Recently I saw a TV program, in which China is aggressively following the policy of moving rural population(farmers) to near Industrial towns. Govt construct cheper housing complex outskirts for these people and ask them to move their as they cannot provide water for irrigation for their land. These folks have no choice but to get employed in factories. I dont know, this may be one of the case!? I think migration is happening in India as well but at slower pace. In my opinion farmer should be encouraged to do better farming instead of working in factory. Govt should provide better facility for farming otherwise countries like china and india will have less and less farm hands and expensive farm goods.
Asking everyone to do subsistence farming is not the way to economic development. Take two scenarios.
A well run farm can be run by some 10 people and produce food for a 1000. This would mean that the 10 people make lots of money while the remaining 990 people can do other productive things like industries or services. Since the 990 people are not tied into farming, they produce things like TVs, Air conditioners, cars and run shops. As a group of 990 people, everyone gets access to industrial goods and food.
The other extreme is the case of subsistence farming. In this case government encourages everyone to do farming. So all 1000 people work on small pieces of land producing food. Since efficiency in farming goes down with smaller farm sizes, these 1000 people produce food for 1000 people. End result being that as a group of 1000, they have food and basic necessities but no TV,no AC etc.
Anyway, ever heard of the three gorges dam ? That's caused more damage than Narmada dam and is a bigger project than Ganga-Kaveri link being proposed in India. We can't blame China for not trying everything to get water around their country. Criticism of environment is probably valid, but as long as its effects are local to China, who are we to complain ?