In recent years, farmers-turned-workers started as "blind migrants" loathed by some city dwellers and are now still limited to manual work that their city counterparts are unwilling to do. Their wages are low and always defaulted. Their work safety cannot be guaranteed and living conditions are poor. Husbands and wives have to separate and their children, usually excluded from urban schools due to high fees, are left at home.

While the living conditions of migrant workers are not optimistic, the contingent is becoming bigger year by year. This shows farmers' pursuit of the well-off civic life and the irresistibility of economic social development.

The migrant workers' hardships and the 10 issues stressed at the conference are really provocative.

What is the hard nut for China's modernization? Everyone may have his or her own understanding, but no one can deny that a huge rural population and low urbanization level are the crux of it.

Since the land contract and responsibility system was implemented, farmers began looking for job opportunities outside their home land. Thus there appeared township enterprises and a large influx of rural labourers into towns and cities.

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