Abstract
Up to present, China is still represented by a typical dual society separated by both urban and rural concepts, and the income gap between the two is tending to enlarge. The low agricultural productivity and peasants’ insufficient labor skills result in slender incomes in their business, wage and transfer activities, with improvement though, which does not help to narrow the gap. Therefore, it is essential for peasants to acquire property income by means of rural land capitalization. In recent years, China has increased efforts to protect the property rights of rural land. However, there still exist multiple institutional barriers that prevent land from enforcing its capitalization feature, and shall be broken through at the shortest delay, so as to awaken the “Sleeping Capital”.
Highlights
Chinese peasants’ income has continued to grow since the reform and opening up, but the gap between urban and rural residents has become bigger and bigger
At the critical point of time when Chinese economy is transforming from investment-driven to consumption-driven pattern, improving rural residents’ income level and narrowing the income gap between urban and rural areas have become a top priority for the central government
China's urbanization rate has exceeded 50%, but it means there are still about 50% of the residents living in rural areas, increasing property income should be favorable for them
Summary
Chinese peasants’ income has continued to grow since the reform and opening up, but the gap between urban and rural residents has become bigger and bigger. Taking into account of other benefits for urban residents, such as in-kind subsidies, free medical care, unemployment insurance, minimum living allowance, pension security, and education subsidies, China's urban residents' income can reach 5-7 times that of rural income, much higher than the world average – 1.5 times[1]. Despite an increase to some extent in their wage income thanks to the improvement of the city's minimum wage level, China is still in the stage of transforming from the low-end manufacturing to high value-added manufacturing industries, her needs to rely on cheap labor to open up the market has not been fundamentally reversed; compared with urban households, there will still be a considerable gap for rural households to fill in their wage income. In 2011, the per capita net income of a rural first family-run industry gained 2,520yuan, with an increase of 289yuan, or 12.9%, thereinto, per capita agricultural income accounted for 1,897yuan, with an increase of 173yuan, or 10.0%
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