Where Are Rural Mega-Changes Heading? An Analysis of Future Development Directions
For the past 10-plus years I have been conducting research in rural areas across the country, and I have felt the tremendous changes in China's countryside. From 2013 to 2015, the center's teachers and students spent three consecutive years using the Spring Festival homecoming opportunity to write homecoming notes. In 2013, more than 60 were written; in 2014 and 2015, more than 100 each. Judging from the nearly 300 homecoming notes written by the center's teachers and students over three consecutive years, although each person's hometown is different, their angles for viewing problems are different, and the themes they wrote about are also different, all the homecoming notes naturally converge into one theme of the era: the current Chinese countryside is undergoing unprecedented mega-changes.
I
When reading the homecoming notes written by the center's graduate students, I found that these classmates, who are about 20 years younger than me, generally felt the mega-changes in their hometowns very strongly. Interestingly, the hometowns they remember from childhood, that is, the rural conditions of the 1990s, were actually very similar to my hometown in childhood. This reflects that before the 1990s, the rural social structure was relatively stable. However, after 2000, large numbers of farmers across rural China went to cities to work and do business, and farm household income became increasingly dependent on urban industrial and commercial income outside the village. Rural young and middle-aged laborers went to the cities, leaving behind the elderly, the young, the sick, and the disabled in the countryside, and hollowing-out became widespread.
Putting the feelings formed through fieldwork into statistical data is even more persuasive. In 2000, China's urbanization rate was 36%; by 2014, China's urbanization rate had exceeded 54%. In just over ten years, China's urbanization rate rose by 18 percentage points. That is to say, in just over ten years, more than 1/4 of the rural population moved to the cities. They found employment in the cities, obtained income from the cities, and spent most of their time in the cities. Correspondingly, the rural population became smaller and smaller, and agriculture became less and less important to farm household income.
It was also at the beginning of this century that three levels of mega-changes occurred in China's countryside. The first level is the relationship between the state and farmers. For thousands of years, the state extracted resources from the countryside, and imperial grain taxes and state levies could not be avoided. After 2000, the state gradually abolished the agricultural tax and also allocated more and more fiscal funds to support agriculture. The traditional state-farmer relationship formed around the collection of agricultural tax faced a tremendous transformation. The second level is the loosening of the long-stable rural social structure. Not only were the basic village social structures built on the family, such as clans and menzi family associations, affected, but the family structure itself was also undergoing mega-changes. The third level is the change in farmers' world of values and meaning. The idea of carrying on the family line has been affected. Why live, and what to do while living, have now become questions.
Of course, the above three levels of mega-changes did not suddenly begin at the turn of the century. Since modern times, China began to bid farewell to the traditional society that had circulated for thousands of years and embarked on the road of mega-change. Such mega-change occurred in every aspect, with industrialization and urbanization at the core. But until the 1990s, 70% of China's population still lived in rural areas, rural society was still relatively closed, and the rural social structure was still stable. Everything seemed to be changing and yet not changing. Around 2000, rural change reached a key node, suddenly accelerated, and formed an energy that shocked all observers, so much so that compared with the rural mega-changes since 2000, the rural areas of the past thousands of years seemed not to have changed.
II
In this kind of mega-change in China's countryside, the most prominent is that most rural young and middle-aged people leave the countryside. Such a change is the result of farmers' choices. On the one hand, cities had more and more employment opportunities; on the other hand, institutional reform provided farmers with guarantees for entering the cities. As farmers entered the cities, the long-standing problem of too many people and too little land in China's countryside was greatly alleviated, farmers' incomes rose continuously, and rural poverty was greatly reduced. At the same time, at the current stage of China's economic development, farmers entering the cities often means only the young and middle-aged laborers of the household entering the cities, not the whole family, because the cost of the whole family entering the city is too high, and migrant workers' incomes are not enough to support a decent life for their families in the city.
According to our survey, about 70% of farm households in China have chosen a half-work, half-farming household livelihood model, namely young children going to the cities to work and do business while elderly parents stay in the village to farm. Such a livelihood model can obtain both farming income and wage income at the same time, while the cost of rural living is relatively low, allowing farm households to have economic savings every year. A life with savings is a better life. However, such half-work, half-farming also inevitably produces left-behind elderly and left-behind children, causing rural hollowing-out, and the social structure that previously maintained farmers' basic production and living order also began to disintegrate.
