Why abolishing the agricultural household registration is a fundamental element of civilization

First, abolishing peasant status is the starting point for all other subsequent reforms. Without the legally mandated differences in national identity, it becomes possible to strive for equality in other civil rights. In a civilized country, the law cannot a priori prescribe different identities and rights for different people. Rawls emphasized again and again in A Theory of Justice that this kind of discrimination is the greatest unfairness. Therefore, abolishing differences in status is the right thing to do.

Second, there are many issues to discuss afterward. The problem of the long-standing price scissors between industrial and agricultural products is an old historical debt. Many of the peasants who made sacrifices back then have already died, and now many descendants of peasants work in cities as migrant laborers. Therefore, this bad debt can only be made up for by increasing investment in agriculture, in rural areas, and in peasants' education and medical security. Per-capita compensation is impossible to carry out. Even if it were forced through, each person would not get much money.

Third, the main problem in agriculture now is that peasants do not have private property rights to land. When Mr. Zhang Peigang was at university, he taught me: unless land can be privatized, China's rural problems cannot be solved. Why? Because fragmented small-scale agricultural production simply does not conform to the characteristics of modern agriculture: refinement, mechanization and industrialization. The agricultural profit per unit of land is very low, and without large-scale production there can be no modern agriculture. Therefore, I support land privatization. But according to current land laws and regulations, the ownership of rural land is collective, peasants do not have ownership, and what peasants have is the right to cultivate. Therefore, before land privatization, what we should strive for is the transfer of contract rights or cultivation rights. In other words, there needs to be a market that allows peasants to transfer the contracted land under their names and obtain a certain return. At the same time, they also gain the freedom of employment that is constrained by small-unit, low-return cultivation of their own land.

Fourth, what we should also strive for is the issue of equal legal treatment for the agricultural population coming to cities. Once peasants can transfer the land contract rights in their hands, they can then seek employment in cities. Among these, discriminatory legal provisions between urban residents and migrant workers should be abolished. Shanghai has already abolished the Regulations on Social Security for Non-local Populations, and all employed people pay the same most basic social security contributions without exception. In this way, non-local populations, especially peasants, have initially achieved equality in work, retirement and medical insurance in Shanghai. For example, if either spouse has paid social security continuously for three years, their child can attend a public school in Shanghai.

Fifth, the issue of peasants' homestead land involves the question of whether it can be bought and sold. Inheritance is permitted, but current regulations do not allow selling it to non-local populations, especially urban populations. One concern is that wealthy people in cities will recklessly buy rural homestead land and build the deep courtyards and grand mansions of the past. But as fewer and fewer people are willing to live in villages, the value of homestead land will also become lower and lower. In rural areas nowadays, even young children like to buy houses in towns when they marry, and the decline of villages will be an inevitable trend.

Sixth, the issue of proceeds from changing the use nature of agricultural land must certainly be changed. At present, the government acquires and stockpiles land from villages at low prices, then compensates the village-level unit, which then distributes it to farming households according to mu. The first problem is that the acquisition and stockpiling price is too low, and local governments obtain huge price spreads. This price spread should be given to peasants; they must no longer compete with the people for profit, and wealth should be stored among the people. The second problem is how to guarantee the future employment and security of the population in villages that lose their land. This point should be resolved through negotiation; there is no peasants' association now, so only the village-level government and developers can determine the priority employment rights of the village population. Third, funds should be set aside to provide skills training for the population of villages that lose their land. This point is extremely important.

Seventh, China currently has no choice but to face the problem of capacity reduction, so from an overall perspective, the demand for newly added industrial land is not great. Therefore, in most regions rural land has no more opportunity to become industrial land. Existing industrial parks are already far more than enough to meet the needs of current industrial production. Therefore, it is unlikely that most village populations can change their fate by changing land use nature. After all, urban villages are very few.

Eighth, the village population should turn to the service sector and industries with skill requirements. Retraining the village population into blue-collar workers and service employees is work the government must undertake. This can both promote the process of urbanization and change the fate of the village population. Today, to say that a bit of land can guarantee this or that for peasants is both ignorance of the profits of agricultural output and demagogic nonsense. Can a Chinese peasant with an average of less than 2.25 mu of land expect to get rich from the returns on land?