An Analysis of the Relationship Between Informatization and Rural Social Development

Information, also called news, is a kind of message disseminated in the form of text, symbols, sound, language, images, animation, video and so on, and it bears multiple functions such as interpersonal communication, expression of ideas and description of scenes. Informatization is a systematic historical development process involving economic production, political development, cultural prosperity, social progress and many other social dimensions; it is a dynamic and gradual process in which a country or region transitions from material production to information production, from an industrial economy to an information economy, and from an industrial society to an information society; it is a new social and historical form in which information plays a foundational role in economic production, social life and scientific and technological progress; it is a historical process of making full use of information technology, developing and utilizing information resources, promoting information exchange and knowledge sharing, improving the quality of economic growth and driving the transformation of economic and social development. Rural informatization is an important component of national informatization construction and an inherent part of building a new socialist countryside, and it has already been incorporated into the overall framework of national information

technology construction. In the "Overall Framework for National Agricultural and Rural Informatization Construction (2007-2015)" formulated by the Ministry of Agriculture in 2007, the rural informatization development path of using informatization to advance modern agricultural development, enhance rural public services and social management, establish and improve informationization organizations at the township and village levels, and innovate rural information service models was clearly put forward. Amid today's global ecological crisis and the setback of the Western industrialization development path, rural informatization is an important force for advancing economic and social development in rural areas. This paper intends to take the theory of practical structure as its theoretical perspective and explore the impact of the informatization process on rural social development against the background of the long-wave process of global informatization development and the special pulse of China's indigenous social transformation.

I. Theoretical Framework and the Raising of the Question

The early Western industrialization process under the guidance of traditional old-style modernity met the needs of human development on the basis of the opposition between humanity and nature and humanity's conquest and utilization of nature. After more than two hundred years of rapid advance, it has reached a dead end and become the root of an increasingly serious environmental crisis and a crisis of humanity itself. In "The World Is Flat," after enumerating the "flattening" of the world brought about by the development of modern communication technology and information technology, Thomas L. Friedman, in his new book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded," explored from the opposite side the increasingly serious energy and environmental problems brought to humanity by the traditional industrialization path under the guidance of old-style modernity. This kind of development is a "primary development" in which both humanity and nature "lose." How to go beyond this view of development and realize comprehensive, coordinated and sustainable human development has become a major issue confronting people. In 1962, Daniel Bell proposed the term "post-industrial society" at an academic seminar, intending to point out the arrival of a new social form dominated by modern science and technology. This was humanity's earliest theoretical self-awareness of the social form after industrial society. Entering the 1970s, various "post-..." theories concerning social transformation and tremendous changes in social structure emerged one after another, forming core concepts and related theories such as "post-industrial" (Bell), "postmodern" (Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard), "late modernity" (Giddens), and "risk society" (Beck, Lash, Giddens). Although their standpoints and understandings differ, there is a basic consensus that we are entering a historical period different from traditional modernity, and that a new social form different from the industrial society since the Western Industrial Revolution is arriving. This social form is both generated on the basis of Western industrial society and different from industrial society in the traditional sense; it is a sublation of and constructive reflective critique of Western industrial society. Based on a profound reflection on Western modernity theory and the development process of Western industrial society, and combined with the actual process of China's social transformation, Professor Zheng Hangsheng proposed the distinction between two different modernities: "old-style modernity" and "new-style modernity." He believes that old-style modernity "is that kind of modernity centered on conquering nature and controlling resources, with disharmony between society and nature and between the individual and society, and with nature and society having paid a double price"; new-style modernity is "that kind of modernity that is people-oriented, in which humanity and nature both flourish and the individual and society both win, in which the relationship between the two is coordinated and harmonious, and in which the natural and social costs are reduced to the minimum." He believes that the transition from the old-style modernity of the classical era to the new-style modernity of the present era is a "structural transformation of social practice" under the intricate entanglement of the long-wave process of modernity globalization and the special pulse of indigenous social transformation. This structural transformation involves a broad scope and has a deep impact, making it impossible for any organization or individual to escape its influence. Since the 20th century, and especially since reform and opening up, China's government-led modernization process has made China's social development exhibit Chinese characteristics different from the so-called general Western path. This is both the foundation of the China experience and a concrete manifestation of the special pulse of China's indigenous social transformation. The development of information technology has made even very remote and impoverished villages inevitably swept into this world modernization process that is half merit and half fault. This late-developing, exogenous modernization process led and promoted by the government has transformed the historical sequence of Western pre-modernity, modernity and postmodernity in China's rural areas into a synchronic, entangled and interwoven relationship. The informatization process in rural areas has been swept in amid this entangled process of pre-modernity, modernity and new-style modernity. This unique process of social change brings many challenges to rural social development, but even more opportunities, making it possible for rural areas to change the industrial pattern of traditional agriculture and the traditional predicament of agricultural development through an information revolution led by modern information technology, and to achieve leapfrog development. This is precisely the core issue discussed in this paper.

