Agricultural Modernization: Actively Exploring a New Development Model Suited to National Conditions
Since 2004, the No. 1 Central Document has focused on the “three rural issues” for the twelfth consecutive time, playing a major role in advancing China's agricultural development. General Secretary Xi Jinping also pointed out in relevant speeches that without the modernization of agriculture, farmers, and rural areas, there would be no modernization of China; without moderate prosperity for farmers, it would be impossible to build a moderately prosperous society in all respects. But in recent years, against the backdrop of slowing economic growth at home and abroad, rising operational risks, domestic economic restructuring, and the continuous advancement of reforms in various fields, agricultural development has faced numerous new bottlenecks, which in turn have affected the overall development of the “three rural issues.” Looking ahead, China's economic growth must emancipate the mind and accelerate reform and opening up. A new round of development in China can start with rural reform, through pilot practices of land system changes such as the “sharecropping land system,” and by drawing on international experience to optimize the agricultural development model, so as to accelerate agricultural modernization and thereby drive the modernization of rural areas and farmers.
China's Agricultural Development Faces New Bottlenecks
(1) The level of agricultural modernization is not high, and development lags behind
Agricultural modernization means equipping agriculture with modern science and technology and production methods, organizing and managing agriculture with advanced scientific methods, improving the cultural and technical quality of agricultural producers, and gradually transforming backward traditional agriculture into modern agriculture with a high level of productivity and sustainable development. Agricultural modernization is the inevitable result of the development of productive forces and an objective requirement of the continuous development of the national economy. However, in the course of China's development of the “four modernizations” - industrialization, informatization, urbanization, and agricultural modernization - agricultural modernization has lagged behind, becoming the weakest link and shortcoming in modernization efforts.
At present, there is no unified standard in China for measuring the level of agricultural modernization, but it is usually measured from several dimensions, including the level of agricultural mechanization, the quality of the agricultural labor force, the contribution rate of agricultural science and technology, agricultural production capacity, the level of agricultural industrialization, and the level of sustainable agricultural development. From the relevant data and materials on these indicators, it can be seen that China's level of agricultural modernization still lags considerably behind that of developed countries. Relevant research shows that China's comprehensive agricultural modernization index is 38, ranking 65th in the world. According to data from China's Ministry of Science and Technology, China's agricultural modernization lags behind that of European and American developed countries by about 20 years, mainly in areas such as the scientific and technological level, informatization level, financial capacity, and management level of agricultural modernization.
Affected by the lagging development of agricultural modernization, China's level of rural modernization is also relatively low. Rural areas generally lack planning and lag in development. Rural infrastructure construction is lagging, especially public services such as medical care and education, which are very scarce and in very poor condition. Many primary and secondary school buildings are still dilapidated, and educational infrastructure is seriously inadequate. In addition, rural areas in China have too few financial institution outlets, a single type of service, high difficulty in obtaining loans, and low financial access; the degree of democracy, participation in social management, and rule of law in rural areas is also relatively low.
(2) China's current land system arrangements have become seriously distorted and exposed many drawbacks
1. The household contract responsibility system has become difficult to adapt to the needs of agricultural modernization development, restricting rural industrialization and urban-rural integration. (1) The system of equal distribution of agricultural land within collectives has led to prominent land fragmentation and dispersion, reducing the level of large-scale agricultural operation and profit margins, and restricting the pace of agricultural modernization. The land system reform implemented in the early 1980s, centered on the household contract responsibility system, increased farmers' income and promoted rural economic development. However, with population growth, the land contract system has continuously subdivided land, making it difficult to achieve large-scale agricultural operation and modernization. At present, China's per capita arable land has shrunk to 1.5 mu, and per capita arable land in 14 provinces and autonomous regions is less than 1 mu, among which 6 provinces and autonomous regions have per capita arable land of less than 0.5 mu. The United Nations recognition standard is that 1 mu of arable land is the basic condition for maintaining one person's minimum survival, so continuing to subdivide land in China is meaningless. (2) The household contract responsibility system conflicts with rural industrialization. The development of township industry requires solving the problem of regional concentration, but in the process of requisitioning land to establish township development zones, resistance is encountered from farming households and economic cooperatives; due to soaring land prices, farmers are unwilling to give up land, and some farmers who had already converted from agricultural to non-agricultural status have even demanded to return to rural areas.
(3) The household contract responsibility system is not conducive to urban-rural integration. Land property rights are dispersed among natural villages and farming households, restricting unified planning and unified management of village and town construction by the township level and administrative districts.
