Where are the focal points for deepening rural reform?
To achieve the strategic goal of comprehensively building a moderately prosperous society, the fundamental approach is to proceed from the concepts of innovative development, coordinated development, green development, open development, and shared development, and through reform promote the protection of farmers' property rights and enable them to share in the gains from land appreciation; promote the optimal allocation of resource factors and realize the modernization and transformation of traditional agriculture; promote the continuous breaking down of the institutional barriers of the urban-rural dual system and ensure that farmers truly share in the fruits of development.
The next five years are the decisive stage for comprehensively building a moderately prosperous society. “Whether it is moderately prosperous or not, the key lies with the folks back home.” To achieve the strategic goal of building a moderately prosperous society, the fundamental approach is to proceed from the concepts of innovative development, coordinated development, green development, open development, and shared development, and through reform promote the protection of farmers' property rights and enable them to share in the gains from land appreciation; promote the optimal allocation of resource factors and realize the modernization and transformation of traditional agriculture; promote the continuous breaking down of the institutional barriers of the urban-rural dual system and ensure that farmers truly share in the fruits of development.
Reform of the rural land system: with the circulation of management rights at its core. As is well known, apart from income from agricultural production and operations and income from working away from home, farmers have almost no property income. Land and housing are the rural resource factors with the greatest market value. Promoting market circulation to release this dormant energy of property rights can not only open up new channels for increasing farmers' income, but also open up new avenues for farmers to expand production, increase investment, and provide credit assets. In the Comprehensive Implementation Plan for Deepening Rural Reform, it is explicitly proposed that deepening the reform of the rural land system means implementing collective ownership, stabilizing farmers' contract rights, and invigorating land management rights. This, on the premise of adhering to collective ownership of rural land, further accelerates the separation of contract rights and management rights, further strengthens the pattern of the separation of ownership, contract rights, and management rights into three rights and the circulation of management rights, and makes rural collective property rights clearer. In essence, this takes granting farmers more property rights as the fundamental starting point and ultimate goal, clarifies the attribution of property rights from the perspective of membership rights, grants farmers various powers and functions such as possession of collective asset shares, income, paid exit, as well as mortgage, guarantee, and inheritance rights, and promotes the establishment of a mechanism linking the rural collective property rights system with the market.
Reform of the agricultural management system: with cultivating new types of business entities as the key. In the Comprehensive Implementation Plan for Deepening Rural Reform, it is explicitly proposed to grant professional large households, family farms, cooperatives, and others corresponding market entity status. Farmers are the most numerous and form a very large group, so their voice should be very great. However, under conditions where market entities in agricultural inputs and agricultural product processing are highly organized and price alliances have already formed and are manipulating market prices, atomized farmers, each household on its own and separated from one another in a loosely organized state, become harder to organize the more numerous they are, and instead engage in vicious internal competition, unable to become complete market entities participating in the interest games of the market. To grant new types of business entities market entity status, it is necessary to quickly make the agricultural management system compatible with market mechanisms. As for what kind of market entity status should be granted to today's rural professional large households, family farms, and rural cooperatives, relevant laws and regulations need to follow up; otherwise, these business entities are nominal. There is also another problem: the entry mechanism and exit mechanism of cooperatives have not been formed, and the related rights are not very clear, resulting in many empty-shell cooperatives. For example, the separation of the three rights of rural land stipulated by original policies, how to implement the separation of the three rights was only written in documents, and rural land could not be effectively circulated. This implementation plan clearly stipulates that it can be mortgaged, guaranteed, and used for loans, and this immediately changed from “empty” to “substantive.”
