Abstract: For a long time, the “dilemma” of China’s “issues concerning farmers” was told as “growth without development”, i.e. the labor productivity and per capita income of farmers had not improved at all with a continuous increase of the total agricultural output. Real addressing such an issue started from the reform and opening up (since 1978), and from the migrant workers’ flow. Our survey tells: 1) the trend of more Chinese farmers’ getting employed in fields out of agriculture grows, and their regional choice is widening; 2) in terms of their choice of working place, the first choice lies in the counties and towns nearby, followed by the second and third tier cities, few first tier cities also on the list. There is no doubt that the high income of cities has a strong pull-out effect on farmers. Such a factor runs together with the rapid development of agricultural science and technology. However, farmers’ non-agricultural employment is also fragile and unstable. To cope with that, we should, on the one hand, establish the absorption mechanism with counties and small towns as the focus in time according to farmers’ employment trend and their regional distribution, and speed up the process of confirming and transferring the right of rural land so as to form a virtuous circle between farmers’ getting employed out of villages and their expanding land management in villages. The population base in rural areas has been still very large for a long time. In view of this, the rural revitalization is also the key to realize China’s modernization with Chinese characteristics, and to settle “issues concerning farmers” in China.

Key words: migrant workers’ flow, regional choice, issues concerning farmers