Comprehensive cooperatives are the key to revitalizing resources
China Securities Journal: If promoting farmers to move to cities cannot adopt radical measures, then how should the current “issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers” be resolved?
Wen Tiejun: The term “issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers” was first put forward by me in China in the 1990s, and it is basically a development issue of a farmer nation with an expanding population and scarce resources pursuing industrialization. The new rural construction emphasized in recent years is actually a crisis-response policy proposed by the central government after the emergence of the contradiction of overproduction and the pressure of deindustrialization, and it is called industry nurturing agriculture and cities nurturing rural areas. Using radical means to bring farmers into cities, such as buying out farmers' status with cash and occupying farmland on a large scale, means that surplus capital forcibly exchanges for scarce resources, which belongs to unequal exchange of urban and rural factors; its consequence is the further outflow of the three key factors of agriculture, which will cause even more serious “issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers.”
China Securities Journal: Does that mean the predicament of small farmers cannot be solved?
Wen Tiejun: No. The smallholder condition finds it very difficult to resist natural risks and market risks, and rural areas in the vast central and western regions have already shown a gradual phenomenon of “hollowing out.” Under the overall environment in which the credit cooperative system, the supply and marketing cooperative system, and the large-household economy in the name of farmers' professional cooperatives each go their own way, for the development of most ordinary villages there is an urgent need to explore and improve the two-tier management system that combines unified and separate management on the basis of household contracted management and under the condition of the separation of the three rights of land.
Villages should be taken as units and villagers should be organized through the mass line; building comprehensive cooperatives is a good direction. That is: the “three” of comprehensive cooperative organizations, diverse local social and cultural construction, and the mass line led by the Party and government, serving the sustainable development of the beautiful village as an “integrated whole.” Specifically, with the village two committees as the leading force, starting from village resources and the interests of the masses, mobilizing village capable people and activists, and consciously advancing the equity-based possession of resources just like equal-field allocation, thereby driving villagers to join grassroots comprehensive cooperation, raising the position for unified external negotiation, and carrying out related social and cultural construction work, will certainly lay a good foundation for the sustainable construction of villages and the long-term connection with national macro policies.
China Securities Journal: Regarding economic cooperative organizations, is there any experience that can be drawn on?
Wen Tiejun: I relatively approve of the Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, China model, which mainly establishes a comprehensive cooperative system on the basis of a smallholder economy, so that other incomes of cooperatives in all agriculture-related fields can make up for the insufficient income of disadvantaged small farmers in the field of agricultural production. Taking Japan as an example, land reform and the establishment of comprehensive cooperatives were almost simultaneous. All capitalized interests in the rural economic fields, including finance, insurance and real estate, were concentrated in this monopolistic cooperative, and the government's preferential conditions were all given to the cooperative, while private enterprises were long prohibited from entering farmland transactions; at the same time, the government strictly prohibited any private capital and foreign capital from entering the rural social and economic fields. This ensured that all economic returns generated in the rural fields were returned to farmers at a high proportion through comprehensive farmers' cooperatives. In this way, both rural areas and farmers were stabilized; it was just that American-style large farms were not formed.
Over the past 60 years, some believe that the “issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers” contributed more than 17 trillion to the state. Now about 10 trillion has been invested in the “issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers,” but this is only compensatory investment. In the future, policy support should be further increased. If capital is concentrated on a large scale in rural areas as it is in cities, rural areas will become as developed as cities.
China Securities Journal: Due to the large outflow of labor, the governance of rural society has undergone tremendous changes. What suggestions do you have for rural construction?
Wen Tiejun: The importance of rural construction is indeed becoming more prominent. As a historical concept, rural construction was conceived in Chinese society in the early 20th century. Although rural construction practices in different periods had many differences in form, they shared similarities in historical background and were also connected by the same line of thought in terms of intellectual logic.
The purpose of rural construction is to reshape harmonious social relations and construct a healthy and sustainable path of social development. At the same time, rural construction is not a conservative focus on rural areas and rejection of cities, but rather takes rural areas as the point of departure for coordinating urban and rural development. That is what Liang Shuming said: “Rural construction is in fact not the construction of rural areas, but the construction of the whole Chinese society.”
Today we emphasize urbanization. Urban and rural areas should not exclude each other, nor should one transform the other away; of course, even less should urbanization transform rural areas away. In the recent process of “deindustrialization” along the coast, rural talent has flowed back to county-level small and medium-sized enterprises and urbanization, and the corresponding demand is for the farmland system to embody “retaining rights while leaving the land.” At this time, how to establish village two committees that can and are willing to serve the maximization of the interests of all villagers and lead rural construction, and the comprehensive cooperatives on which they are based, is a huge challenge for deepening reform.