II. The Impact of Informatization on the Outlook on Rural Economic and Social Development Humanity's understanding of the "outlook on development" itself develops continuously with the changes of the times.

In the early period of industrialization, people equated development with economic growth. Amid the widespread crisis of Western industrial civilization today, this outlook on development has fallen into an unprecedented crisis. Humanity has no choice but to consider the question of how to develop against the background of resource depletion, environmental crisis and the crisis of humanity itself. How to realize a new round of economic growth against the historical background of resources tending toward depletion, severe environmental pollution and growth approaching its limits is a question of widespread concern. To overcome and go beyond the traditional industrialization path under the guidance of this old-style modernity, it is necessary to realize informatization as the guide, replace the traditional "growth outlook" that one-sidedly pursues GDP growth with a scientific "outlook on development," realize the intensive transformation of the mode of economic growth and the mode of life development, and realize comprehensive, coordinated and sustainable development between humanity and nature, between people, and between people and society. As a different modernity corresponding to old-style modernity, "new-style modernity" emphasizes reducing social costs, promoting social progress, and advancing the harmonious win-win between humanity and nature. The "Scientific Outlook on Development" put forward by the Third Plenary Session of the 16th CPC Central Committee, namely "coordinating urban and rural development, coordinating regional development, coordinating economic and social development, coordinating the harmonious development of humanity and nature, and coordinating domestic development and opening up," is in fact a new outlook on development based on new-style modernity as its theoretical basis. The Scientific Outlook on Development emphasizes adhering to a people-oriented approach, establishing a comprehensive, coordinated and sustainable outlook on development, and promoting the comprehensive development of the economy, society and people. In terms of the mode of economic growth, this outlook on development means gradually transforming the mode of economic growth, changing the development predicament of "growth without development" in which development is equated with growth and GDP growth is pursued one-sidedly, realizing the transformation of the outlook on development, combining development with residents' livelihood issues, and realizing comprehensive, coordinated and sustainable development of the economy and society and of humanity and nature. At the same time, in economic growth, it is necessary to thoroughly reverse the high-cost development model of high energy consumption, high pollution and low output, and realize an economic growth path led by modern information technology and high-tech industries. In rural and agricultural development, it is necessary to realize the informatization of agricultural production factors and the transformation of information into a production factor. For a long time, based on the theory of zero-value labor in agricultural labor, people believed that the main problem in China's agricultural and rural development was the "agricultural involution" and low-output development predicament formed by the contradiction between population and land caused by overpopulation, and proposed a rural economic development path of transferring rural labor and advancing rural industrialization. This development path is troubled by two unavoidable problems. First, the increasingly severe environmental crisis as the foundation and result of development. The increasingly severe environmental crisis has become an indisputable fact, and developing rural industry on the basis of fragile rural ecological conditions will inevitably further aggravate the deterioration of this environmental crisis. Second, the dependent development of rural areas on cities and the persistently low agricultural output value. China's long-standing urban-rural dual structure has caused increasingly serious urban-rural differences and a pattern of dependent rural development, and this difference will become even more obvious with the development of industrialization and the transfer of agricultural labor. In "Transforming Traditional Agriculture," Schultz called "agriculture based entirely on the various production factors used by farmers for generations" "traditional agriculture," and proposed that the way to transform traditional agriculture is to renew agricultural production factors and invest in agriculture. Schultz's so-called agricultural investment is not limited to monetary capital and asset-type investment such as agricultural machinery, but is a composite concept including institutional investment in agriculture, human capital investment and other factors. Through the development of rural informatization, inputting information as a new agricultural production factor into agricultural production and promoting agriculture's own development is naturally an important way to invest in agriculture. Rural industrialization and the transfer of agricultural labor can indeed develop the economy and solve the employment problem of the so-called "surplus labor," but they do not solve the problem of rural development itself, and the agricultural sector remains the lowest-output and unprofitable industry in economic production. To change the development predicament of China's low agricultural output rate, it is necessary to start from agriculture's own development to solve the problem. In this sense, the way out for agricultural development is to develop agriculture, not to weaken or replace agriculture with industry. Therefore, the rural informatization process provides a rare good opportunity for agricultural development. If we follow the trend of informatization development, actively advance rural and agricultural informatization, and realize the combination of modern information technology and agricultural production, agriculture may very well become an environmentally friendly, low-carbon and high-return industry, and rural areas may very well become new countryside with beautiful environments, developed production and social progress.

