How Can New Rural Communities Stay Farmer-Need-Oriented?

Recently, the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council issued the "Guiding Opinions on Further Advancing the Pilot Work of Rural Community Construction," putting forward a series of new requirements. The document makes clear that practice has proven that rural community construction is an important part of building a new socialist countryside and a supporting project for advancing new urbanization. It can be seen that the state's attention to new rural communities has brought vitality to the building of a new countryside, and new community construction has achieved commendable results. However, alongside these achievements there are also shortcomings.

The construction of new rural communities has the following four major problems: First, the positioning of rural communities is unclear. Because the rural community is a new thing, there is still no unified concept, which leads to a lack of theoretical guidance in the process of building new rural communities and the problem of blind advancement. Second, the enthusiasm of some of the masses is not very high. For many years, the broad masses of farmers have been accustomed to a living style of separate houses with their own courtyards, and they can be self-sufficient in daily living consumption. After moving into a community, however, the increase in management fees such as property charges will inevitably lead to higher daily living expenses. Therefore, the masses have misunderstandings about merging villages and consolidating residential points and moving into apartment buildings, and their degree of acceptance is not high. Third, the supporting infrastructure of newly built communities cannot keep up. Developers only care about development and construction, not comprehensive supporting facilities, and cannot meet the requirements of community residents' material and cultural life. Fourth, there is a lack of social security for land-lost farmers. In the process of merging, new rural communities will inevitably occupy part of the land, which will inevitably create some farmers who are the "three withouts" - without work, without social security, and without land to farm - burying hidden dangers for social stability. The existence of these shortcomings and drawbacks has affected the development of new rural community construction. How to achieve orderly governance and social integration in rural society has become one of the most urgent propositions in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects.

In recent years, some local grassroots governments in rural areas have, in the name of the "three concentrations" (namely, industry concentrating in concentrated development zones, farmers concentrating in towns and new communities, and land concentrating toward appropriately scaled operations), new countryside construction, rural land consolidation, "hollow village" governance, village withdrawal and merging, and small town construction, demolished scattered farmhouses and built concentrated farmer residential areas. This kind of concentrated farmer residential area is called a "new rural community" or "new rural community" in many places across the country. Although the concept of "new rural community construction" has not yet entered the documents of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council, it has already become an important measure attracting attention in China's rural modernization drive at the present stage.

The construction of new rural communities is of great significance

First, at the macro level, it should be emphasized that new rural community construction is a key condition for new urbanization. The "new" in new urbanization means, first, "new" in coordinating urban and rural development and promoting the flow of resources to rural areas; second, "new" in building ecological civilization, transforming industrial production methods, and creating an upgraded version of the Chinese economy; and third, "new" in innovating the management system and creating a new social structure and national governance system. Here, the first "new" is the most important, because past urbanization over-concentrated resources in cities, causing the more urbanization developed, the deeper and more rigid the urban-rural dual structure became, whereas new urbanization is precisely about breaking the urban-rural dual structure and system and achieving integrated urban-rural development. Therefore, although "new urbanization" is nominally a matter of cities and towns, in essence it should focus on solving the "three rural issues" - agriculture, rural areas, and farmers. Only in this way can the key to new urbanization be grasped, and only in this way can we, as General Secretary Xi Jinping required, "make major breakthroughs in coordinating urban-rural relations, especially in breaking the urban-rural dual structure and advancing equal exchange of urban and rural factors and balanced allocation of public resources."

For some time now, the issue of orderly advancing the citizenization of the agricultural transferred population has received special attention from many scholars and even leading organs. The issue of the citizenization of the agricultural transferred population fundamentally lies not in how cities and towns can accommodate the agricultural transferred population, but in the need to enable rural residents to make a choice between entering the cities and staying in the countryside, letting those who can enter the cities do so and letting those who are willing to stay in the countryside remain there, thereby ending the state of drifting between urban and rural areas and allowing both body and mind to settle down.

Therefore, if, with the support of the state, the basic public service level of these new rural communities can be made no lower than that of cities, conditions and opportunities can be provided for farmers to urbanize in place and nearby. This should be the direction and key of new urbanization. Therefore, it is very important that these places are named "new rural communities." It is very important to make a strict distinction between the functions of new rural communities and small towns. If new rural communities also develop industry, they may destroy the idyllic state that rural areas should have. For the future development of new rural communities, protecting ecology and the environment is not only a matter of food and food safety, but will also certainly be a favorable condition for attracting more urban residents to live, relax, and sightsee in rural areas.

At the micro level, new rural community construction is even more important for rural areas themselves. For example, the urbanization of rural residents' lifestyle requires new communities with concentrated living. At the present stage, rural households generally have purchased home appliances, and the consumption of home appliances requires concentrated installation of supporting facilities. According to research, due to the lack of supporting sewage treatment facilities, over time the soil and water in many rural residential areas have been severely polluted by wastewater containing chemical detergents discharged by washing machines and other appliances. Therefore, the urbanization of lifestyle requires the construction of new rural communities.

For another example, the construction of rural public service facilities requires farmers to live in concentrated settlements. In order to open up the rural market, since the end of the last century the state has implemented in rural areas "village-to-village projects" for electricity, roads, drinking water, telephone networks, cable television networks, and the internet. But it is obvious that only by building village-to-village projects in permanent concentrated residential areas of rural residents can waste be avoided and utilization rates be raised. Also, only in new rural communities with a relatively high living standard is it possible to bring in and retain a more highly educated workforce, so that modern public facilities can operate and be maintained effectively.

Furthermore, the development of grassroots democracy in rural areas also requires residents to live in concentrated settlements. In Marx's view, "small-plot land ownership is, by its very nature, the base on which an all-powerful and innumerable bureaucracy stands." Only on the basis of nationwide industrialization and the full development of modern agriculture and service industries in rural areas, and by achieving concentrated living for rural residents, can a foundation be laid for the development of grassroots democracy in the modern sense and for institution building.