Agricultural modernization should be the modernization of agriculture, rural areas, and farmers
I. The Two Basic Social Functions of China's Agriculture
From a macro perspective, China's agriculture assumes two basic social functions.
The first is the reproduction function of farming households. This function is the most basic one. If this basic function remains stable, then China's rural society will be able to maintain relatively good order. The household reproduction function can be simply summarized as production and living based on the village.
⟦NL> The first aspect is that villagers live based on the village. Over several thousand years of agricultural society development in history, the village became the basic form and basic unit of China's rural society. Even in modern times, this basic rural social form has remained so despite the strong impact of various revolutionary movements. As a community, the village, through long-term historical accumulation, possesses a rich and complete political, economic, and social-cultural system. Politically, the village has formed its own internal authority identification; socially and culturally, geographical ties, blood ties, and ties of shared interests all constitute the villagers' social relationship networks; economically, land is generally allocated within the village, and various production tasks are also completed within the village. In terms of these aspects, land is the core element of the village's integrity. Only when farmers have their own land in the village can they live a complete life in the village and have a sense of existence and belonging there. In this regard, Chen Xiwen keenly observed this point. He believes that China is a typical country that conducts agricultural production in the village manner, and agricultural production therefore has sociological significance. It can be imagined that if the connection between the village and land were completely severed, then farmers' lives would inevitably be greatly affected.
The second aspect is that villagers engage in production based on land. Traditionally, land is the main source of income for farmers, and land is therefore the most important means of production. In most areas of central and western China at present, income from land still occupies an important position. With the development of the modern economy, similar to the experience of other countries around the world, China's agriculture has also shown an obvious trend toward part-time farming. Therefore, farming households' income generally includes two parts: one is the agricultural income from middle-aged and elderly people farming at home, and the other is the wage income from young and middle-aged people working away from home. Rural areas have formed a household livelihood model of half-work and half-farming based on intergenerational division of labor. Such a half-work and half-farming model will continue to exist for a fairly long period. The reason for this is that China's rural labor force population is huge, and most lack basic skills training. Young and middle-aged laborers absorbed into the secondary and tertiary industries can only obtain low remuneration, and their income level is insufficient to maintain household reproduction. This forces them to rely on the farming income of their middle-aged and elderly parents to increase the total household income. Philip Huang called this "the institutionalized 'half-work, half-farming' involutionary agriculture." Therefore, as long as China's rural labor force has not decreased substantially, and as long as the rural labor factor cannot yet be allocated to higher-level secondary and tertiary industries, villagers will still have to rely on rural land for production.
The second is the function of supplying agricultural products to the whole society.
In modern and contemporary society, the proportion of agriculture in the national economy shows a law of continuous decline. At present, China's agricultural output value accounts for about 10% of total gross national product. However, agriculture is also a foundational industry and a strategic industry. If the foundation of agriculture is not solid, the entire edifice of the national economy will be shaken. Especially for a country like China, which has a huge population and extremely scarce land resources, agriculture's foundational and strategic position appears even more prominent.
The main function of agriculture is to provide agricultural products to society. China currently has less than 1.9 billion mu of cultivated land, and with the advancement of urbanization it is still decreasing every year. On this extremely limited cultivated land, the first priority is to ensure the country's food security. In recent years, as the state has attached importance to and increased investment in agriculture, rural areas, and farmers, China's grain output has historically achieved ten consecutive increases. However, with the continued development of China's economy and society and changes in the structure of grain demand, overall China's grain supply shows a tightening and continuously intensifying trend. Because China's huge grain consumption cannot be resolved through the international market, how to raise the output level of China's agriculture is extremely critical. From the state's perspective, it hopes to maintain a high land output rate so as to ensure the total land output level. However, in recent years, the phenomenon of part-time farming in China's agriculture has become increasingly obvious, especially as there are more and more part-time farming households whose main income is non-agricultural income. Because the proportion of agricultural income is very low, such part-time farming households do not attach importance to agriculture, and thus phenomena such as reducing the land multiple cropping index or even abandoning land appear. Clearly, part-time farming in China's agriculture will continue to develop and deepen. If the state does not adopt effective countermeasures, then it will threaten China's food security. In addition, China's agriculture must not only ensure a relatively high grain self-sufficiency rate, but also supply relatively sufficient agricultural and sideline products. Agricultural and sideline products also require a certain area of land for production. China's total cultivated land area is only so much, and how large a proportion of cultivated land is occupied by non-grain crops and grain crops respectively also requires rough state control. Therefore, from the perspective of agriculture's social attributes, agriculture is not merely an individual economic decision-making behavior of farming households; it also requires the state to exercise certain control and regulation over farmers' production.