III. The Impact of Informatization on Rural Social Governance

Local governance is a systematic project; it is a process of political activity in which government institutions located at specific structural nodes of the national political structure system mobilize resources from all sides and promote the implementation of national policies and local development. After the abolition of the agricultural tax and the villagers' small groups, the top-down social management method established during the traditional planned economy period has become seriously unsuited to the requirements of rural economic and social development. State power is changing from "extractive" to "floating," and this transformation has caused grassroots township governments to "not have transformed into action subjects providing services to rural areas, and they are breaking away from their old ties with farmers, becoming a level of government organization that appears on the surface to be insignificant and dispensable," and rural areas face a governance crisis. The development of rural informatization has promoted the widespread dissemination of the concept of "governance" in rural areas and led to a major transformation of the foundation of grassroots rural social governance. During the planned economy period, China established a highly centralized omnipotent government management model of a "big government, small society": the state directly intervened in all aspects of social life through administrative power, forming a highly centralized authoritarian government. Local governments, as executors of national policy and makers of local policy, had very limited discretionary decision-making power. In this government management system, the state achieved comprehensive penetration and organization of social life through ideology, organizational structure, the cadre ranks and effective political mobilization, monopolized the economy and various social resources comprehensively, and achieved a high degree of unity between government and society, with the three centers of politics, economy and ideology highly overlapping. The government gradually established comprehensive control over society, incorporated society under the government's power system, and the government's power expanded unprecedentedly while social power shrank; the power pattern between government and society was clearly characterized by a "strong government, weak society," and gradually established a powerful "omnipotent" state power and a tendency in government functions. "A thousand threads above, one needle below"; the concentrated manifestation of the omnipotent government's management system in grassroots social management is that the government transformed from a provider of public services into a "majordomo" meddling in every detail. Grassroots government institutions expanded, fiscal deficits rose year by year, and public credibility fell sharply. Governance, as "an analytical framework and intellectual system that explains modern life, political order and structural change, analyzes the framework of modern political and administrative power, and expounds the characteristics of the public policy system," is distinguished from traditional rule and management. Governance is participatory management, and it is "the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs. It is a continuing process through which conflicting or diverse interests may be accommodated and cooperative action may be taken. It includes formal institutions and regimes empowered to enforce compliance, as well as informal arrangements that people and institutions either have agreed to or perceive to be in their interest." The core and foundation of governance are equality of subjects, collaborative participation, contribution of wisdom and sharing of results. The development of rural informatization has greatly promoted the openness of government affairs information and the channels for rural residents to participate in and discuss politics, prompting grassroots rural governments to transform their governing concepts, gradually transforming from the omnipotent management-oriented government of the planned economy period to a specialized-function governance-oriented government suited to the requirements of globalization and market economy development, fully mobilizing the enthusiasm and initiative of all sectors of society to participate in social governance, and realizing the benign development of local social governance. At the same time, with the deepening of informatization, e-government, as a new means of government governance, has received widespread attention. At present, government departments at all levels in China, from central to local, have basically established their own portal websites and corresponding exclusive-domain information management service systems, and even some village committees or residents' committees have established their own websites. In some areas with a relatively high degree of informatization, paperless office work is widely practiced. The government makes full use of the Internet, television, wired and wireless communications, radio and other modern means of information dissemination to achieve extensive and in-depth information transmission and communication with the public, and to achieve a higher degree of political participation by the people. The advancement of the informatization process has also placed higher demands on local governments, and the Internet has become a very effective means of administrative supervision. On December 28, 2008, because of exposure by netizens, Zhou Jiugeng was expelled from the Party and public office and sentenced to 11 years in prison for arbitrarily making inappropriate remarks to the media that produced a negative impact and for luxury consumption behavior such as using public funds to purchase high-end cigarettes. A "Dahe Net" article titled "Deputy Bureau Chief: Whom Are You Speaking For?" disclosed the shocking quote by Lu Jun, deputy director of the Zhengzhou Municipal Planning Bureau: "Are you preparing to speak for the Party, or are you preparing to speak for the ordinary people?" This stirred up a thousand waves with one stone and aroused widespread discussion among netizens across the country about government functions and the quality of government officials. The Baimiao Township government in Bazhou District, Bazhong City, Sichuan Province, was called China's first "fully naked government" because it publicly posted on the Internet its official expense expenditures for January 2010, recording in detail every cent of official spending, arousing a nationwide great discussion about the openness and transparency of government affairs information. Although opinions were mixed and there were many worries, it nevertheless awakened public reflection and discussion about grassroots government governance in China, which is no small blessing. From this it can be seen that, as a new tool for conveying public opinion and sentiment, the Internet and other new media forms are becoming important channels for the public to supervise the government and express public opinion. This change in the mode of communication caused by informatization not only provides the necessary conditions for the transformation of the government's governing style and the improvement of administrative management efficiency, but also provides convenient channels for the masses to supervise the government, and provides a powerful guarantee for the transformation of grassroots government governing concepts and the construction of the government's own image.

