What challenges does new-type rural governance face? A full analysis of the solutions
In recent years, the rapid advancement of industrialization and urbanization, along with the continuous deepening of rural reform, has brought new vitality to rural development while also bringing many new situations to rural governance and triggering many new problems. New-type rural governance cannot follow the traditional rural governance approach with a “one-size-fits-all” method; instead, it must meet the new challenges brought by new situations such as new-type rural communities, “hollow villages,” “super villages,” and “urban villages,” conduct comprehensive and systematic analysis, adapt measures to local and village-specific conditions, and solve new problems well, so as to improve the quality and level of rural governance and achieve new development in urban-rural integration.
New situations currently emerging in rural governance
New-type rural communities under “village withdrawal and residential merging” and “farmers' concentrated residence.” With the acceleration of urbanization, a large amount of rural labor has moved to cities and towns, and large quantities of unreasonably or insufficiently used and abandoned idle residential and construction land have appeared in rural areas. In order to replan and comprehensively utilize rural collective construction land (mainly homestead land), many local governments have farmers move collectively into new resettlement communities by demolishing and withdrawing old villages and building relocation buildings, forming new-type rural communities. Under such circumstances, old homestead land can be reclaimed to obtain construction quotas for urban construction, or the original homestead land can be directly used for urban construction projects. With the rapid development of the economy and society, the problems of backward rural infrastructure and scarce resources such as public services have become prominent; after farmers have solved the problem of food and clothing and basically achieved a moderately prosperous life, they have also put forward new and higher requirements for housing conditions and the production and living environment, which also laid the groundwork for the construction of new-type rural communities. Since the new rural construction began in 2006, many rural areas, especially those in economically developed regions, have accelerated the pace of community construction, and new-type rural communities have become an important part of new rural construction. Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shandong, Hebei, Chongqing and other provinces (municipalities) have all carried out community construction centered mainly on concentrating farmers into towns or clustered communities. Up to now, nearly half of the communities in Jiangsu, Shandong and other provinces have become new-type rural communities through “village-to-residence conversion.”
New-type rural communities are different both from traditional administrative villages and from urban communities. They are either formed by merging several administrative villages together with unified planning, unified layout, and unified construction, or built from one larger administrative village. After completion, most new-type communities are located at the seats of townships or subdistricts or in convenient core areas of townships. In essence, the construction of new-type rural communities is not simply village renovation or reconstruction, nor simply the gathering of more people, but rather the creation of a new form of social life in the community, allowing farmers to enjoy public services like urban residents and live a life similar to that of urban residents, ultimately achieving the goal of narrowing the urban-rural gap and achieving in-situ urbanization. However, in actual operation, due to the inertial thinking of “land finance” among some local governments, the construction of new-type rural communities has been alienated into the “most convenient way” to exchange for urban construction land. In this process, if the relationships among relevant interest groups cannot be handled well, various problems are likely to arise. Moreover, even in new-type rural communities that have already been built, community governance still faces many challenges.
⟦NL> “Hollow villages” caused by the transfer of rural labor to cities and towns. Rural areas have always been an important field for people's residence and life, but with the development of China's industrialization and urbanization, the pace of rural population deagriculturalization has greatly accelerated, and more and more villages have become “hollow villages.” In September 2014, the Baotou survey team of the National Bureau of Statistics conducted a survey of 32 administrative villages involved in the household income and expenditure survey. The results showed that the 32 administrative villages had a total of 29,124 households, 2,851 households had all family members working away from home, and the number of idle houses (for more than 2 years) was 2,690.
In the new period, “hollow villages” mainly include two types: first, in the demographic sense. Urban infrastructure and public services such as education and medical care are inherently superior to those in rural areas, and with the rapid advancement of industrialization and urbanization, the urban-rural gap has shown a trend of further widening. Against this background, a large number of young and middle-aged farmers with relatively high educational levels go to cities to work, leaving behind groups such as the elderly, the weak, the sick, the disabled, women, and children in the villages, resulting in the widespread phenomenon of “people leaving and houses standing empty” in rural areas. This is the “hollow village” formed by labor transfer. Second, in the geographical sense. After many migrant workers earn money working in cities and towns, they return to their hometowns and, influenced by factors such as marriage, family division, improvement of living conditions, and location, need to build new homes. Due to the lack of village construction planning, imperfect land use management systems, lack of effective supervision over farmers' illegal house construction, and inadequate village infrastructure, most newly built houses are concentrated on the outskirts of villages, especially along main roads, while old houses in the villages are often idle or become “warehouses” and “decorations.” This leads to a large number of idle homesteads and idle land in the villages, forming an “empty inside, expanding outside” architectural style and resulting in “hollow villages.” These two levels of “hollow villages” are interconnected, but the “hollowness” in the demographic sense has a more far-reaching impact. In this sense, this article mainly discusses the phenomenon of “hollow villages” caused by the transfer of rural labor to cities and towns under the rapid advancement of industrialization and urbanization.
