The rural population of China may drop to 20 percent of the current total by 2027 and that agriculture will then represent less than 5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, a Chinese scholar has suggested. 

Dang Guoying, a researcher with the Rural Development Institute under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the transfer of labor from rural to urban areas was a deep-seated trend and China shouldn’t impede it.

China currently has 1.3 billion people, more than 800 million of whom are farmers, or about 60 percent of the total population.

Statistics show that rural populations have shrunk by 1.6 percent annually in recent years. "If more active urbanization polices are implemented the rural population will decrease even more quickly," Dang said.

Vice Minister of Construction Chou Baoxing said at an international urbanization forum in Shanghai in November that 50 percent of the Chinese population would live in urban areas by 2010.

Some people worry that there'll no longer be enough labor in the countryside with only the elderly,  women and children left there.

But Dang said there was no need to worry about the transfer of labor from rural areas to urban districts. With the development of modern agricultural technology elderly people and women would be able to do the work once undertaken by young men. Agricultural output wouldn’t decrease despite the loss of many male laborers, he said.

As they moved to urban districts the income of the farmers remaining in rural areas would increase, Dang said.

(Xinhua News Agency January 9, 2007)