How Can Rural Community Development Highlight Countryside Characteristics
The "rural communities with countryside characteristics" referred to here are compared with urban communities. At present, the different communities in Chinese cities have formed along with the rapid development of China's social economy, and have obvious characteristics such as a large and concentrated population, strong government support, diverse residents' occupations, convenient community service facilities, a high degree of network informatization, and very little interpersonal interaction among residents.
With the acceleration of urbanization, especially the continuous expansion of the scale of demolishing single-story houses and building multi-story buildings in rural areas, as well as the promotion by governments at all levels, China's rural community development, which has only recently started, shows a trend of imitating or even copying urban communities. This should attract our great attention.
China's rural community development started later than urban community development, so it is also reasonable for rural communities to learn certain practices from urban communities. Rural communities should learn the people-oriented concepts and practices of urban community development that make life convenient for residents, rather than simply imitating practices such as certain urban communities building tall buildings, luxurious plazas, and spacious community service centers. Rural communities have characteristics such as a low degree of population concentration, locations that mostly have little appreciation potential, residents mostly engaged in various production activities around agriculture, community service facilities that are often inconvenient, and more interpersonal exchanges based on blood ties and clans. If they blindly imitate urban community development, rural communities will become unsuitable for the production and life of rural residents. For example, at present most rural communities must have sites suitable for raising poultry, must have their own vegetable gardens where planting and picking can be done conveniently at any time, and must have warehouses for storing various large, medium, and small farm tools and machinery. Without such sites and merely being passively moved to live in multi-story buildings, life and production will become increasingly inconvenient and costs will become higher and higher, and the advantages of rural communities compared with urban communities will be completely lost.
There are also rural schools. How exactly their locations should be arranged and what exactly students should be taught all need to conform to the internal requirements and laws of rural communities. If the actual needs of rural areas for various types of talent are not considered, and instead administrative power is used to close schools and merge them, blindly imitating the urban model of having students take college entrance examinations and find good jobs, then the long-term development of rural communities will be hindered.
The present era is prominently characterized by informatization, and rural communities are certainly no exception. How to use modern network technology to break down the obstacles hindering the integrated development of urban and rural areas; how to use modern network technology so that agricultural products can be sold throughout the country and the agricultural materials and daily necessities villagers need can be purchased at low cost; how to use modern network technology so that villagers can conveniently learn about the country's various agriculture-related policies and agricultural subsidy benefits, and how villagers can obtain convenient government services. Many issues of this kind are matters that rural communities must explore and practice, and urban communities clearly have no ready-made examples to imitate.
With young and middle-aged adults working in cities large and small, rural communities are mostly home to elderly people and left-behind children. Some scholars believe that rural planting is currently driven by middle-aged and elderly people, and is a kind of elderly agriculture. Accordingly, rural communities should cultivate social organizations and social service institutions that serve elderly planting, making it convenient for elderly people to engage in agricultural activities, support their families, and watch over their homes; rural communities with the conditions should purchase social services so that elderly people can obtain high-quality services at low prices for heavy physical labor such as plowing and harvesting. Only in this way can young and middle-aged people working away from home be at ease, and can rural communities operate harmoniously. Because young and middle-aged people work away from home for long periods to earn money, elderly people in rural communities in terms of elderly care, and left-behind children in terms of the lack of parental affection, should both receive help and relief from the community.
Other things such as village rules and conventions, governance by village worthies, family genealogies and ancestral halls, ancestor worship and clan identification, weddings and funerals, market fairs and temple fairs, and festival customs are even more unique to rural communities and need no imitation of urban communities. Only by critically inheriting and carrying forward these cultural traditions unique to rural communities can the harmonious development of rural communities be promoted.