From the above analysis, it can be seen that China's farmers need to rely on village society for living and on village land for production. It is precisely because of the existence of the village society and land that they are able to complete household reproduction. At the same time, through agricultural activities, farmers also assume the social responsibility of supplying agricultural products to the whole society. Although the right to use land belongs to farmers and they can use it freely, from the perspective of the overall interests of the state, they must also accept corresponding state regulation. These two basic social functions of China's agriculture are both interconnected and contradictory. In other words, agriculture, rural areas, and farmers are mutually dependent and mutually restraining. From the perspective of farmers, especially small farmers, they live in rural areas and engage in agricultural production to complete household reproduction. Agriculture, farmers, and rural areas are inseparable. From the state's perspective, the main consideration is how agriculture serves the development of the state and society. Although there is tension between the two, neither can be neglected.
II. The Current Bias Toward Agriculture in China's Agricultural Modernization
After land was distributed to households in the 1980s, China's rural areas established a two-tier management system combining unified management and separate management based on the household contract responsibility system. This institutional design attempted to achieve two goals: first, to protect the dominant position of the household as a management entity and increase farmers' enthusiasm for agricultural production; second, to solve through village collective economic organizations or internal cooperation those matters that individual farming households cannot handle well or find difficult to handle, that is, to achieve a certain degree of "unified management" on the basis of household management. It should be said that this institutional design took into account both the actual rural situation at the time and the long-term development requirements of agriculture. However, in the specific practice of most rural areas, the function of unified management was continuously weakened and even basically lost. As a result, China's agriculture in a certain sense returned to the era of the traditional small-peasant economy. The dispersed small-peasant management model brought a series of disadvantages to China's agricultural production. For example, in the process of small-peasant production, people are often good at dividing but not good at cooperating, and the dilemma of collective action greatly increases production costs; small farmers have limited demand for new technology and knowledge, and county and township agricultural technical services find it difficult to connect effectively with them, which is not conducive to the long-term progress and development of agriculture; under the market economy, small farmers simply cannot connect with the market and lack bargaining power. Not only can they not increase profits, they are often hit by market risks.
Clearly, the fundamental way out of these problems lies in increasing the scale of agricultural management. Advocating moderate scale management is precisely one of the core meanings of agricultural modernization. Only when agricultural management reaches a certain scale can agricultural mechanization, new technologies, and new varieties be promoted on that basis. Fragmented land management cannot achieve this. In terms of local government policy formulation and implementation, this mainly means vigorously promoting land transfer for industrialized management. In recent years, new types of agricultural management entities such as large farming households, family farms, and agricultural companies have appeared in various places, which can be regarded as manifestations of this line of thinking. From local practice, the scale management currently being promoted has indeed achieved partial results. For example, after scale management, the problems of difficult cooperation in small-peasant production links and how to connect with the market have been solved to a certain extent, with relatively obvious performance in promoting new technologies and new varieties and controlling chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Another example is relying on capital investment to replace labor, breaking the involutionary agricultural model and greatly increasing labor productivity. Another example is that the government encourages new types of agricultural management entities through policy subsidies to increase the multiple cropping index, thereby increasing total land output and helping to ensure the country's food security.
However, concentrated land management has also produced many problems. First, local governments and new types of agricultural management entities often have a tendency to prefer larger and larger management scale. Once the moderate scale of household management is exceeded, land productivity mostly declines, which undoubtedly runs counter to the state's policy goals. Second, there is the problem of resettling surplus labor, mainly middle-aged and elderly labor in the villages. Although they can obtain land rent, they lose the opportunity for agricultural labor. They are either forced to go out to work or can only stay completely idle at home. This has in fact broken the half-work and half-farming household livelihood model based on intergenerational division of labor, and farmers' household reproduction model faces challenges. Third, it breaks the integrity of the village structure. After large-scale or even entire-village land transfer, the village loses its production function and retains only its residential function. The rhythm of village life is also completely disrupted, and farmers' behavioral patterns and rural social order are adjusted accordingly. Take the author's investigation in Xiaogan, Hubei, as an example. After implementing land transfer for entire villages and groups, farmers' sensitivity to land rent greatly increased. Large farming households in the village were forced to withdraw from agriculture and choose to go out to work because they could not afford the rising land rent. Elderly people in the village were idle all day. Although they had land rent, it still could not compare with the income they had when farming themselves. Most villagers felt that their welfare level had declined compared with before. All the above problems can be seen in the large number of overt or covert acts of resistance by many farmers during the land transfer process.
