Why the Transformation of China's Rural Economic and Social Development Is an Unavoidable Stage
China's countryside is undergoing profound changes. In many places, rural villages have seen "village hollowing-out" and "farmer aging." This is an unavoidable stage when a traditional agricultural country's industrialization and urbanization have advanced to a certain degree. How to properly handle these problems is a new challenge to China's "three rural issues."
Farmers Finding Work in Cities Is the Key
At present, China has hundreds of millions of rural laborers working and living in cities, but they remain on the margins of urban management. According to statistics, in 2006 the urbanization rate was 43.9%, the urban population had reached 577 million, and the corresponding rural population had dropped to 56.1%, or 737 million. But according to household registration statistics, the agricultural registered population is about 949 million. That is to say, about 212 million people with agricultural household registration do not live where their household registration is located.
Some people believe that "migrant workers" should be renamed "farmers working in cities" to eliminate discrimination. But in fact, farmers who go out to work do not all necessarily go to cities; many also work below the county level, for example, township and village enterprises employ 140 million workers. Therefore, merely protecting the rights and interests of farmers who work in cities is not enough; the rights and interests of migrant workers employed outside cities must likewise be protected.
What pattern the flow of migrant workers will take in the future depends on which path China's urbanization takes. There has long been controversy about this in theoretical circles. Very few countries in the world can truly be compared with China's national conditions. The United States mainly relies on its coastal areas to solve the problem, but the U.S. population has just exceeded 300 million, 1 billion fewer than China's; recently more people have been talking about the South Korean experience, but South Korea has only just over 40 million people, and the Seoul area alone accounts for nearly half the country's population. The experience of other countries should of course be drawn on, but in terms of population scale, this is not a question of the same order of magnitude. It should be recognized that China's urbanization will be a long process, and for a very long period China will have a large population living in rural areas. In recent years, China's urbanization process has been relatively fast, increasing by 1.3 percentage points each year. If it increases by 1 percentage point each year in the future, by the time a moderately prosperous society in all respects is built, the urbanization rate will reach about 55%. By 2050, when modernization is basically achieved, the urbanization rate may rise to 60% or even 70%. But even so, China will still have at least 30% of its population in rural areas. Therefore, in 2000 the proposal of the CPC Central Committee on the "10th Five-Year Plan" put forward: it is necessary to blaze a path of urbanization that "combines large, medium-sized and small cities with small towns."
Farmers moving into cities must have three major problems solved: housing, employment, and social security. If half of the 250 million farming households move into cities, that is 125 million households; if each household has a house of 50 sq m, then 6.25 billion sq m of housing must be built, equivalent to 10.3 times the national commercial housing sales area in 2006.
The fundamental problem for farmers moving into cities is employment. Some places propose "exchanging land for social security." I believe this issue must be handled cautiously. People cannot live on the minimum living allowance alone; first of all they still need employment. Therefore, in the process of accelerating urbanization, two points must be clearly grasped: first, advancing urbanization and building a new countryside must go hand in hand, and one cannot expect that solving one problem will completely solve the other; second, farmers moving into cities is by no means a simple matter, and only when there is the capacity to solve farmers' employment, housing, and various social security needs can we boldly move forward.
Raising Farmers' Degree of Organization Is More Important Than Large-Scale Operation
In a certain sense, the high degree of organization among Chinese farmers is rare in the world; everyone belongs to a villagers' committee. But in most areas, the villagers' committee is still an inward-looking organization engaged in social management, and there are still not many village collective organizations with real economic strength. Under market economy conditions, what farmers more urgently need are outward-looking, business-oriented organizations.
On the issue of raising farmers' degree of organization, each locality should proceed from reality. Where conditions permit, for example in southern Jiangsu, northern Zhejiang, and other rural areas where collective economic strength is relatively strong, it is possible to rely on the existing three-in-one organization - which is at once the Party branch, the villagers' committee, and the farmers' collective economic organization - to solve the problems of raising farmers' degree of organization and improving socialized services. For most areas, where the collective economy has little strength, it is necessary to guide farmers to organize themselves and take the path of developing cooperative organizations, and with government support, rely on farmers' specialized cooperative organizations to provide self-services.