IV. The Impact of Informatization on the Lifestyle of Rural Residents

Lifestyle, as a series of living habits, living institutions and living consciousness formed by people under the influence of certain social, cultural and economic conditions to satisfy their own needs, is a long-formed "style" of life. Lifestyle is both a direct representation of the level of economic development and an external manifestation of cultural values, and it is always connected with some kind of informal institution. Informal institutions, as "the general thought habits of individuals or society regarding certain relationships or certain functions," "recognized lifestyles" and "states of mind," are "unwritten behavioral norms naturally formed in the long-term life of residents living within a certain geographical area, commonly recognized by society, including invisible constraint rules such as customs and habits, ethical norms, moral concepts and ideology." This kind of informal institution has an internal coercive force for the people living in a specific region, and it has a very complex interconnected relationship with specific regional culture and local knowledge. Compared with formal institutions, "the change of informal constraints is a long-term process," and thus it has stronger institutional inertia. According to William Ogburn's theory of "cultural lag," in the process of cultural change, material culture changes first, and non-material adaptive culture changes afterward. But once non-material culture changes, it inevitably greatly promotes the change of material culture and brings tremendous changes in social structure. This tremendous change is the "structural transformation of social practice." In the development of human history, successive technological revolutions have all been accompanied by tremendous changes in lifestyle and social structure. In recent years, with the continuous advancement of rural informatization work and the smooth implementation of special projects such as the "Village-to-Village" project and the "Home Appliances to the Countryside" project, the channels and methods by which rural residents obtain information have been greatly improved. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, by the end of 2009, the total number of fixed and mobile telephone users in China had reached 1,016 million, the telephone penetration rate had reached 7,919 units per hundred people, and the scale of China's netizens had already exceeded 300 million, showing a momentum of rapid development. Data from the Second National Agricultural Census show that by the end of 2006, 81.19% of China's townships had completed rural power grid renovation, 98.17% of villages had electricity, and 98.13% of natural villages had electricity; 97.16% of villages and 93.17% of natural villages had telephone service; 81.11% of townships had post and telecommunications offices; and on average every hundred households owned 87.13 color televisions, 51.19 fixed telephones, 69.18 mobile phones and 2.12 computers. This tremendous historical change shows that the ways in which Chinese rural residents obtain information and communicate have undergone earth-shaking changes. The advancement of informatization and the invasion of modernity brought about by it have changed the traditional rural lifestyle, and also changed the communication methods, behavioral methods and informal institutions that rural residents have long inherited, thereby changing the foundation of order in rural society. The life goal of "two mu of land, one ox, wife, children and a warm kang" and being content with modest prosperity has become history. Rural areas are no longer, as before, self-enclosed regions where "the voices of chickens and dogs can be heard from one another, but people do not visit one another until death," but have become a node and unit of the global information society. At the level of lifestyle, the most important result of this transformation is the transformation of farmers' traditional worldview, values and agricultural management concepts, and the transformation of life ideals. In the information society, farmers can, beyond traditional agricultural production and the local knowledge related to it, understand and recognize the external world and the tremendous changes brought to humanity by industrialization and urbanization, and thus consciously become involved in this modernity process. This transformation of consciousness from spontaneity to self-awareness has fundamental significance for the transformation of rural social structure and lifestyle: farmers' living foundation is no longer the moral economy based on the subsistence economy, but commercialized business activities based on rational calculation; farmers are no longer the so-called "moral peasants" of Scott, but the so-called "rational peasants" of Popkin. In this sense, the so-called "migrant worker tide" that has appeared in the past ten-plus years is not the spontaneous transfer of rural surplus labor under the pressure of the contradiction between population and land as people habitually think, but the conscious behavior of farmers giving play to comparative advantages on the basis of rational calculation and weighing of pros and cons, because today, when agricultural product prices hover at a low point and ecological crisis causes agricultural output to continue to decline, going out to work is in any case a relatively cost-effective business behavior. Land is merely a zero-risk minimum living guarantee, and the government's various agricultural subsidies are a "windfall" obtained at no cost and with little relation to agricultural production. Chayanov, in "The Theory of Peasant Economy," proposed the concept of the "degree of self-exploitation" of peasant family labor, believing that "this degree of self-exploitation is determined by some relationship between the degree of satisfaction of needs and the degree of drudgery of labor." This "self-exploitation" behavior is obviously the result of rational calculation. In recent years, and especially the "migrant worker shortage" of 2010, has further demonstrated the bankruptcy of the low-wage competitiveness advantage under China's traditional unlimited supply of labor in economic development and the growth of farmers' instrumental rationality. The transformation of farmers' productive concepts will inevitably cause the transformation of the foundation of rural social order. The traditional rural mode of social connection based on local knowledge and informal institutions such as village rules and folk agreements is gradually declining, while modern unified statute law and formal rules based on nation-state identity penetrate deeply into rural areas and form an erosion and transformation of traditional local culture, and the foundation of traditional rural social order undergoes transformation.

