How to Achieve Coordinated Development Through Urban-Rural Integration
The Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Party made “coordination” one of the five major development concepts, proposing to focus on promoting coordinated urban-rural and regional development, promoting coordinated economic and social development, and promoting the synchronous development of new industrialization, informatization, urbanization and agricultural modernization. Facing the current realistic predicament of cities growing ever larger and villages growing ever emptier, how to uphold the concept of coordinated development and advance the integration of urban and rural development is an important topic requiring active consideration.
1. Core Concept: Coordinated Development Advanced as a Whole
Practice at home and abroad has proven that coordinated development is the road to success for effectively advancing the integration of urban and rural development. Advancing the integration of urban and rural development is an inevitable requirement of industrialization, urbanization and agricultural modernization once they reach a certain stage.
Looking across developed countries such as Japan, South Korea, France, the United States and Germany, all of them went through a stage of sharp urban-rural confrontation, in which various problems brought about by uncoordinated urban-rural development emerged, and all of them, under conditions of highly uneven urban-rural development, adopted various different measures and achieved a high degree of urban-rural integration.
Take Norway, for example. In the 1960s, its urban-rural development was severely unbalanced, and the income gap between urban and rural residents at one point exceeded 3:1, with large numbers of farmers flowing to the cities. Subsequently, through the implementation of a series of policies such as the “regional development plan”, it has now completed urban-rural integration, and farmers enjoy living conditions, income levels and social welfare benefits almost identical to those of urban residents. In contrast, some Latin American countries such as Brazil began the initial stage of modernization in the 1950s and by 1980 had approached Europe's level of urbanization; however, because they failed to adopt timely policy measures and failed to properly handle the urban-rural relationship, rural infrastructure in many Latin American countries is currently extremely backward and many slums have appeared. Domestically, regions such as Kunshan, Guangzhou, Suzhou, Shanghai, Beijing and Chengdu have also created relatively mature models of urban-rural integration.
Successful experience at home and abroad proves that upholding coordinated urban-rural development is an effective path for strengthening the overall character of a country's and a region's economic and social development. Only by enhancing the overall and coordinated character of urban and rural development, and reflecting the differences and complementarity of the two, can one go steadily and far.
Advancing the integration of urban and rural development is not about taking the city as the center and simply advancing new urbanization and turning farmers into urban residents, nor is it about taking the countryside as the center and solely building a new socialist countryside and turning rural areas into cities. Rather, it is about upholding equal emphasis on both city and countryside, advancing industry and agriculture, city and countryside, and urban residents and rural residents as an organic whole, and promoting mutual integration and common development of city and countryside in development concepts, planning and layout, factor allocation, industrial development, public services and ecological protection, so that in the city one can savor the quality of life of the countryside, and in the countryside one can enjoy the modern civilization of the city.
While emphasizing advancement as a whole, differences and complementarity must also be highlighted. As two different forms of economic and social space, city and countryside have different natural attributes, population distributions and social functions. To promote coordinated urban-rural development, one must both “seek common ground” and highlight integration, and also “preserve differences” and avoid homogenization; one cannot transform rural areas by the methods of building cities, or occupy rural areas with the urban lifestyle model. For example, France has 370,000 villages whose appearance has not changed in more than 200 years, yet they have likewise achieved rural modernization. It is necessary to prevent the homogenization of agriculture and industry, two different industrial forms, and the convergence of the countryside and the city, two different landscapes; in particular, new countryside construction should preserve regional characteristics and retain folk customs and appearances.
City and countryside possess complementarity and symbiosis in many respects; rural development cannot do without the radiation and driving force of the city, and urban development cannot do without the promotion and support of the countryside. To advance coordinated urban-rural development, city and countryside should be closely linked, adhere to differentiated development of city and countryside, and promote the two-way flow of various factors between urban and rural areas. While absorbing more rural people to settle in cities, those who remain in the countryside should be enabled to live and work in contentment, and more urban people should be attracted to the countryside for leisure and residence, enhancing rural vitality, so that “going to the city” and “going to the countryside” each find their proper place, forming an integrated urban-rural production and living pattern of complementary advantages and mutual dependence.
2. Top-Level Design: Comprehensive Planning and Industrial Integration
The successful cases of coordinated urban-rural development abroad are without exception ones that emphasized top-level design for urban-rural integration. For example, in response to the reality that after the Industrial Revolution the pace of urbanization greatly accelerated, large numbers of rural people moved to cities, and the countryside became increasingly desolate, the United Kingdom proposed the “garden city” concept of resolving urban and rural problems together, enacted the Town and Country Planning Act, and established independent urban and rural planning management bodies, becoming the first country in the world to establish an urban-rural planning system.
Governments at all levels should study and draw on successful foreign experience, treat city and countryside as a whole, consider them comprehensively, plan them in a coordinated way and design them as one, and implement the integration of multiple plans such as the overall urban-rural plan, the overall land use plan and the overall industrial layout plan, effectively resolving the problems of urban-rural disconnection and emphasis on the city over the countryside in planning. In accordance with the different main functional zones, the spatial layout of industry and agriculture, and of towns and villages, should be planned in a coordinated way, consciously separating the city's residential areas, industrial areas, commercial areas, logistics areas, financial areas, leisure areas, university areas and government affairs areas, and purposefully laying out some business districts and industrial zones in the suburbs and rural areas so as to drive rural development. For example, in the planning of the food safety system, consideration could be given to locating everything from raw material bases to terminal product processing in rural areas, implementing the integration of agriculture, industry and trade, thereby accelerating the coordination of urban and rural areas.
