China was largely a country of peasants when the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of the People's Republic of China, the rural population was 505 million in 1953, while the urban population was only 77 million. In 1995, the rural population peaked at 859 million, but by 2020 it had decreased to 510 million, or about 36 percent of the Chinese population. This rapid urbanization process has had profound social impacts, as rural and urban China are divided through the "household registration" (hukou 户口) system; rural and urban China are each governed under their distinct set of policies, conditioning people's access to food rations, housing, education, healthcare, and other welfare goods. This radical change in population structure is also a reflection of evolving national policies on urban-rural relations. The earlier phase started in the 1950s, with rural regions viewed as supplying both labor and agricultural production in support of the country's industrial sector. This urban-rural separation resulted in the "three rural problems" {san nong wenti 三农问题)， outcomes first identified by Wen Tiejun in 1996 and summarized as the inefficiency of agriculture, the insufficiency of village infrastructure, and the unsustainabil-ity of farmers' incomes.1 The beginning of the second phase, which aimed to promote urban-rural coordination by redirecting urban resources toward rural development, was officially announced in 2003.
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