Chinese farmers are returning to the essence of a profession

China's “farmers” are returning to the essence of a “profession” that the term represents, and increasingly losing the meaning of “identity” in the traditional context. It can be said that the traditional Chinese concept of “farmer” is changing.

From the stratification of “scholars, farmers, artisans and merchants” a thousand years ago, to the current household registration distinction between “agricultural” and “non-agricultural,” China's farmers in a certain sense are not merely “people who take agriculture as a profession.”

As China's people-centered new urbanization and household registration system reform gradually deepen, and modern agriculture and new types of agricultural business entities are gradually built and cultivated, farmers in the traditional sense will gradually step onto a new historical stage as urban residents, and those who work in agriculture will no longer be one side of the urban-rural dual structure.

The nearly 300,000 people with rural household registration in Deqing County, Huzhou City, Zhejiang Province, in China's eastern coastal region, together with the remaining nearly 140,000 people with non-agricultural household registration, have since September 2013 been uniformly registered as “Zhejiang resident households.”

Behind the change of just a few words on a thin household registration booklet is the bridging of the gap in urban resident treatment between urban and rural registered populations, and the closing of the historically huge gap of the urban-rural dual structure.

After Deqing unified urban and rural household registration, farmers' minimum living security, which previously could only be received at 80% of the urban resident standard, was changed to be issued according to a unified standard; low-rent housing and affordable housing changed from previously guaranteeing only urban residents to covering all registered residents of the entire county.

Farmer Uncle Cai, 64, of Zhongguan Town, Deqing County, suffered a traffic accident in April 2013 and received only 51,539 yuan in compensation according to the agricultural household registration standard. After the local government launched household registration reform, according to the unified Zhejiang resident standard, Uncle Cai received more than 90,000 yuan in additional compensation.

Wu Jinhe, a staff member of the Deqing County Urban-Rural System Reform Office, said: “Implementing household registration reform opens a channel for turning the rural population into urban residents, and is the foundation of urban-rural integration.”

According to estimates, before 2030 China still has nearly 400 million farmers to be turned into urban residents.

The recommendations for the 13th Five-Year Plan, which guides China's construction and development over the next five years, proposed deepening household registration system reform, promoting the transfer of agricultural population with the ability to secure stable employment and life in cities and towns to settle in cities with their whole families, and granting them the same rights and obligations as urban residents.

Moreover, the “Opinions on Further Advancing Household Registration System Reform” issued by the State Council at the end of July last year clearly pointed out the establishment of a unified urban-rural household registration system and the abolition of the distinction between the nature of agricultural and non-agricultural household registration. The basic establishment time for this new type of household registration system was set as 2020.

Zhao Chenggen, a professor at the School of Government of Peking University, said this means that China's urban-rural dual household registration separation system, which has been in place for more than half a century, will officially end after 5 years.

After the founding of New China, in order to achieve national industrialization in a relatively short period, China implemented a policy of using agriculture to subsidize industry, restricted the flow of rural population into cities, and the urban-rural dual system gradually formed and was continuously strengthened.

In a specific historical period, this urban-rural dual household registration system played an important role in promoting economic development and maintaining social stability. However, China's continuously improving market economy system requires equal exchange and balanced allocation of factor resources between urban and rural areas, and the goal of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects requires coordinated urban-rural development and development results benefiting all citizens.

The “13th Five-Year Plan” recommendations proposed promoting coordinated urban-rural development. Persist in industry nurturing agriculture and cities supporting rural areas, improve the institutional mechanisms for urban-rural development integration, and advance equal exchange, rational allocation and equalization of basic public services of urban and rural factors.

Analysts said that in the future Chinese farmers will no longer continue to maintain gaps with the non-agricultural population in employment, education, medical care, social security, housing and other aspects. The term “farmer” will gradually shed its “discriminatory” meaning as a welfare identity and become the concept of a profession.

China is still the world's largest developing country and faces enormous pressure to feed a huge population, while problems such as constraints on agricultural resources and the environment, imbalance in the production structure, and low development quality and efficiency are becoming increasingly prominent, creating an urgent need for China to transform its agricultural development mode and advance agricultural modernization. Achieving agricultural modernization requires not only the guidance of new types of agricultural business entities, but also a high-quality workforce of professional farmers.

Zheng Fengtian, vice dean of the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development at Renmin University of China, said that agricultural modernization can not only solve the food security problem and ensure growth in grain output, but its more important significance lies in liberating rural labor so that it can be invested in new industrialization and urbanization.

The “13th Five-Year Plan” recommendations proposed building a policy system for cultivating new types of agricultural business entities and training new types of professional farmers.

China is accelerating the cultivation of new types of agricultural business entities such as family farms, large specialized households, farmer cooperatives and leading enterprises in agricultural industrialization. In the process of raising the level of intensification, scale, organization, socialization and industrialization of agricultural operations, a group of new types of professional farmers and a high-quality workforce of new types of agricultural production and operators is emerging.

Yan Tingzhan, a “post-80s” farmer from Yinjia Village, Jijia Town, Jiutai District, Changchun City, Jilin Province, started as a large grain grower after graduating from secondary school in 2002, beginning with 2 small agricultural machines and 10 hectares of transferred land. The year before last, he registered and established Lüye Jiayuan Family Farm and began large-scale operations, with land transferred increasing to 50 hectares and agricultural machinery expanded to 9 units, basically achieving full mechanization.

Different from his father's generation and even his grandfather's generation, Yan Tingzhan's “farmer” title is the result of an independent and voluntary choice. Such professional farmers will engage in agricultural production work in the future, yet enjoy the same treatment and rights as urban residents.