By Liu Shijin, vice-minister of the Development Research Center of the State Council (DRC), and Liu Shouying, Research Department of Rural Economy, Xu Wei, General Office, and Shao Ting, Institute of Market Economy, the DRC

Research Report No 212, 2013

Abstract:

Social and economic relations in the rural-urban fringe have gone through deeply acute changes in urbanization and the amount of collective construction land is a major source for income of farmers as well as future urban development space.

Rural residents in the rural-urban fringe area have engaged in urbanization on their own by using rural collective land and have formed another approach to urbanization that is different from the government's land acquisition approach.

The research selected Beijing's three typical villages and analyzed the actions and results of urbanization on farmers as well as the policy and institutional obstacles they encountered.

The survey leads to some policy suggestions on reforming the urban-rural duality and sound urbanization by starting from the rural-urban fringe.