Judging from the current practices of actively promoting agricultural modernization across the country, the government, especially local governments, values the positive effects brought by large-scale agricultural management, but does not give due attention to the above problems it causes. They either simply believe that a small number of farmers lack sufficient awareness, or that even if problems exist, they are only small problems in development. The author believes that, just as the slogan "agricultural modernization" itself suggests, it obviously looks at problems more from the perspective of agriculture, talking more about agriculture and less about farmers and rural areas, and has a relatively obvious bias toward agriculture. From the government's perspective, agriculture first ensures the country's food security, and carrying out agricultural modernization is an inevitable trend, so its bias toward agriculture is understandable in a certain sense. However, it must be clearly recognized that China's agricultural modernization not only cannot bypass farmers and rural areas, but to a large extent depends on them. If agricultural modernization is pursued one-sidedly and advanced alone, then the effect is very likely to be the opposite of what is desired. In this regard, both history and reality have provided sufficient lessons.
III. The "Agriculture, Rural Areas, and Farmers" Issues in China's Agricultural Modernization Must Be Considered Comprehensively
A large farmer population is China's greatest national condition, and China will maintain a huge rural population for decades to come. Since reform and opening up, along with rapid economic and social development, China has undergone a rapid urbanization process, and the urbanization rate has greatly increased. According to survey data from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China's urbanization rate in 2011 already exceeded 50%. This was the first time in thousands of years of Chinese history that the urban population exceeded the agricultural population. However, when the urbanization rate reached a historic high, it must also be noted that China's urbanization level is still far from sufficient. On the one hand, in horizontal comparison, China's urbanization rate is not only greatly lower than that of developed countries, but also lower than that of many developing countries. On the other hand, viewed internally, the quality of China's urbanization is still at an elementary stage. This is mainly manifested in the fact that although China counts more than 200 million rural registered migrant workers in cities as urban population, in reality only a very small portion of them can truly establish themselves in cities. They live an amphibious "city-rural" life, and their parents, wives, and children still live in rural areas and have not moved into cities. If this group were excluded from the urban population statistics, then China's urban population would account for only about 35% of the national population.
Some say that the fundamental reason why the huge number of migrant workers cannot transform into true urban people is the urban-rural dual structure left over from China's planned system. According to this view, farmers participate in urban construction and serve urban residents through their own labor, but because of their non-urban household registration status they cannot enjoy the same treatment as urban residents (for example, unequal pay for equal work and lack of social security). Therefore, to raise China's urbanization level, the key lies in breaking the urban-rural dual structure. Objectively speaking, the urban-rural dual structure has indeed hindered the development of China's urbanization to a large extent, and in today's increasingly open society it appears more and more unjust. However, removing the various welfare discriminations tied to household registration does not mean that China's rural population will rapidly decrease. What should be faced squarely is that, because of China's huge population base and enormous rural population, together with the various uncertainties in economic development and the urbanization process, China's urbanization will be an extremely long process, and may even face challenges that no other country in the world has ever experienced. Even with optimistic forecasting, when China's real urbanization rate reaches 70% after some time, China will still have five to six hundred million rural people. And this number far exceeds the population of the vast majority of countries in the world. Therefore, it can be said that a huge rural population will be China's long-term national condition, and this also constitutes the starting point for our thinking about China's agricultural modernization.
Agricultural modernization is a universal law of development in countries around the world, and it is also the inevitable path for China's agricultural development. China's greatest national condition is a large population and little land. Ensuring food security concerns the national economy and people's livelihood and is a major matter of high concern to the whole society. Rural reform over the past thirty years has enabled China's agricultural development to make great progress and successfully solved the problem of food and clothing for the whole population. However, farmers' disadvantaged position has not been fundamentally resolved. Moreover, with economic and social development, new requirements have been put forward for China's agriculture, and agricultural modernization faces unprecedented development opportunities. However, it must also be seen that the process of Chinese farmers entering cities will be a long one, which determines that agricultural modernization will also be a long process. This requires that the speed of agricultural modernization be coordinated with the speed of urbanization of China's rural population. In other words, promoting agricultural modernization must take into account farmers' circumstances and feelings. Likewise, China's rural villages are the result of long-term historical development, and land is the core element of the village. If land is mainly managed by capital from outside the village or even from cities, then the structural integrity of the village and even farmers' lives will be greatly affected. At present, the various problems brought about by agricultural modernization measures across China are already reminding us that China's agricultural modernization should, more accurately, be the modernization of "agriculture, rural areas, and farmers." The three are an organic whole, and only by properly coordinating their relationships can we embark on a path of agricultural modernization suited to China's actual conditions.