Transfer payments should focus on increasing farmers' participation
Currently, the state's annual transfer payments to rural areas have reached a scale of one trillion yuan. Starting from the abolition of the agricultural tax in 2006, in less than ten years, not only are farmers no longer required to pay taxes and fees, but there are also large-scale transfer payments. The magnitude of the change is unbelievable.
Before the abolition of the agricultural tax, the state collected taxes and fees from hundreds of millions of farming households. Because farming households operated on a small scale and were extremely scattered, the cost of collecting taxes and fees was extremely high. Collecting money from farmers thus became the number one difficult task in the world. What is quite surprising is that, under the circumstances of large-scale state transfer payments to rural areas, distributing money to farmers has become the number one difficult task in current rural work.
⟦NL> State transfer payments to rural areas generally take two forms: one is competitive transfer payments, and the other is universal transfer payments. Competitive transfer payments involve applying from the bottom up for infrastructure and other construction projects, which are then invested in and built by state finances, with local governments generally required to provide matching funds; universal transfer payments are financial support that all eligible farmers or rural areas can obtain.
Universal transfer payments must have clear standards
If universal transfer payments have obvious markers or clear standards, such payments are not controversial; the money is simply distributed. For example, for cooperative medical care, when farmers participate in cooperative medical care, central and local financial subsidies reach 320 yuan/year. Another example is the new rural pension insurance, under which all rural residents over 60 years old receive a minimum of 55 yuan per person per month.
Comprehensive agricultural subsidies generally require subsidies based on actual sown area, but actual sown area is difficult to calculate, and the households that contract the land are often not the same as the households that actually cultivate it. In other words, if comprehensive agricultural subsidies are calculated based on actual sown area, it is very difficult to calculate clearly, because it is very difficult to determine specifically who sowed how much area. Therefore, comprehensive agricultural subsidies nationwide are almost all indiscriminate subsidies based on contracted area, all subsidizing contracted farming households, with little relationship to the cultivator or the actual sown area.
Another example is rural minimum living security. Annual national spending on minimum living security is as high as over one hundred billion yuan. According to policy provisions, extremely poor farming households should all be covered. The problem is that it is very difficult to have a clear and unified standard for who is an extremely poor farming household. Moreover, although in the village acquaintance society farmers have consensus about who the truly extremely poor households are, when the minimum living security quotas exceed the very few extremely poor households that the whole village agrees on, who else can receive minimum living security will be extremely controversial and generate many conflicts. Another example is rural dilapidated house renovation. Because the annual budget is tens of billions of yuan, and dilapidated house renovation often costs tens of thousands of yuan, whose house is dilapidated and how to assess it are very difficult to determine by standard. Therefore, almost every dilapidated house renovation triggers controversy.
In other words, universal transfer payments must be projects with very clear standards in order not to cause controversy, while almost all projects with relatively vague standards will cause controversy. When standards are vague, grassroots cadres may exploit these vague areas to seek private gain, and powerful groups in rural areas may also use this to seek personal benefit. Therefore, the state also tries as much as possible to turn universal transfer payments into standardized projects, such as the “one-card” system for comprehensive agricultural subsidies, which directly distributes funds to farming households through fiscal channels, and it is unlikely to actually check who is farming, whether they have farmed, and how many seasons they have farmed.
At the same time, because universal coverage is not entirely based on per capita equality, but rather on specific circumstances (such as “all those who should be covered are covered” in minimum living security), it is very difficult to standardize who is an extremely poor household in the village and which household meets the state minimum living security standard, so it is impossible to handle it with a one-size-fits-all approach. Therefore, either village cadres are given the power to judge, or villagers select minimum living security households. Whether village cadres choose or villagers choose, personal factors or clan factors may come into play, making it difficult to achieve objective fairness and justice. As a result, no matter how minimum living security quotas are allocated, they will cause conflicts within the village and even lead to petitions.
The dilemma of competitive transfer payments
Competitive transfer payments generally require local application, and higher-level authorities arrange them according to actual circumstances. Obtaining competitive projects often first depends on the personal ability and personal connections of local applicants, and projects obtained by relying on applicants' personal connections may allow individuals to obtain more benefit from them, even though the projects are intended for the locality.