2. China's agricultural land contracting system faces a complex dilemma between equality and efficiency
For the vast majority of Chinese farmers, agricultural land has always been an important source of their economic income. Therefore, under the rural collective land ownership system, equal distribution of land and land adjustment according to population changes have become the internal demand of China's collective ownership of agricultural land and the household contract responsibility system. But the problem is that frequent administrative adjustment of land not only directly leads to ultra-small-scale agricultural operations, but also inevitably affects land users' enthusiasm for land investment, and may even lead to extensive land use, destruction of soil fertility, and reduced land output. For this reason, the central government has consistently emphasized the need to stabilize land contracting rights, stipulating that “land contracts remain unchanged for 30 years” and that “land is not increased when people are added, and not reduced when people are removed,” but pressure within rural villages for land adjustment due to population changes among different households continues to emerge, and the “Rural Land Contracting Law” cannot be effectively implemented.
3. China's unique land expropriation system makes local governments the actual main body of land supply, and along with changes in land use, the government replaces farmers' collectives as the owner of land and the operator of urban land
Under China's existing legal framework for land management, the main body of agricultural land conversion to non-agricultural use is government agencies at all levels, rather than the main body of non-agricultural land ownership, namely rural collectives. The government becomes the sole arbitrator of the conversion of agricultural land to urban land, possessing the exclusive right to obtain land from rural areas and transfer it for urban use. After the tax-sharing reform in 1994, the pattern in which local governments “rely on finance for food and on land for construction” basically took shape and kept strengthening, causing “land finance” to become an entrenched problem, greatly pushing up real estate prices and making farmland protection an empty phrase; the overly broad land expropriation system has led to continuous conflicts, farmers' rights and interests cannot be fully protected, and social stability is endangered.
(3) Under rapid urbanization, the trends of part-time farming, subsidiary farming, and aging in agriculture have become increasingly prominent
Due to the urbanization process and the rapid development of township enterprises, a large number of strong rural laborers have moved into non-agricultural industries, leaving agricultural production to women, children, and the elderly. According to statistics, China's total number of migrant workers has now reached 263 million, of whom more than 160 million are migrant workers working away from home. The existing small-scale agricultural production, subsidiary farming, and aging have begun to affect China's comparative advantage in agriculture and hinder the realization of agricultural modernization. They lead to a decline in farmers' enthusiasm for adopting new technologies, affect the role of agricultural mechanization, and impede the improvement of agricultural productivity.
Moreover, constrained by the long-standing urban-rural dual structure and supporting factors such as social security, education, and housing, the rural population cannot achieve complete migration in the process of moving to cities. The mechanism for migrant workers and businesspeople to “leave the land” cannot be activated, creating a situation of “leaving the land without leaving the village,” which also greatly affects the stability of land property rights within rural areas.
(4) The competitiveness of Chinese agricultural products has weakened, and industrial security faces new challenges
China's long-standing price-support purchase policy, continuously rising costs of production materials, and dispersed smallholder economy have led to domestic prices of major agricultural products being more than 20% higher than the international market, weakening the competitiveness of Chinese agricultural products.
From 2013 to 2014, China temporarily purchased and stored 69.19 million tons of corn and 6.29 million tons of cotton. The annual interest and maintenance cost per ton of cotton inventory was about 2,000 yuan; temporary purchase and storage of rapeseed oil reached as high as 6 million tons. If sold at market prices, the price difference loss would exceed 15 billion yuan; cumulative temporary purchase and storage inventory of sugar was about 5 million tons, with estimated hidden losses exceeding 20 billion yuan. From 2006 to 2012, the average annual increase in prices of rice, wheat, corn, cotton, rapeseed, and sugarcane in China was lower than the increase in costs over the same period. By 2013, domestic prices of China's bulk agricultural products had become comprehensively higher than international prices.
At the same time, driven by price differences, imports of China's major agricultural products surged, endangering the security of the agricultural industry. The “soybean tragedy” is a typical manifestation. Because China's soybean growers have small average areas and find it difficult to achieve economies of scale, production costs are more than 30% higher than in the United States, while the soybean market is highly open. Under comparative benefits, the domestic soybean planting area has continued to decrease.
