【有文稿】鼓励农民工买房，怎么鼓法？

Michael: Well, just to continue the discussion on the housing front a little bit, it was also announced that China would help rural migrants obtain urban residency and then cultivate the housing market among these new residents. So how do you think they will be able to guarantee that these new residents will be able to actually afford the house prices in the areas where they choose to settle down? Zhang Jun: Well, these are very comprehensive issues. Over the past ten years, a lot of rural populations have moved down to the towns, and they are not given the same social status as the local residents. The problem is that they can easily return to the farming land, this is the problem. So I think, in terms of the urbanization process and the housing reform, once they got settled in a city where they’ve got jobs and they’ve been given the urban residence status, there should be no way they can return to farming land, so that the government can get a lot more land which they can transform from residential land to farming land. By doing so, China can save a lot of urban land, actually. As I said, we’ve really got an oversupply of housing, so we could actually encourage the migrant workers who got the residence status, they can actually access the housing market with government aid. For instance, they can get mortgages from commercial land, from the commercial banks, according to the policy, so that is something that the government should do, I think – encourage a lot more migrant workers to get housing with the financial support. LK: Well then, if you encourage migrants to settle down in cities and you encourage the government to change residential land into arable land, who would be left to the task of really farming there? Would there be enough labour force in the rural areas in the country? Zhang Jun: Well, this is actually the issue related to the modernization of Chinese agriculture, you know. I think, a couple of years ago, there were government policies that came down to tackle those issues, because we should let the land be tradable, so that some people who really specialize in farming and have a human capital accumulation over the last 20 years, who can specialize in the farming activities so they can actually acquire more land so they can specialize in this agriculture, which I think would improve the Chinese agricultural productivity. So, you know, all the reforms in different areas are quite interrelated, so we can move in that direction – urbanization, but at the same time, we should let the land be tradable, so that people can get access to arable land and specialize in farming activities.