Comprehensive cooperatives are the key to revitalizing resources

Taking the village as a unit and organizing villagers through the mass line to build comprehensive cooperatives is a good direction. That is: comprehensive cooperative organizations, diverse rural social and cultural construction, and the Party-and-government-led mass line - these "three" serve the sustainable development of the beautiful village as "one body."

The term "three rural issues" was put forward in China in the 1990s, and it is basically a development issue of a peasant country with an expanding population and scarce resources pursuing industrialization. The new rural construction emphasized in recent years is in fact a crisis-response measure proposed by the central government after the emergence of the contradiction of overproduction and the pressure of deindustrialization, and it is called industry repaying agriculture and cities repaying rural areas. Adopting radical means to push farmers into cities, such as buying out farmers' status with cash and requisitioning and occupying farmland on a large scale, means surplus capital forcibly exchanges for scarce resources. This belongs to unequal exchange of urban and rural factors, and its consequence is the further outflow of the three key factors of agriculture, which will create even more serious "three rural issues."

The smallholder state makes it very difficult to resist natural risks and market risks, and rural areas in the vast central and western regions have already shown a phenomenon of gradual "hollowing out." Under the overall environment in which the credit cooperative system, the supply and marketing cooperative system, and the large-household economy in the name of farmers' professional cooperatives each operate on their own, for the development of most ordinary villages, there is an urgent need to explore and improve the two-tier management system that combines unified and separate management on the basis of household contract management and under the condition of the separation of the three rights of land.

Taking the village as a unit and organizing villagers through the mass line to build comprehensive cooperatives is a good direction. That is: comprehensive cooperative organizations, diverse rural social and cultural construction, and the Party-and-government-led mass line - these "three" serve the sustainable development of the beautiful village as "one body." Specifically, with the village two committees as the leading force, proceeding from village resources and the interests of the masses, mobilizing village capable people and activists, and consciously advancing the shareholding possession of resources similar to equal-field allocation, so as to drive villagers to join grassroots comprehensive cooperation, raise the position of unified external negotiation, and carry out related social and cultural construction work, will certainly lay a good foundation for the sustainable construction of villages and the long-term connection with national macro policy.

As for economic cooperative organizations, I relatively approve of the models of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, China, mainly because they establish a comprehensive cooperative system on the basis of a smallholder economy, so that the other income of cooperatives in all agriculture-related fields can make up for the insufficient income of vulnerable smallholders in the field of agricultural production. Taking Japan as an example, land reform and the establishment of comprehensive cooperatives were almost synchronized, and all capitalized benefits in the rural economic field, including finance, insurance, and real estate, were concentrated in this monopolistic cooperative. The government's preferential conditions were also all given to the cooperative, and private enterprises were long prohibited from entering farmland transactions; at the same time, the government also strictly prohibited any private capital and foreign capital from entering the rural social and economic field. This ensured that all economic benefits generated in the rural field were returned to farmers at a high proportion through comprehensive farmers' cooperatives. In this way, the countryside was stabilized and farmers were stabilized, except that an American-style large farm did not take shape.

Over the past 60 years, some believe that the contribution of the "three rural" sector to the state has reached more than 17 trillion yuan. Now about 10 trillion yuan has been invested in the "three rural" sector, but this is only compensatory investment. In the future, policy support should be further increased. If capital is concentrated on a large scale in rural areas as it is in cities, rural areas will become as developed as cities.

Due to the massive outflow of labor, the governance of rural society has undergone tremendous changes. As a historical concept, rural construction was conceived in Chinese society in the early 20th century. Although rural construction practices in different periods differed in many ways in their forms of expression, they had similarities in historical background and also came down in one continuous line in ideological logic.

The purpose of rural construction is to reshape harmonious social relations and construct a healthy and sustainable path of social development. At the same time, rural construction does not conservatively focus on rural areas and exclude cities, but takes rural areas as the point of departure for coordinating urban and rural development. That is, as Liang Shuming said, "Rural construction is in fact not building rural areas, but intends the construction of the entire Chinese society."

Today, as we emphasize urbanization, urban and rural areas should not exclude each other, nor should one transform the other away, and of course urbanization must not transform rural areas away. In the recent process of "deindustrialization" along the coast, rural talent has flowed back to small and medium-sized enterprises in counties and to urbanization, and correspondingly the farmland system needs to reflect "retaining rights while leaving the land." At this time, how to establish village two committees that can and are willing to serve the maximization of the interests of all villagers and lead rural construction, and the comprehensive cooperatives on which they are based, is a tremendous challenge for deepening reform.