Abstract: The two major public health crises，the SARS crisis in 2003 and the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020 reveal the lagging progress of citizenization as a prominent weakness in China’s economic and social governance. The citizenization of migrant workers lags behind scale urbanization，which leads to scale migration and further to increased risk of epidemic spread and difficulty in prevention and control. The settlement of migrant workers in cities and towns lags behind the urbanization of labor force，which leads to increased difficulty in resumption of work and production after the epidemic. The county level urbanization of migrant workers is far lower than super or mega city level，which leads to an increased probability of epidemic diseases. Drawing on the experience and lessons from the two public health crises，we believe that in the 14th five-year plan period，it is essential to systematically break the “iron triangle” of urban-rural dual household registration，public service system and land system，to accelerate the urbanization and resettlement of migrant workers，and to completely change the “separate” urbanization model that distinguish migrant workers as labor from as consumers.

Key words: public health crisis, citizenization of migrant workers, system innovation