Chen Xiwen: Urban-rural coordination means enabling people to move between cities and rural areas
GUIYANG, Nov. 14 (Chinanews.com, Huang Hua) “The highest ideal of coordinated urban-rural development is to let people freely choose between cities and rural areas.” Chen Xiwen, director of the Office of the Central Rural Work Leading Group, said this while delivering a lecture in Guiyang on the spirit of the Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee. He said the reason urban and rural development is currently uncoordinated is that advantageous resources are concentrated in cities, causing rural people to migrate to cities one after another in order to obtain these resources.
Chen Xiwen is a well-known Chinese expert on agriculture, rural areas and farmers, and he has long paid attention to rural issues. On November 11, the Migrant Population Service Center of the National Health and Family Planning Commission released the “Report on China’s Migrant Population Development 2015”, which stated that by 2020, China’s floating and migrant population will gradually grow to 291 million, of which about 220 million will be people transferred from agriculture.
⟦NL> “The saying that cities make life better is not complete; a well-built rural area can also make people yearn for it.” Chen Xiwen pointed out that at present, the resource factors of China’s rural areas are continuously flowing outward, and no new factors that can drive rural development are being injected, which has created the current situation of uncoordinated urban and rural development. If rural areas can have complete infrastructure, farmers in rural areas can also enjoy the same services as in cities, and they will not necessarily leave the countryside.
Chen Xiwen believes: “Coordinated urban-rural development does not mean making rural areas and cities the same, but rather requires the government to provide equal services to rural areas and cities, so that rural resources can meet the needs of the people living in rural areas, and people can meet their own development needs whether in cities or rural areas. This is true coordinated development, and the recommendations of the ‘13th Five-Year Plan’ also reflect such requirements.”
The “13th Five-Year Plan” recommendations point out that in the next five years, China will promote coordinated urban-rural development, improve the institutional mechanisms for integrated urban-rural development, and advance equal exchange of urban and rural factors, rational allocation, and equalization of basic services. It will promote the extension of urban public services to rural areas, improve the policy system supporting farmers’ income growth, and strengthen the internal momentum for rural development.
Chen Xiwen said: “Guizhou has a good ecological environment. After so many years of development, it has made tremendous achievements in ecological civilization construction. More importantly, it has built expressways connecting cities and rural areas. Villagers have hope, and their positive and enterprising spirit has given Guizhou’s rural areas the possibility of being as beautiful as cities.”