Solving the issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers: urbanization is not the fundamental way out

The reality in China is that although more than 100 million farmers in the 940 million rural population have gone to cities to work, about 800 million farmers still live in scattered rural areas. No matter how the country's large cities change, among the 3 million villages of rural China, most are still villages, and the smallholder village community system handed down from several thousand years of traditional culture as the general economic foundation of rural areas has remained basically unchanged to this day. Moreover, the local differences among rural areas in different places are very great. Can we simplistically directly connect this traditional smallholder village community system's economic foundation with the so-called modern rule-of-law society or modern superstructure, to which even city people have not fully adapted? Is it possible to copy the existing systems of developed countries today and thereby achieve a modern rule of law?

If this were really done, then before doing it, please first make a horizontal comparison: which large developing country in the world with a population of over 100 million has not copied them? But which one has completed industrialization as comprehensively as China? Which one does not have a poverty rate of more than 30%, and in serious cases even exceeding 50%? And no matter how high the per capita income is, most still have a urban-rural dual structure, and so-called urbanization mainly relies on large slums to concentrate poor populations in large numbers. The benefits of copying such systems are obtained by a small number of elites, while the institutional costs can only be borne by the great majority of ordinary people!

For example, the other four large developing countries in Asia with populations of over 100 million have long implemented free elections and multi-party parliamentary democracy in the superstructure, and privatization and marketization in the economic foundation; scholars, as part of the elite group, have also been able to share in the institutional benefits as "knowledge capitalists"; however, their overall development of industrialization and urbanization as nation-states participating in global competition is not as good as China's.

The question raised by this is: as a developing country, what do we actually want? What do the rural areas of China, in which our farmers live, actually want? Today the mainstream in academia is privatization, marketization, liberalization and globalization. This is the so-called Western-style four modernizations that have in fact replaced the "official four modernizations", or, to put it more neutrally, industrialization, urbanization, monetization and capitalization. But even if all these "izations" are completed, they may not necessarily solve China's issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers.

Everyone understands that the "Western-style four modernizations" are logically entirely tenable: only after privatization can there be marketization; with marketized free trade, "commodities are natural levelers", and the newly emerging middle class will inevitably demand political liberalization; finally it leads to global integration. Otherwise, there would not be so many "officials and ordinary people alike" who take these views as a matter of course and superstitiously believe in them.

However, the trouble lies in the fact that the institutional costs inevitably formed in the process of realizing this logic will, through inertial "path dependence", be shifted onto rural areas, so the urban-rural gap will inevitably widen, and the factors of production will inevitably flow out of the "agriculture, rural areas and farmers" sector on a large scale; of course, there will also be increasingly severe issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers. In recent years some people have even thought that China would be completely fine as long as it copied the American system. But they have overlooked a common sense: "China has no farms, America has no farmers." In China, 90% of the land is operated by more than 200 million farming households, while in America 90% of the land is operated by 170,000 farm owners. The reality in China is that plains account for only 1/8 of the national land area, and the plains area where the four resources suitable for agriculture - water, soil, light and heat - are relatively well matched accounts for less than 10% of the national land area. Deserts, mountainous areas and plateaus are certainly not the first choice for entrepreneurs to build factories, so industry is inevitably concentrated in the plains and coastal areas, and therefore cities are also inevitably concentrated in the plains and coastal areas. In this way, agriculture, industry, cities and population are all mainly concentrated in the plains and coastal areas. Therefore, the widening of regional disparities in China is the result of the constraints of China's economic geography of "tiered distribution", and is not entirely the result of human action or the disaster of institutions.

Twenty years ago, the author, like many people, also regarded urbanization as the fundamental way out for solving the issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers, believing that as long as urbanization was accelerated, household registration was relaxed, and farmers were allowed to enter cities, the issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers would be readily solved. But later, through investigations of many developing countries, as long as their population exceeded 100 million, no country was found to have succeeded in urbanization. If China also uses large slums to achieve urbanization, that would merely be a kind of "spatial translation and concentration of poverty" - scattered poor rural populations becoming relatively concentrated slum populations - and the result is often a concentrated outbreak of social contradictions.