Reform of the agricultural development system: oriented toward protecting farmers' interests. It is necessary to establish a mechanism for sustainable agricultural development. The major strategy of safeguarding the country's food security is premised on ensuring that farmers can continuously obtain comparative returns from agricultural development, and ensuring sustainable agricultural development depends on nothing other than the incentive effect of agricultural product market prices and the guiding effect of government fiscal input. In recent years, because the cost of agricultural production has risen sharply with increases in the prices of means of production and rural labor prices, for example, rural labor prices are even higher than urban labor prices. During rural field research, farmers reported that labor costs were too high, and that farm work had to be exchanged between households to reduce costs. Therefore, this will undoubtedly cause the effect of the state's fiscal policy to deviate from policy expectations. At the same time, no matter how high the government's agricultural fiscal subsidies are, they cannot surpass the substantive benefits of agricultural product market prices. To improve the support and protection system for agriculture, on the one hand, the guiding effect of government fiscal input must work through the driving force of agricultural product market prices; on the other hand, the incentive effect of agricultural product market prices needs the impetus of government fiscal input to be stimulated. The incentive effect of agricultural product market prices needs the construction of a comprehensive government institutional system to go further, and the construction of the government's institutional system must rely on the incentive effect of agricultural product market prices for sustainable development. To practice a market economy without acting according to the rules of the market economy: once pork prices rise, the government holds meetings and issues documents on how to push prices down; once pork prices fall, it issues documents for comprehensive support. Excluding the resource allocation of agriculture from the market will inevitably trigger many problems.
Reform of the urban-rural integration institutional mechanisms: with shared development as the goal. Urban-rural integration requires equality of urban and rural economic rights and political rights, giving farmers equal national treatment. In economic development, the most important thing is the right to equal exchange between urban and rural areas. For example, land must prohibit forced government requisition, and agricultural product prices and agricultural resources must be determined by the market. Another is the right to equally enjoy public goods in both urban and rural areas, regardless of ethnicity, gender, or occupation, and everyone in both urban and rural areas has the right to enjoy them equally. For example, building roads in rural areas mostly requires farmers to pool funds; where in the city is there fund-pooling to build roads? Electricity is a commodity, yet farmers have to pool funds to build power facilities. Many “projects benefiting the people” require rural supporting funds and grassroots supporting funds. In the end, who provides the supporting funds? Townships and villages mostly have no fiscal capacity, so in the end it is farmers who pay, while the same construction in the city is paid for by the government. Therefore, the reason farmers are a vulnerable group is not only that the comparative returns of agriculture are low, but also that farmers' pensions and various other social security benefits are not covered by public finance, causing the rural labor force to suffer unfair treatment in the market. When the rural labor force participates in market competition, there is no social security, and everything must be borne by themselves. Only by breaking down this urban-rural dual institutional mechanism and achieving major breakthroughs in promoting equal exchange of urban and rural factors and balanced allocation of public resources can farmers share in the fruits of development; and only shared development can fully give play to farmers' principal role and pioneering spirit, and can continuously stimulate the vitality of rural development.
Reform of rural social governance: with innovation in villager self-governance as the breakthrough. For thousands of years in China's past, rural social governance was a gentry system, and such rural governance kept the civilization of the Chinese nation unbroken for thousands of years. But at that time it was an agrarian society in a closed natural economy, whereas now it is an era of globalization and informatization. It can be said that the era we live in is the coexistence of three eras in time and space: many backward areas are in the agrarian era and are in the process of developing to escape poverty; many places have entered the industrial era and are accelerating the process of urbanization; and some developed areas have already entered the information era, such as the Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou regions, which are absolutely not behind the cities of developed Western countries. In developed Western countries, the progression from the agrarian era to the industrial era and then to the information era was gradual, whereas we are fortunate to be in the coexistence of three eras, which is an unprecedented development history in human history. As a country with a huge population in the world, large-scale and rapid urbanization and modernization will undoubtedly bring intense collisions between tradition and modernity, between institutions and reality, and between city and countryside, and many institutional constructions cannot be uniform. Villager self-governance must reflect differences, because every village is different. How can innovation in rural governance be realized? It needs to be advanced within the larger framework of building political civilization, to open up and invigorate grassroots democracy in rural areas, and to innovate effective forms of realizing villager self-governance. Advancing the reform of rural social governance and realizing the separation of politics and economics essentially requires, at a new historical turning point, exploring effective ways for rural reform to achieve a fundamental transformation from focusing mainly on the development of productive forces to simultaneously promoting the improvement of the superstructure, so that rural grassroots organizations can smoothly achieve transformation and rebirth in this new round of reform.