Text |Li Peilin is a member of the Faculty of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Rural revitalization is a hot topic in the academic community and the whole society at this stage. The report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China stressed that "the most arduous and arduous task of building a modern socialist country in an all-round way is still in the countryside". On the one hand, the understanding of "still in the countryside" refers to the fact that under the basic national conditions of more people and less land in China, the revitalization of the countryside has become a difficult problem for a long timeOn the other hand, the problem of rural revitalization has not been fundamentally solved, the gap between urban and rural development is still large, and the "three rural issues" of agriculture, rural and peasant development are still the arduous task for China to achieve modernization.
Provide more external support for rural revitalization.
Due to China's basic national conditions of a large population and a small amount of land, the gap between urban and rural development in China has been formed for a long time. Solving this problem and making the peasants generally prosperous has become the most arduous task for China to modernize. From the perspective of the academic development history of sociology, the academic community has a clear understanding of this problem very early on, and has made arduous efforts to explore the path of rural development.
Since the reform and opening up, the reform of the economic system and the changes in the social structure have provided a strong impetus for the development of the rural areas, and the productive forces in China's rural areas have been greatly liberated and improved, and unprecedented changes have also taken place in the rural areas. The endogenous driving force of rural development has been released and cultivated through different paths, such as the implementation of the household contract responsibility system, the development of township enterprises, the migration of migrant workers to urban areas for work and business, the large-scale operation of agriculture, and the integrated development of urban and rural areas.
However, in this kind of rural development and change, the problem of insufficient endogenous power for sustainable rural development has become increasingly prominent. We must be soberly aware that the rural revitalization of Chinese-style modernization has entered a new stage, while continuing to make great efforts to cultivate endogenous power, we must also provide more external support for rural revitalization, implement the rebalance of ensuring food security and promoting farmers' income, continue to vigorously promote the reform of the dual structure and system of urban and rural areas, promote farmers' part-time employment and increase farmers' income by transferring the surplus labor time of rural labor, promote urban-rural integration development by revitalizing rural resources, and mobilize all walks of life across the country to help rural revitalization.
Understand the changes in the dynamics of rural development from a long-term perspective.
The possible future of rural revitalization with Chinese modernization should also be based on the common characteristics of rural modernization in various countries, as well as Chinese characteristics based on their own national conditions. When the famous French rural sociologist Mendras published his book The End of the Peasant in 1964, the urbanization rate in France was about 65%, which was about the same as in China today. By 1984, when the book was republished, he wrote "Twenty Years Later", and by that time the proportion of agricultural workers in France had fallen to less than 7% of the country's employed population, which was roughly equivalent to the level that China might reach when it modernized in the future. The dramatic changes in the French countryside that Mendras described at the time may have some reference for us to look forward to the possible future of rural modernization today.
We can refer to the experience of other countries and judge the possible future trends of China's rural development according to our own national conditions, which helps us to understand the changes in the driving force of rural development in the long term.
The rural population and agricultural workers will continue to decline. China's rural modernization will continue to be a long-term process, with China's urbanization rate of 65% in 2022 and an average annual growth rate of about 1 in the 10 years from 2010 to 20204 percentage points predict that China's urbanization rate will break the ceiling of 80% by 2035. However, according to international experience, after the urbanization rate exceeds 80 per cent, it may no longer be an indicator of the degree of development, but only an indicator of the choice of life and housing style. The indicator of China's rural modernization gap is the proportion of agricultural laborers. In 2022, about 7Of the 500 million employed people, about 22% are employed in agriculture, which is still far from the current proportion of less than 3% in developed countries. Based on an average annual decrease of more than 1 percentage point in the 10 years from 2010 to 2020, this indicator will be reduced to 10% in 2035. Of course, this simple extrapolation method may also cause misjudgment, the actual speed may be slower than expected, and there will be hesitation and bottlenecks when urbanization and non-agricultural development reach a certain extent, but this general trend will not change.
The number of villages will continue to decrease. This trend will continue for a long time, and of course we cannot carry out large-scale demolition and construction in order to increase land revenue, especially to pay attention to the protection of ancient villages, but it is not necessary to preserve every village. In the process of modernization, the relative concentration of rural residents in some countries and regions in East Asia with large populations and small land is also the premise and general trend of rural modernization. Perhaps some kind of reverse urbanization in the future will solve the problem of withering and "hollowing out" some villages, but it is impossible to solve the problems of all villages in this regard. Therefore, rural revitalization cannot be regarded as the revitalization of every village, and the key is to gradually eliminate the living gap between urban and rural areas.
The way for the peasants to become prosperous in general will be to work part-time and multi-occupationally. Although the intensive cultivation of land can increase agricultural productivity, it can only solve the problem of a small number of farmers becoming rich, and most farmers rely on the national average of 0It is difficult to get rid of the low-income state of 6 hectares (9 acres) of cultivated land and the income of several hundred or thousands of yuan per mu of cultivated land a year. Over the years, the per capita disposable income of rural residents has exceeded the net income of agricultural operations. With the decline of the working-age population in rural areas, the total number of migrant workers who go out is also close to the peak, and in the future, ordinary farmers will have to rely more on part-time and multi-industry to increase their income.
Living in the countryside became a lifestyle choice, and farming became a career choice. Of course, this future possibility also depends on a range of institutional arrangements. In the future of China's rural revitalization, in the construction of infrastructure such as water supply, power supply, gas supply, and roads, and public services such as employment, education, medical care, and social security, the institutionalized difference between urban and rural areas will gradually narrow, and the intergenerational transmission of relative rural poverty will be basically blocked in the system. Occupation and other restrictions, peasant houses have complete property rights like urban people's houses, and many people who live in the countryside are no longer farmers, they just choose to live in the countryside to escape the hustle and bustle of urban life, crowding, air pollution and high housing prices. Professional farmers will become the main body of agricultural laborers, and engaging in agricultural production is no longer the fate of their ancestors, but the choice of occupation.
Agriculture as a civilization will exist for a long time and will not disappear with the rise of industrial civilization. Agriculture will still have a basic and strategic position in protecting food security in the future, the modernization of agriculture is an important part of national modernization, and the rural areas are an important carrier for retaining nostalgia and preserving pastoral scenery. In short, in the future of rural revitalization, rural life is a choice of lifestyle and life experience, and rural areas are no longer associated with poverty, backwardness, lack of culture, and inefficiency in our civilization.
It is necessary to make institutional, psychological, and governance preparations for the hollowing out and aging of some villages. We can see that even in developed countries where there is no fundamental difference in living standards between urban and rural areas, the process of hollowing out and aging some rural areas has not yet ended. Although China's population density is relatively large, due to the differences between urban and rural areas in terms of living opportunities, educational opportunities, employment opportunities, etc., will still exist for a long time, the hollowing out and aging of some villages will be an inevitable trend for a long period of time, and we must make full preparations for this in terms of system, psychology and governance.
On the new journey of Chinese-style modernization, changing the common urban-rural dual structure in developing countries and embarking on a new path to achieve rural revitalization has become the top priority in the new stage of high-quality development. No matter from the perspective of international experience or the practice of rural development in China, rural revitalization needs to pay attention to cultivating endogenous power while continuously increasing the intensity of urban to rural areas and industry to supplement agriculture.