Generally speaking, “hollow villages” have the following notable characteristics: in terms of location, they are generally far from large cities, economically relatively backward, and slow in development; in terms of village appearance, there are large numbers of idle houses and abandoned cultivated land in the villages; in terms of population structure, there are few young and middle-aged laborers in the villages, and left-behind elderly people, women, and children account for a considerable proportion. According to surveys, the population structure of “hollow villages” is currently seriously imbalanced, with left-behind elderly people over 50 years old making up the vast majority of the left-behind population. The number of “hollow villages” is increasing day by day, large numbers of young and middle-aged laborers in the villages are being lost, the number of left-behind elderly people, women, and children is huge, and there are many idle houses and abandoned cultivated lands, all of which will affect rural governance in the new period.
“Super villages” that are villages in name but cities in reality. In the early 1990s, in the developed areas along the southeast coast, “super villages” represented by Huaxi Village and Yonglian Village appeared one after another. With the advancement of China's modernization drive and the rapid development of rural industrialization and urbanization, a large number of “super villages” with strong economic strength and a relatively high degree of modernization have risen rapidly and are in a state of sustained development, seemingly having become “a beautiful scenic line” in China's grassroots rural development.
As a new village form, “super villages” belong neither to traditional towns and villages nor to cities in the modern sense, but display many intermediate characteristics. Most of these super villages exist in the form of enterprises or enterprise groups, yet retain some features of traditional villages; they retain the village committee, a grassroots mass self-governance organization, yet perform various “quasi-government” functions and also play an intermediary role in the relationship between the state and villagers; they have entered industrialized community life, yet still retain some life order and principles of rural society, displaying characteristics of being both urban and rural. Compared with ordinary villages, “super villages” are greatly different in economic structure, collective income, population composition, infrastructure, and public services. First, most “super villages” have their own collective enterprises, and the output value is huge (most output values reach hundreds of millions or even tens of billions), forming a non-agricultural economic structure with township and village enterprises as the main body, and industrial output value or non-agricultural output value already accounts for the vast majority of the village's total output value. For these villages, agriculture is no longer the leading industry. Second, stable “village government” income usable for village administration and public and public welfare undertakings has already been formed. Third, the village population has multiplied, gathering a large number of external laborers, sometimes even several times or more than ten times the total number of villagers. Although most of the external population are “migrant workers” without household registration in the village and with strict identity differences from villagers, and are highly mobile, as a whole they have already formed a relatively stable scale and become the village's “quasi-villagers.” Fourth, village infrastructure and public and public welfare undertakings have developed rapidly, and villagers' lifestyles and cultural values have changed, with new lifestyles and values正在 forming①.
In the process of development and expansion, most “super villages” have undergone the process of merging surrounding villages, becoming “communities” where original villagers and newly added villagers live together. Moreover, these “super villages” have already achieved urbanization, and most have surpassed the development level of surrounding townships, becoming the de facto local economic, cultural, and social service centers. The large-scale emergence of “super villages” and the new characteristics they display have brought many new challenges to rural governance.
“Urban villages” in the cracks of cities. In the process of promoting urbanization, due to the staged nature of development, central areas often develop into cities first, while relatively remote suburban areas evolve into “urban villages.” “Urban villages” mostly refer to villages that, in the process of rapid economic development and continuous urbanization, were located on the edges of cities and were incorporated into urban districts; although they have become part of the city in regional terms, they still retain the rural model in land ownership, household registration, and administrative management systems, and are also called “villages in the city.” According to distance from the city center and possession of agricultural land, “urban villages” can be divided into three types: first, villages located in bustling urban areas that have completely no agricultural land; second, villages located around urban areas with a small amount of agricultural land; third, villages located in distant suburbs with more agricultural land.
Although “urban villages” in the cracks of cities have already become part of the city geographically, compared with true cities, their infrastructure, public services, environmental sanitation, and so on remain very backward. The existence of “urban villages” not only affects urban management and restricts urban development, but also changes the original characteristics of villages, bringing many new problems to village governance.