For farm households, farmers entering the cities certainly does more good than harm; for village production and living order, it does more harm than good. It happened that since 2000 the state began large-scale transfer payments to rural areas, not only providing subsistence allowances and hardship assistance to the most vulnerable rural groups, but also establishing broad-coverage New Rural Cooperative Medical Care and New Rural Social Pension Insurance for farmers, alleviating absolute poverty in rural areas. At the same time, the state also vigorously improved rural infrastructure such as water, electricity, and roads, as well as basic public services.
State investment solved some of the problems existing in rural areas, but state investment is not omnipotent. When the traditional forces maintaining the village's basic production and living order weakened or even disintegrated, and no other forces took their place, various problems appeared in rural society.
These problems were not only manifested in concrete matters such as garbage everywhere, but also in vicious competition in social gift-giving, disorderly comparison in housing, increasingly cold interpersonal relations, increasingly widespread gambling, the spread of underground religion, and so on, involving almost every level of rural social production and life. It was precisely the gathering of these problems that presented a shocking rural picture and touched every person who worked and lived in the city and returned home during the Spring Festival.
III
Undoubtedly, solving the above problems and rebuilding the order of rural life requires the intervention of external forces, especially the support of state finance. However, when the state inputs resources into rural areas, it cannot simply be finished once the resources are delivered to the countryside. It should also combine top-down transfer payments with farmers' bottom-up expression of needs. If sending resources to the countryside does not bring about an increase in farmers' organizational capacity, but instead makes farmers develop a dependent mentality and makes rural organizational capacity weaker, then such sending of resources to the countryside can hardly be called successful.
China's countryside is huge in scale and vast in territory, and there are relatively large differences among regions. The eastern coastal areas have developed economically faster and have already formed urban belts that include rural areas. With the influx of large numbers of migrant people, rural areas have not become hollowed out; instead, they have become more prosperous. From within rural areas in the eastern region, a small number of villagers became wealthy by running factories and doing business and became entrepreneurs; most villagers could work locally and earn enough income to support their families; migrant workers from elsewhere found it difficult to integrate into the developed coastal areas. They earned money in the developed areas and planned to return to their own hometowns to spend it. In other words, rural areas in developed regions have already shown obvious economic differentiation and the social differentiation that comes with it.
The rural economy in the central and western regions is relatively underdeveloped, with large numbers of rural people flowing out. Some farmers even had their whole family enter the city and no longer farm. These households whose whole family entered the city and no longer farm transferred their land to households that still relied on land for income, thereby forming in rural areas so-called “middle farmer” households, accounting for about 10%-20% of the total number of farm households, whose main income is in rural areas, whose social relations are in rural areas, whose family structure is complete, and whose household income is not lower than the income from working elsewhere. Such “middle farmers,” together with the elderly and children left behind in rural areas, formed a relatively stable structure, making it possible for the state to send resources to the countryside and for an endogenous rural order to take shape.
The state can provide farmers with infrastructure and public services, but it is very difficult for the state to solve the “last kilometer” problem from state input to farmers' needs. These problems are widespread, including the “last kilometer” of water conservancy construction, the “last kilometer” of roads connecting to villages, the “last kilometer” of agricultural technical services, and so on. They are mainly not problems of engineering or state investment, but problems of insufficient farmer organization.
Grassroots village and community organizations are very important, because farmers have a large number of affairs that individual households “cannot do well, are difficult to handle, and find not worthwhile to do.” These affairs involve not only production and life, but also village customs and village appearance. The loss of excellent traditional rural culture, the failure to uphold filial piety, and the loss of control over competition in social gift-giving certainly have the background of the impact of urbanization and marketization, but another important reason is that atomized villages lacking organization have no resistance to these shocks.
In our research, we found that in some rural areas with close kinship relations, when facing rapidly changing social realities, people can often give positive responses, such as reaching consensus through consultation among clan members and effectively avoiding the vicious expansion of social gift-giving expenditures. This gives us inspiration: the most fundamental thing in rural construction should be grassroots organizational construction. Under the background of urbanization, only by organically combining grassroots organizational construction with the state's sending of resources to the countryside can we respond to farmers' need for basic production and living order, and can we grasp the key to rural construction in an era of mega-change!