Liao became a worker 6 years ago for the Hong Kong-funded Charter Media Dongguan Co. in Dongguan city in South China's Guangdong province after he left his home in rural Jiangxi province.

"About two-thirds of the 2,000-strong employees at the electronics factory are from the countryside outside Dongguan," said Liao.

Dongguan is home to 2,800 computer-related manufacturing companies, mostly overseas-funded, producing such electronic devices as mainboards, monitors, scanners and drivers for the overseas and domestic markets.

Like Liao, millions of farmers are working in factories in urban areas in China, and their number is growing, thanks to the accelerated pace of the country's industrialization and urbanization.

A survey conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture found that, by the end of September this year, 92 million farmers had left home for jobs in urban areas for more than half a year, mostly working for manufacturing and tertiary sectors.

According to another survey by the ministry, the country's township enterprises, contributing to 47 percent of China's added manufacturing output last year, employ a total of 130 million farmers, many of whom still farm in busy farming seasons.

The workforce of State-owned and collectively-owned companies in urban China, however, dwindled to 87.62 millions by the end of September, a year-on-year decrease of 6.16 million due to the strategic restructuring of State-owned businesses.

Guo Wencai, director of the Grass-roots Organization Department of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, said, "The makeup of China's manufacturing workers has undergone great change, the number of farmers-turned workers has surpassed that of workers in traditional terms, or those born in urban areas with household registration."

To date, farmers-turned workers are involved in most of the traditional sectors and new industries, compared with the situation in 1978, as China began its historic process of reform and opening up to the outside world, when urban citizens constituted 99.8 percent of manufacturing workers.

Lu Xueyi, president of the China Society of Sociology, said: "The phenomenon of millions of farmers becoming workers has reshaped the fabric of China's agrarian society."

The gap between urban and rural areas in China was narrowing in some economically prosperous areas, said Lu.

The change would have great impact on China's ongoing economic transition, urbanization process, household registration system, social security and the thinking of the population in general, he said.

Liu Yanbing, a research fellow with the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, said the rapidly growing army of farmers-turned-workers was the result of the rising demand for workers in China, which had maintained a sustained, fast economic growth and was gradually becoming one of the world's major manufacturing centers.

Most of the farmers-turned-workers were employed by the non-State-owned sectors, namely in private and overseas-funded businesses, said the expert.

By 2005, a total of 390 million rural people would be added to the workforce, and some of them would join manufacturing sectors in urban areas, said Liu.

With that in mind, the Chinese government since 1999 has worked on a nationwide program to train farmers for jobs in urban areas, and the plan has been implemented in 40 counties or rural parts of cities on a pilot basis.

Zhang Zuoji, Minister of Labor and Social Security, said the central government was in the process of setting up a pension system for employees coming from the countryside.

Under China's unique household registration system designed five decades ago, farmers-turned-workers are still classified as farmers and do not enjoy urban welfare benefits such as heavily subsidized housing, medicare and pension.

During the past two years, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions has been urging overseas-funded and private business across the country to set up trade unions in a move to protect the legitimate rights of farmers-turned-workers.

The presence of farmers-turned-workers has increased competition on the job market in urban China, which faces the arduous task of creating jobs for its residents, including those laid off by money-losing State-owned enterprises.

The central government plans to create eight million jobs each year until 2005, and bring the urban registered jobless rate under five percent.

(People's Daily December 20, 2002)