Abstract: The high-quality promotion of citizenization for agricultural transfer population faces the dilemma of two“barrier lakes”. Based on statistical analysis and empirical study with the multi-source data, it is found that, firstly, the current process of citizenization is slow, and the problem of“semi-urbanization”is severe. Agricultural transfer population is gathering towards the central and western regions, the super and super-large cities and their central urban areas, and shifting towards the tertiary industry. Secondly, the expansion of the city scale and the permanent residence in the central urban area will significantly enhance the urbanization willingness of agricultural transfer population, but at the same time, it will weaken their urbanization ability in dimensions other than public services, and the high-quality public service resources will be concentrated in the central urban area, further exacerbating the agglomeration of population towards the central urban area. Thirdly, there is a significant gap in public service resources between different types of cities, central urban areas and suburbs. Public service resources in super and super-large cities and their central urban areas are expanding rapidly, while public service resources in small and medium-sized cities are idle. In the future, we should accelerate the development of large cities and above in the central and western regions, enhance the human capital level of agricultural transfer population, establish and improve the cost constraint and sharing mechanism for urbanization, and strengthen the comprehensive construction of the non built-up areas in super large cities and the built-up areas in small and medium-sized cities, guiding agricultural transfer population to flow to such areas and achieve urbanization.

Key words: citizenization of agricultural transfer population, city size, central urban area, public service, investment in people