building houses for the population."

Yang also mentioned the importance of the fiscal transfer payments a city will gain, since the government will spend more on services such as education and health if the city holds more registered permanent residents, meaning fiscal transfer payments will be significant for balancing the interests of different sectors of Chinese society.

For CRI, I'm Xie Cheng.