V. Conclusion

Based on the dichotomy of "old-style modernity" and "new-style modernity," the theory of practical structure holds that human society is currently in a historical period of transition from old-style modernity to new-style modernity, and that this process is a historical transformation of the structure of social practice. Reflected in China's modernity process, this transformation means that the interconnection between the long-wave process of world modernity and the special pulse of China's indigenous society causes the historical process of Western pre-modernity, modernity and postmodernity to appear in China as a synchronic entangled relationship. This paper takes the theory of practical structure as its theoretical perspective to analyze the impact of informatization and the information society on China's rural social development. Rural informatization is an important component of national informatization construction and an inherent part of building a new socialist countryside. Rural informatization promotes the two-way transformation of the informatization of traditional agricultural production factors and the transformation of information into a production factor, brings innovation in traditional agricultural production factors, and provides new opportunities and conditions for agricultural development. In this sense, China's rural development cannot be realized by relying on rural industrialization and the transfer of agricultural labor; this method only improves the industrial economy and is of no benefit to agricultural development, and agriculture remains a high-input, low-output and inefficient industry. Agricultural development in countries such as Mexico, Israel, Chile and Japan shows that "there is no basic reason why the agricultural sector of any country cannot make a major contribution to economic growth." Realizing the modern transformation of agricultural production factors and developing agriculture starting from agriculture itself is the correct path for agricultural development and also the fundamental way for rural modernization and new countryside construction. At the level of grassroots rural social governance, due to the abolition of the agricultural tax and the villagers' small groups, state power has changed from "extractive" to "floating." This transformation has caused the "authority over affairs" and "financial authority" of grassroots governments to tend toward unification, but it has triggered a governance crisis in rural areas. Informatization has promoted the transformation of the governing concepts and social governance methods of grassroots township political power in rural areas, and is conducive to forming a participatory governance pattern of "equality of subjects and multi-party participation" that fully gives play to the enthusiasm and initiative of rural residents and all sectors of society. At the same time, the advancement of informatization and the invasion of modernity brought about by it have changed the traditional rural lifestyle, and also changed the communication methods, behavioral methods and informal institutions that rural residents have long inherited, thereby changing the foundation of order in rural society. Farmers have transformed from "moral peasants" into "rational peasants." Therefore, rural informatization provides a historic opportunity for rural economic and social development. Through the development of rural informatization, it is expected that in the not-too-distant future the long-formed urban-rural dual structure will be historically bridged, which is conducive to realizing rural urbanization and the development of the county economy, and to realizing the win-win co-prosperity and harmonious development of agriculture and industry, rural and urban areas, and farmer residents and urban residents.