In this respect, international experience is well worth learning from. For example, German agriculture has what is called a "machinery ring" or "farm machinery circle." That is, because the operating scale and funds of a single household are limited, in order to reduce costs and improve the efficiency of agricultural machinery, cooperative organizations coordinate farmers' purchases of agricultural machinery in a unified way, and several or a dozen farming households form a "machinery ring." By contrast, when some grassroots cadres in China face new problems, they are often unwilling to expend effort on raising farmers' degree of organization and improving socialized services, and instead simply want to concentrate farmers' contracted land and implement so-called large-scale operation. This may seem simple to do, but if urbanization is not yet sufficient to absorb so many farmers, it will leave endless trouble.
In recent years China's wheat output has had consecutive bumper harvests. Besides the great contribution of improved seeds, there is another important reason: tens of thousands of combine harvesters provide harvesting services to farming households from south to north. Without this condition, when all the young and strong laborers have gone out to work, a bumper wheat crop would still be hard to bring in. This is the importance of agricultural socialized services. Therefore, it is necessary to raise farmers' degree of organization and strengthen agricultural socialized services in a solid, painstaking, and meticulous way, so as to solve the many difficult problems facing agricultural development.
Rural Economic and Social Transformation
After the abolition of the agricultural tax, the rural grassroots faced many new problems.
The first is the problem of the rural governance system. Over the past 30 years, the greatest evolution in rural institutions has been the gradual expansion of farmers' autonomy, so farmers' economic dependence on traditional rural organizations is clearly decreasing. If rural areas and farmers are still managed by the old methods, it will certainly not be suitable. Therefore, rural governance needs new exploration from institutional design to concrete operation. China has already formulated many laws and policies on rural governance, but some provisions themselves contain contradictions and loopholes and need to be continuously improved in practice. For example, farmers are allowed to go out to work or even move out with their whole families, but their property, including land, housing, and long-accumulated collective property, is difficult to liquidate, and once they move out they have nothing. Another example: according to surveys, 91% of rural land ownership in China is held by villagers' groups, but this level of organization, which holds land ownership, has no independent legal status. The villagers' committee is a legally established autonomous organization, but the vast majority of villagers' committees do not hold land ownership. Giving the power to contract out land and manage collective property to the villagers' committee, letting an organization without ownership manage property while the organization with ownership is left nominal, is not a long-term solution.
The second is the problem of the governance cost of rural autonomous organizations. According to the Constitution, the villagers' committee is an autonomous organization. From staff wages and management expenses to public welfare undertakings and infrastructure construction, the villagers' committee must raise funds on its own. After the abolition of the agricultural tax, places with a good collective economy do not need to rely on farmers to raise money and can pay from the village collective; but areas where the collective economy is not developed need to collect money from farmers to get things done. This creates a big problem: who should bear the operating costs of rural autonomous organizations?
The third is the problem of the functions of township governments and the allocation of public resources. With the deepening of reform of the rural governance structure, how exactly should the functions of township governments be determined? The 15th National Congress of the CPC proposed that government functions are four major matters - economic regulation, market supervision, social management, and public services. Applying these four phrases to the township level of government may not be appropriate; for example, a township cannot have the function of economic regulation. Some people propose that township-level governments should mainly handle social management and public services, but others believe that townships cannot afford not to grasp the economy and attract investment. The key to the problem is: what exactly are the functions of township governments? In practice, it probably cannot be handled with a "one-size-fits-all" approach. At present, townships across the country differ too greatly; the economic scale and fiscal revenue of one township in a developed area may exceed those of a county or city in a traditional agricultural area. Reform of township institutions must proceed from reality.
Therefore, through urbanization, turning farmers into urban residents, raising farmers' degree of organization, providing farmers with high-quality agricultural socialized services and gradually improving the rural governance structure, and providing farmers with more and better social management and public services, are urgent tasks. It is necessary to adapt to the profound changes taking place in the rural economy and society, and to attach greater importance than ever before to studying and solving these problems, so as to alleviate as much as possible the shocks of the period of rural economic and social transformation.