New challenges facing rural governance
In traditional rural society, the old rural governance model achieved certain results in promoting rural progress, agricultural development, and farmers' prosperity. However, with the rapid development of the economy and society and the rapid advancement of urbanization, new situations such as new-type rural communities, “hollow villages,” “super villages,” and “urban villages” have appeared in large numbers, bringing many new problems and challenges to rural governance. The traditional “one-size-fits-all” rural governance model is already far from being able to adapt to the development requirements of the new era. The 2013 “Communique of the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China” pointed out that it is necessary to “form a new type of worker-peasant and urban-rural relationship featuring industry promoting agriculture, cities supporting the countryside, mutual benefit between workers and peasants, and urban-rural integration, and allow the vast number of farmers to participate equally in the modernization process and share in the fruits of modernization.” However, the old rural governance model has seriously hindered the development of urban-rural integration.
New challenges facing the governance of “new-type rural communities.” First, it causes some villagers to become “impoverished by moving upstairs.” The construction of new-type rural communities is often accompanied by farmers “moving upstairs.” In this process, there is generally the problem of insufficient compensation by local governments for farmers' housing and homestead land, while farmers often still need to pay extra to buy apartments. Coupled with the increase in farmers' living costs after “moving upstairs,” this can cause the adverse consequence of “impoverishment by moving upstairs.” Moreover, after farmers “move upstairs,” they basically leave the land and lose an important source of income——farming income. Under such circumstances, if the problem of non-agricultural employment after farmers move upstairs cannot be solved well, the issue of farmers' income becomes a long-standing difficult problem.
Second, unique community phenomena such as “raising pigs on rooftops and growing vegetables in green belts” appear. At present, in the vast majority of rural areas in China, agriculture is still farmers' main production activity, courtyard economy and household livestock raising are still important sources of income, land is still the main means of security, and rural residential points mainly in the form of villages are still relatively suitable for rural villagers to live in and engage in various production activities. Faced with sudden “moving upstairs,” many villagers, especially elderly people, find it difficult to adapt in a short time. Coupled with their hard-to-give-up feelings toward land and livestock, some villagers choose to open up “their own territory” on rooftops or in green belts and other public spaces to raise pigs or grow vegetables.
Third, rural relationships weaken, village cohesion declines, and villager relations gradually become estranged. In the construction of new-type rural communities, in which farmers' concentrated residence is an important feature, an important link is the merger of villages and the addition of outsiders. Along with the merger of villages, the relatively closed traditional village residence pattern originally based on blood ties and locality has been broken, and villagers originally belonging to different villages have become common community residents, which weakens the villages' original rural relationships. Although new-type communities improve farmers' housing conditions and living environment, the high-rise residences and anti-theft systems in the communities are no longer convenient for villagers to visit one another and chat, or to help one another, especially because within the communities “public spaces are becoming fewer and fewer, and the functions of some surviving public spaces have also weakened.” Coupled with the addition of external “strange” people, the old warm relationships in rural areas based on kinship and connections are gradually giving way to organized and institutionalized occupational relationships. The cohesion of the original village community has been weakened, and relations among villagers have gradually become estranged and cold. How different villagers can “live well” has become an urgent problem to be solved.
Finally, how to manage and serve well new-type communities that transcend village boundaries is a major challenge facing new-type rural governance. Before village mergers, the original villages already had their own elites managing the villages. Now, the village mergers brought about by the construction of new-type rural communities, on the one hand, cause some elites to lose their “leadership” positions, and on the other hand, the “leaders” of new-type communities cannot possibly know all the villages thoroughly. The new “leaders” may be less capable of managing and integrating the community than the former clan elders. Moreover, the new communities still implement the system of villager self-governance, which may trigger competition among elites to win control over community management. This not only affects and weakens the exertion of the elites' own strength, but also makes it difficult for rural communities to form an authoritative center with lasting influence that can serve villagers wholeheartedly. Therefore, how to manage and serve well new-type communities that transcend village boundaries, and how to embed the traditional rural governance structure centered on villager self-governance into the construction of open new-type communities, is also a major challenge facing new-type rural governance. In addition, with the construction of new communities, investment in public undertakings within communities continues to increase, and many public service functions related to villagers' livelihoods continue to extend to the grassroots level. The extension of rural governance is gradually expanding, and how to undertake these tasks and ensure the supply of public services is a new challenge facing rural governance.