Abstract: China’s growth model has overseen three decades of rapid economic development by moving toward a market oriented economy but also maintaining some significant aspects of the Maoist era economy. One aspect is the institutional division of rural and urban China. The household registration system still treats rural and urban residents differently and the land tenure system maintains vastly different land rights. These divisions have led to a strong urban development bias and an unbalanced growth model that has severely disadvantaged rural development and contributed to the three agrarian issues of agriculture, rural areas and rural people. In order to address these development issues it is necessary to incrementally dismantle rural-urban dualism through a process of rural-urban integration. This paper looks at the institutional basis of rural-urban dualism in the household registration system and land tenure system and argues efforts toward an integrated system have moved forward in recent years but far more needs to be done. The current divisions are unsustainable and the process of integration complicated by the traditional role rural areas play as a ‘population sink’ as well as the interlinking of residency, land and political rights. Successful integration of rural and urban China should proceed incrementally to invigorate rural development and meaningfully move China closer to the goal of economic transformation and politically sustainable development.