Why is the farmers' collective an important guarantee for social development?
To clearly grasp the essence of the rural collective, one can examine six criteria: the peasant character of its members, the community character of its members, the equality of its members, whether it operates the collective's "three assets," whether it is endowed by policy with the value goal of common prosperity, and whether it can help the government implement social governance, comparing the institutional characteristics of different new-type collective economic organizations in order to find the institutional core of the contemporary rural collective.
From the attached table, it can be seen that the new-type collective economic organizations share two main common characteristics: carrying the value goal of common prosperity and helping the government implement social governance. The other two characteristics with relatively high overlap are the peasant character of members and the equality of members.
The farmers' collective stabilizes
Safeguarding the overall social order
If we understand and think about the future of the farmers' collective within the four-dimensional framework of land institutions, the state, the market and the community, then the state is the decisive variable; one may even hold that the socialist farmers' collective is a work of the state, but its future ultimately depends on its significance for social development. In the period ahead, the positive significance of the farmers' collective may mainly be reflected in the following aspects.
Rural land collective ownership is an important foundation for maintaining social stability. Rural land collective ownership is stipulated by the Constitution and cannot be changed in legal theory, but its actual connotation possesses considerable flexibility. Land collective ownership played an important role not only in the 30 years of state power building and agricultural economic development after the founding of New China, but also in the 30 years of industrialization and urbanization since reform and opening up; after land finance gradually fades, land collective ownership continues to help consolidate state power, develop the agricultural economy, and boost industrialization and urbanization. But one issue needs attention: China's current small-peasant economy is a small-peasant economy under the household contract responsibility system, not a small-peasant economy under private ownership. It is commonly thought that the small-peasant economy can give peasants who move to the cities a way out; in fact, this way out is realized in law through land collective ownership.
Farmland management rights and peasants' homestead use rights are being strengthened, but if handled improperly, the social risks generated by this institutional design will also concentrate from the farmers' collective toward government departments. In other words, despite the provisions of central policy, whether local and grassroots governments and relevant financial departments are truly willing to bear the related risks remains to be seen.
New-type collective economic organizations inject new vitality into the farmers' collective. As intermediary organizations, new-type collective economic organizations help smallholders connect with the big market and solve the difficulties of bringing land, collective assets, funds and agricultural products into the market. Among them, collective asset share cooperatives not only help capitalize the assets of the farmers' collective, but also help determine the relationship between collective membership qualifications and community membership qualifications. The more crucial issue lies in the relationship between land, funds and production, within which there are two basic relationships: the relationship between industrialized development and cooperative development, and the relationship between comprehensive cooperation and specialized cooperation.
The development strategy of agricultural industrialized operation started in 1995, exactly 20 years ago to date, so reflection on it is necessary. In its initial stage, it played a positive role in safeguarding urban supply amid rapidly growing demand and in boosting the marketization of agriculture. But when the food crop security situation is not optimistic and economic crops and livestock agricultural products are in surplus, this system of using state fiscal support to back enterprise competition needs reform. Many people believe that industrialization and the development of cooperatives are not contradictory; broadly speaking, the development of cooperatives is also part of agricultural industrialization, which is acceptable in terms of conceptual interpretation, but in the actual process of policy support, more funds are invested in agricultural enterprises rather than cooperatives. If this situation is not improved, then cooperatives can only deform in a state of being nominally what they are not, and gradually lose the connotation of the new-type farmers' collective. Another related issue is whether peasants' cooperative economic organizations should develop into comprehensive organizations or specialized organizations; at present we mainly develop specialized organizations. This issue is very complex, and the path that emphasizes specialization has its rationale, especially since specialized cooperation is relatively simple in institutional design. However, this path leads to a disconnect between community-based land share cooperation, mutual-aid fund cooperation and agricultural production cooperation, which in turn makes single-item cooperation difficult to survive, and various spontaneous comprehensive cooperative organizations also receive no support from this policy and find it difficult to survive.
The farmers' collective is an important guarantee for sustaining the survival and development of the community. With the increase in population mobility, the collective and community members have become separated, and the community's permanent resident population is not necessarily collective members. Members of the farmers' collective were originally determined through the household registration system; the agricultural household registration population of the community was generally the collective members. With the reform of the urban and rural household registration system, many places have abolished the household registration division between agricultural population and non-agricultural population, and the determination of collective membership qualifications has been more thoroughly handed over to the collective. The boundary between collective membership qualifications and community membership qualifications has become more blurred, causing the already weak grassroots democratic system to face severe tests in handling issues of vital interest to residents.
On the surface, this issue is about the relationship between two kinds of "private" interests, namely the relationship between collective members and community members, but behind it is the relationship between two kinds of "public" interests. Collective interest is a kind of public interest, and the harmony and stability of the community is also a public goal; how should these two goals be coordinated? In fact, the collective's "public" appears to be a "small public," the interest of a specific group of people, and the collective often appears as a "troublemaker" in order to protect its own interests; while the community's public is a "great public," concerning the peace of a locality. In developed areas, new communities located within the scope of the farmers' collective are institutional vessels that boost the citizenization of migrant workers and possess historical and moral rationality. Therefore, we see that when communities occupy the collective's resources for governance, they receive the support of grassroots and local governments. Thus, whether these two kinds of publicness will merge into one in the future is an issue worthy of attention.
Improving the capacity for institutional reflection
Safeguarding the development of the farmers' collective
Many scholars tend to believe that the future of the farmers' collective will depend on its historical rationality, so whether the farmers' collective can be allowed to unfold according to its own logic becomes a question. In fact, the farmers' collective arose from the state's macro-political arrangements and once gained more autonomous rights before and after reform and opening up, but now it is more constrained by bureaucratic organizations. The operation of bureaucratic organizations has its own unique logic; the logic of the farmers' collective is only one of the factors to be considered in the operation of this system, and its historical rationality must first pass through the filter of the instrumental rationality of bureaucratic organizations.
For example, with regard to the land system, national law emphasizes that rural land is owned collectively by farmers, but bureaucratic organizations are not necessarily conducive to collective ownership. For instance, some local governments have elevated the authority over transaction management from the farmers' collective to the county-level land management department; will management authority thus replace ownership? If such a replacement occurs, then the issue must be raised to the political level to be corrected. As for the vitality of new-type collective economic organizations, the emergence of the agricultural industrialization policy is the result of political considerations, and it acquired its practical form under the operation of complex bureaucratic organizations. As for the relationship between the collective and the community, this is a new issue that seems not yet to have entered the horizon of national political consideration. Where it will go will mainly depend on the exploration of local and grassroots governments. The institutional innovation capacity of local and grassroots levels is good, but the question is whether the farmers' collective can demonstrate its own rationality in this process of innovation.
The state's top-level design can often only frame the broad framework of institutions related to the farmers' collective, while the actual connotation of these institutions needs to be continuously enriched in practice, and in this process bureaucratic organizations exert a relatively large influence on them. If the institutional reflection capacity and self-correction capacity of bureaucratic organizations are effective, then the level of institutional rationality will be relatively high; otherwise, the future of the farmers' collective system will be full of uncertainty.