In order to prevent corrupt behavior by individuals in transfer payments, for competitive projects the state generally requires public bidding, with higher-level governments arranging implementation from the top down, excluding local influence as much as possible. As a result, this not only excludes villagers from the projects, but also excludes grassroots cadres from the projects. Instead, a construction team obtained through bidding builds public works or public welfare undertakings on farmers' land that are directly related to farmers' vital interests. At this time, conflicts between the outside construction team and local farmers are very normal. Moreover, in rural areas there will certainly be holdouts, “tough characters,” and people hoping to use the project to obtain benefits. These people create difficulties to obtain more project compensation, while other farmers watch coldly because it has nothing to do with them.
Even if projects arranged by the state can be effectively implemented, such implementation may differ greatly from farmers' actual needs. Rural public goods are characterized by enormous difference and diversity and cannot be standardized. The more formal top-down public bidding there is, the more difficult it is to flexibly meet local actual needs. Therefore, the tension between flexibility and standardization becomes quite serious.
The most fundamental problem is that the top-down implementation of state projects merely improves farmers' production and living conditions and is charitable in nature, but does not improve farmers' organizational capacity and participatory capacity through project implementation. The projects are external to the village.
Transfer payments need farmer participation
Whether competitive transfer payments or universal transfer payments, both are the state distributing money to farmers, and this money-distribution process is clearly not smooth, has relatively low efficiency, and has relatively poor results. The reason for this situation is still related to farming households being too scattered. Simply put, the cost of the state dealing with more than 200 million small farmers with vastly different circumstances is very high. Specifically, China's rural areas differ enormously by region, and the number of farmers is huge, so it is basically impossible to find a nationally unified standardized method for subsidizing farmers, and impossible to have a one-size-fits-all concrete operational method. In order to make state transferred resources targeted, there must be a certain degree of local flexibility in the transfer payment process. Once there is flexibility, once there is flexible space for using transfer payments, localities can use the opportunity to seek private gain. In milder cases, they focus on local achievements and image projects, and large amounts of state transfer payments are used to create demonstration sites along roadsides; in severe cases, they seek private gain, and all kinds of connection-based projects and favor-based projects appear.
The difficulty of standardizing rural transfer payments makes it necessary for the central government to give localities space for flexible operation. Once flexible, the use of transfer payments may deviate from the target, and corruption may even appear. This administrative pattern of “chaos as soon as it is relaxed, rigidity as soon as it is tightened,” with which we are very familiar, also appears repeatedly in state transfer payments to rural areas.
How can this problem be solved?
Different farmers in different regions have vastly different circumstances, and their demands on state transfer payments are vastly different. These vast differences, which cannot be standardized, make it fundamentally impossible for the state to adopt top-down one-size-fits-all policies to solve all problems. The state is also unable to deal directly with more than 200 million small farming households. The only remaining method is basically to organize farmers at the grassroots level and let farmers participate in expressing the demand preferences for state transfer payments. On the one hand, the state transfers resources to rural areas, but this transfer is not only for poverty alleviation and charity, but also to improve farmers' organizational capacity and capacity to connect with state resources. On the other hand, only through a certain organizational platform can farmers effectively connect with state resources and truly enable state resources to serve farmers' production and living needs with maximum benefit.
Such a connecting platform should obviously be the village, this acquaintance society. It happens that villages implement villager self-governance. Farmers' villager self-governance through democracy for self-management, self-education, and self-service has already been practiced for more than 20 years and accumulated mature experience. Now let this autonomous acquaintance-society platform of the village connect with state resources. The state also transfers some resources to this autonomous platform, which makes decisions on their use through democratic methods. This kind of bottom-up farmer demand preference and top-down transferred resources connecting through democratic methods on the village platform may not only effectively use state resources, but also enhance farmers' capacity for democratic self-governance. This enhancement of self-governance capacity will in turn further improve farmers' ability to solve their own affairs and solve the basic order of rural production and life.
In other words, in the process of the state transferring resources to rural areas, there must be farmer participation.