New urbanization should drive rural prosperity and development

Zhaoshipan Town, Hengshan County, Shaanxi Province, a village called Gedi Cave in Tuoxiang Village, covering nearly 2 sq km, originally home to more than 30 households and over 200 villagers. Now the people are gone and the village is empty, more than 500 mu of farmland lie waste, and only Wang Minghou and Gao Shenghua, a couple in their 50s, remain here, extensively farming more than 50 mu of land.

In Jinshi Township, Da County, Sichuan Province, a village called Tongziyuan in the Sixth Cooperative of Liutan Village, young and middle-aged adults have left one after another to seek a new life, while the elderly left behind are worn away one by one by time. In this mountain village of more than 140 people, now only Tang Mingxiao, in his 70s, and his wife Li Shifen still live here, keeping company with several courtyards that collapse a little more each year.

Such villages are long no longer isolated cases. I am a farmer's son, and I am deeply aware of what land means to me and my family. In villages large and small across the country live more than 200 million farming households, and the average land held by each household is only 1/80 to 1/60 of that in developed countries. Our elders and fellow villagers have for generations lived on scattered plots, and for generations have faced the yellow earth and depended on the heavens for their food. In the end, they still did not choose the land beneath their feet as a place to settle down and make a living. The land watered by their hot tears and sweat ultimately failed to give them the happiness and peaceful life they wanted.

My experience of rural life shows that poverty has always been the underlying color of these abandoned and crumbling villages. Poor rural households generally fall into such categories as: elderly people with no children, and households enjoying the five guarantees; those with severe illness, major illness, or disability who have lost the ability to work; those caring for seriously ill people, minor children, or the elderly, who cannot go out to work; those dragged into poverty by children attending middle school or university; and those falling back into poverty because the main laborer has died, divorced, or gone missing. Precisely because of this, outstanding farmers' children rush off to Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Beijing without any reluctance... I have learned that Da County in Sichuan Province has more than 400,000 migrant workers, equivalent to one third of the county's population; the young people have all gone out.

According to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on January 20 this year, the urban resident population was 749 million, accounting for 54.77% of the total population. This is the urbanization rate in numerical terms. For a similar increase in the urbanization rate, Britain took 120 years, France took 100 years, and the United States took 40 years, while our country took only 25 years. With the world's largest scale of urbanization and also the world's fastest speed of urbanization, this is undoubtedly a formidable test of wisdom for the governance of a major country that is now being advanced.

What deserves careful analysis is that among the urban resident population published by the National Bureau of Statistics, 298 million were rural people who had left the place of their household registration for more than half a year, accounting for 39.78%. They work and live in cities large and small, and although they have not obtained the status of citizens of the cities where they are located, nor do they enjoy the treatment of citizens in education, medical care, housing, social security, and infrastructure, they simply do not want to return to the countryside, and do not want to curl up in that place called "home." This is precisely where my worries have lain in recent years: the countryside is empty, the cities are full, and between this emptiness and fullness lie the tiny details affecting the comprehensive deepening of reform.

In recent years, I have kept calling for this: the true meaning of the urbanization rate is to create opportunities for farmers to increase their income and to make rural settlements prosper. In this process, it is essential to avoid farmers being harmed, agriculture declining, and rural areas withering. Therefore, I suggest that in the top-level design for comprehensively deepening reform, strategies of in-situ urbanization and nearby urbanization be adopted, so that farmers can enjoy, at their doorstep, a quality of life and public services comparable to those of city residents, and that a new path be opened up toward the modernization of farmers' lives, the corporatization of agricultural production, and the pastoralization of rural ecology, achieving common progress between urban and rural areas and enhancing the entire country's capacity for sustainable development.

One view holds that in promoting new urbanization, a certain number of migrant workers should be settled in cities each year, even specifying an average scale of 20 million per year, believing that in this way the 400 million migrant workers who have already entered cities and will enter cities could basically be absorbed by 2030. The current average cost of turning a migrant worker into an urban citizen is about 100,000 yuan. If this suggestion were followed, settling 20 million migrant workers as urban citizens each year would require a solid investment of 2 trillion yuan. I believe such views need comprehensive assessment. Only by truly understanding this grand strategy of new urbanization, guiding it according to circumstances, and applying it well can the comprehensive building of a moderately prosperous society possibly have a steady and solid good start.

A certain mayor once told me that, according to his city's existing fiscal capacity, letting all the city's urban residents and rural residents enjoy basic public services and reach the level of comprehensive moderate prosperity was still barely affordable. But if more than 1.5 million migrant workers from elsewhere were added, he would have no way at all, because it would exceed a city's actual capacity to bear. I had a serious discussion with this mayor about whether counter-urbanization could be an option for new urbanization, or even a higher stage of development surpassing old-style urbanization. The typical feature now emerging in this process is that urban populations, in order to escape survival and living pressures such as traffic congestion and severe pollution, voluntarily flow toward the countryside, enjoy the quality of urban life together with farmers in the countryside, can see the mountains, see the water, and remember their nostalgia, and rural life prospers once again.

I once submitted a document reporting that agriculture, as the strategic industry that is the foundation of the nation, needs at least 200 million laborers under the age of 45. Otherwise, who will farm and raise livestock? What will fill the rice bowls of 1.367 billion Chinese people? My further research shows that in the country's 9.6 million sq km of land territory, the land space suitable for urbanization development is about 1.8 million sq km. After deducting the farmland that must be protected and the existing built space, only 280,000 sq km will be available for new urbanization development in the future, about 3% of all land space. Where will the land come from? Where will the people go? Given the basic national condition of scarce land resources, I believe it is very difficult, as in some developed countries, to concentrate more than 70% of the population in cities at or above the prefecture level with districts. On this major judgment, I suggest a little more mutual respect and a little less self-righteousness; a little more mutual tolerance and a little less prejudice and misunderstanding.

Villages are the root of Chinese agricultural civilization, continuing for more than 7,000 years since Fuxi and Shennong. In this sense, only by understanding farmers can one understand China; villages are a profound epitome of national governance. All confidence in theory, in the system, in the path, and in culture derives from the grand historical narrative unfolded on this basis.

As national governance turns a new page, 588,000 administrative villages and more than 2.5 million natural villages are walking through a turning point. I believe the three basic relationships between the state and rural areas, the market and rural areas, and cities and rural areas need new institutional arrangements. In these arrangements there is pain, there is confusion, and there is also the breeding of hope.