Therefore, how to continue strengthening the foundational status of agriculture, improve rural living conditions, and promote sustained increases in farmers' incomes under the broader environment of slowing domestic economic growth and advancing urbanization; how to establish relevant new mechanisms and systems through effective land system reform and supporting reform measures, and complete “spatial urbanization” and “population urbanization” while balancing efficiency and fairness, while also promoting the effective allocation of land resources within rural areas, the expansion of agricultural operation scale, and the rational circulation of agricultural land and rural homestead land; how to overcome the natural endowment of many people and little land, give play to comparative advantages, and innovate agricultural support and protection policies and improve agricultural competitiveness under the “double squeeze” at home and abroad; how to ensure the effective supply and quality safety of agricultural products under hard constraints of resources and environment, and enhance the capacity for sustainable agricultural development…… all of these have become key to coordinating urban-rural contradictions, promoting agricultural modernization, and achieving the central government's goal of “guiding the overall economic and social development with the scientific outlook on development and coordinating urban and rural development.”
The Course and Enlightenment of China's Land System Reform
Land is the foundation of agricultural production, and the land system is the root of Chinese society, economy, and politics. With economic and social development and the acceleration of urbanization, the land issue has become particularly important in China. Solving the land issue well and reforming the land system well have become key to promoting agricultural modernization and thereby driving the modernization of rural areas and farmers. “In light of past events, there is aid for governance.” Only by first clearly explaining the land reforms of successive dynasties, understanding the various constraints, and appropriately comparing them with overseas constraints and those of present-day China can a relatively suitable top-level design be made.
(1) The course of China's land system reform
China's land system can be traced back at the earliest to the “well-field system” of the Zhou Dynasty. This was a form of state ownership in ancient times. The ownership of “public fields” and “private fields” belonged to the Son of Heaven of Zhou, while usufructuary rights or “contract management rights” belonged to the feudal lords. Its core lay in sorting out the “relations of production” and “social context,” and clarifying the distribution of land ownership, the use of labor, and the collection of land rent. Later, Shang Yang's reforms “abolished the well-field system and opened up the field boundaries,” guaranteed the rights and interests of “private fields,” allowed free buying and selling of land, and created an institutional model that lasted nearly two thousand years; however, the policies of “valuing agriculture and suppressing commerce” and small households formed at this time closed off the possibility of fundamental land reform. Subsequent land reforms basically revolved around the division of rent and tax interests, lacking changes in property rights and the political system.
After the Revolution of 1911, Sun Yat-sen put forward the slogan “land to the tiller,” and afterward both the Kuomintang and the Communist Party carried out land reform around this goal. But the Kuomintang did not advance it well, and only after moving to Taiwan did it carry out three relatively successful land reforms. Our Party implemented “land to the tiller” from 1946 to 1956 and established cooperatives, which played a relatively positive role during this period; but the people's commune system promoted in 1958 deprived farmers of their land in disguised form, until the “de-collectivization” reform in 1978 gave farmers land contract management rights, stimulated production enthusiasm, and promoted rural economic development.
In recent years, driven by land circulation, various parts of the country have also advanced land reforms under certain models, including Tianjin's housing-for-homestead exchange and Chongqing's “land ticket” model, among others. These have played a certain role in exploring the optimal allocation of land resources in peri-urban or distant areas, activating urban and rural factor markets, giving back to the “three rural issues,” promoting reform of the household registration system, and accelerating urbanization. However, compared with the abolition of people's communes and the introduction of the land contract system in Xiaogang Village in 1978, none have played a truly revolutionary role in the development of agriculture as a whole.
(2) Enlightenment from China's land system reform
1. The land system must change with the times and adapt to the stage of economic and social development. At present, historical experience should be fully absorbed and land system reform should be accelerated; however, when carrying out institutional reform, it is necessary to adapt to local conditions under established goals, and it is not appropriate to apply a nationwide “one-size-fits-all” approach. Flexible and diverse methods should be adopted to achieve the goal, which can reduce resistance to reform and achieve twice the result with half the effort. 2. Land system reforms in successive Chinese dynasties were mostly related to factors such as finance (namely so-called tax sources, grain, and soldiers) and did not link land system arrangements with protecting the property rights of common people and the politics of ordinary people. Reform at the current stage should give farmers relatively complete property rights over land, accelerate flexible land circulation, reduce administrative intervention, and lower institutional costs. 3. The design of land policy must go through in-depth, on-the-ground preliminary research, with planning first; the implementation of land reform must be guided by laws and policies and, more importantly, must have practical administrative driving force. 4. Agricultural development requires a relaxed policy environment. The government needs to reduce the tax burden, simplify the types of taxes, achieve tax fairness, and effectively protect farmers' rights and interests. 5. A certain degree of land concentration plays a positive role in promoting the extension of agricultural technology, the accumulation of wealth, and the improvement of agricultural productivity. Strengthening economies of scale, mechanized farming, commercialized production, enterprise-based operation, and all-round financial support are positive measures for promoting modern agriculture.