In coordinated urban-rural development, industry is the key. Without industrial support, the integration of urban and rural development will become water without a source and a tree without roots. From foreign practice, developed countries all attach great importance to the coordinated development of urban and rural industries and to a reasonable division of urban and rural industries. For example, Japan at one time experienced a phenomenon of rural population flowing sharply to the cities and widening urban-rural differences; later, through policy measures such as the New National Comprehensive Development Plan and the Act on Promotion of Introduction of Industry into Rural Areas, it encouraged the transfer of urban industry to rural areas, strengthened enterprises' capacity to connect with villages, powerfully promoted rural industrialization, and achieved balanced and coordinated development. In the 1990s, South Korea implemented the “one village, one company” plan, legislating to require capable enterprises to connect with villages and support industries, including agricultural product development, sightseeing agriculture and village improvement.
From domestic exploration, Hunan Province has since 2007 organized and carried out the “ten thousand enterprises linked to villages, common development” activity, encouraging and guiding large numbers of non-public enterprises to carry out industrial cooperation with rural areas through forms such as industry-village linkage and project-led villages, advancing the combination of city and countryside, using industry to promote agriculture and using the city to drive the countryside, and achieving notable results. At present, the province has more than 6,700 non-public enterprises cooperating with more than 9,800 administrative villages, investing more than 57 billion yuan of various funds and implementing more than 2,100 industrial projects, with the per capita net income of farmers in paired villages 32% higher than the provincial average.
Governments at all levels should grasp industry as the key, guide the flow of modern economic factors such as urban enterprises' capital, talent and technology to rural areas, promote the reasonable layout in rural areas of urban modern logistics, e-commerce and agricultural product processing industries, promote the integration of industry and agriculture, the joining of hands between enterprises and farmers, and the linkage of city and countryside, and gradually narrow the gap between urban and rural areas in the level of industrial development. Specific policies should be introduced to encourage and guide industrial and commercial capital to develop in rural areas modern breeding and planting industries suited to enterprise-style operation, encourage social capital to be invested in rural construction, and allow enterprises and social organizations to establish various undertakings in rural areas. For enterprises that relocate from cities to rural areas to engage in agricultural production and participate in poverty alleviation and that conform to national industrial policy and environmental protection requirements, as well as small and micro enterprises themselves located in suburbs or rural areas, key support should be given in areas such as taxes and fees, finance, land use, electricity use and subsidies, attracting more market entities to invest, consume and operate in rural areas, prompting the diffusion of consumption and development opportunities to rural areas, thereby both easing urban pressure and boosting the rural economy.
3. Consolidating the Foundation: Narrowing Gaps and Equalizing Services
Since the 1930s, the United States has consistently attached importance to rural infrastructure such as roads, water and electricity, drainage and irrigation, and markets; at present, within a hundred-kilometer radius around major metropolitan areas, it is very difficult to distinguish urban from rural boundaries.
To advance the integration of urban and rural development, the foundation must be consolidated. Infrastructure, public services and social governance are, apart from industry, where the gaps between urban and rural areas lie. The integration of urban and rural development can only be effectively advanced on the premise of consolidating the rural foundation.
First, the most intuitive manifestation of the urban-rural gap is none other than infrastructure. Looking across the countries of the world, those with a high degree of urban-rural integration all attach great importance to infrastructure construction, and some have even extended urban infrastructure down to the village level.
China has a large population and little land, with numerous farmers, and limited by the carrying capacity of resources and the environment, even a very high level of urbanization would find it difficult to catch up with developed countries in a short time. At present, the principle of “joint urban-rural construction, urban-rural networking and urban-rural sharing” should be upheld, advancing the extension and coverage of urban infrastructure such as roads, water supply, sewage pipe networks, garbage treatment, electricity, telecommunications, environmental protection and informatization to rural areas, achieving “seamless connection” and interconnection, so that farmers can enjoy a life of modern civilization. The boundaries of urban development should be reasonably delineated to avoid unlimited urban expansion and the replacement of the countryside; through the integrated construction of urban and rural infrastructure, in spatial form the city should look more like a city and the countryside more like the countryside.
Second, the equalization of urban and rural public services should be advanced. For a long time, because the urban-rural dual system has not been deepened and reformed in step, large numbers of migrant workers in cities live in the city but cannot become urban residents, and serve the city but cannot enjoy urban life; in particular, the new generation of migrant workers yearns for the city but is not accepted by it, and has its roots in the countryside yet is increasingly alienated from it. At the same time, the “hollowing out” of rural areas has continued to intensify.
At present, major breakthroughs should be made in breaking the urban-rural dual structure and advancing the equal exchange of urban and rural factors and the balanced allocation of public resources, and a series of linked institutional reforms in household registration, land, social security, employment and education should be accelerated, so that all urban and rural residents enjoy equalized basic public services.
Finally, for urban and rural areas to be coordinated, governance must be synergistic. With the acceleration of the integration of urban and rural development, rural communities have entered a period of rapid change and transition to modern communities. Rural community construction should be continuously and deeply advanced, planning and building more villages in the suburbs and urban-rural fringe into rural communities with relatively complete facilities, focusing on creating nearby “community service circles”, so that the broad masses of rural residents can also enjoy high-quality and efficient community services.