There will be 8 days of Spring Festival holiday in 2024, and the number of people returning to their hometowns to visit relatives and travel has increased significantly. As of February 21, the cross-regional flow of people in the whole society has reached 61300 million people. According to the Ministry of Transport, there will be 9 billion people traveling, visiting relatives and leisure across the country during the entire Spring Festival travel period. The Spring Festival holiday and the entire Spring Festival travel cycle have greatly stimulated domestic consumption, further activated the cultural tourism market, and maximized the spillover effect of the "holiday economy".
From talent to crowds.
In the past few years, a series of new phenomena and trends have also emerged in the domestic tourism industry, from the tourism boom in Guizhou led by the popular "Village Super" and "Village BA", to the short-distance travel tide driven by Zibo barbecue, and then to the ice and snow world detonated by Harbin in the north, all of which fully demonstrate China's huge consumption momentum and potential demand.
Correspondingly, people everywhere and people are doing their best to advertise their cities and compete for the "consumption dividend" brought by them. The directors of culture and tourism bureaus from all over the country who speak for the city and the people who fully demonstrate the local spirit compete to appear on the stage, becoming the best spokesperson for economic resilience and social vitality in the mobile Internet era.
We can summarize these new phenomena as the "rush for people" war launched in various places, which is also part of the "flow economy". In the era of high-speed information dissemination, a place attracts the public's attention through various means, so as to be able to usher in the influx of "people" in a short period of time, show local customs, stimulate local economy, and stimulate social consumption, which is the underlying logic of the "crowd" war.
If we take a longer and broader view, we will find that the "scramble" around "people" has become an important model of local development for a long time in the past.
Since about 2017, various localities have introduced various talent policies, or launched "policy packages", or set up special institutions, played the "educational resource card", and played the "relaxation of settlement chess", all in order to attract college graduates and high-quality talents to settle in the local area, so as to improve the connotation and quality of local economic and social development, and lay the foundation for sustainable high-quality development.
From the "competition for talents" in various places to the new landscape of "grabbing people" shown by the "Zibo phenomenon" and the "Erbin phenomenon", the "rush for people" boom in Chinese society has been formed.
Whether it is a rush for talents or a rush for people, it is closely related to "people": the essence of the competition around talents is to attract talents in line with regional development to the region, and take root here to become "new local residents"; The purpose of the competition around the "crowd" is to shape the city's tourism brand, drive the development of the local related cultural and tourism industry, stimulate consumption, create more jobs for the local area, and improve the income level of local residents by attracting the "crowd".
Rushing for talents is the long-term rooting of talents, and grabbing people is the pursuit of explosiveness and instantaneity of traffic. They are all intuitively reflected in a series of numbers and data: "a certain place attracts xx high-end talents this year", "a certain place attracts xx tourists this year, driving tourism income xx yuan" ......These headlines, which often appear in news reports, often use striking data to show the attractiveness of the city. Whether it is talent or **, in modern economic development and social governance, it has become an extremely important and quantifiable data indicator.
Demographic economy and modern state.
Why do we need to "grab people", and what does it mean to develop from "competing for talents" to "grabbing people"? To answer these questions, we must first understand the following questions: Why has the competition around "people" become one of the main logics of modern social and economic development? Why is "people" in the sense of data, i.e., "population flow" and "number of talents", important for modern countries? When people with a sense of subjectivity become "talents" and "people" in the sense of statistics, should regional development still "grab people"?
In classical times, the concept of economics meant "household economy" or "home economics", because at that time the self-sufficient natural economy was the general state, and people's productive capacity was limited, and self-sufficiency was still difficult, let alone for profitable exchange and **. Therefore, the exchange and ** of that era were at a very low level in terms of type, quantity, intensity, etc., and the exchange was underdeveloped. With the development of productive forces, the production and manufacturing capacity of human beings has been unprecedentedly improved; With the development of geographical discoveries and ocean-going navigation technology, the scope of human beings has gradually expanded to the world, the world's production chain and system have been established, and the importance of money has increased.
As a result, the state form of the traditional era has undergone drastic changes, and a new state capability unique to the modern state has emerged, that is, the state's ability to calculate, plan, manage, and develop various "economic factors" within the territorial limits. It is in this sense that factors including land, population, and various resources become an important part of the national economy. Among the above elements, "people" and "population" themselves become the most valuable and complex elements.
The modern social system itself is a huge and complex economic system, which condenses all the elements including people, the technology that people have, and the resources that people have, and these elements with "people" as the core have become the "core assets" of the modern state, and the scientific and rational overall analysis and calculation of these elements have become the core capabilities of the modern country, and the population and talents have become an important part of the modern national economy. Whether it is grabbing talents or grabbing people, the same underlying logic is shared behind it, which is to pay attention to various economic effects based on people.
The logic of mobility in modern society.
After figuring out why the economic society on "population" has become a compulsory course in modern countries, we need to face the next level of problem: why does the crowd that is closely related to the cultural tourism industry and local consumption appear?
With the continuous update and iteration of transportation technology and information technology, the physical space of life has been greatly compressed, and the distance between time and space has been infinitely shortened. The improvement of the overall living standard has provided a solid foundation for the emergence of the "human tide". For today's Chinese, whether it is to travel abroad for a vacation, or to work in other places to take root, it has become the norm of life. Behind this change in concept and consciousness is the code for the emergence of "crowds".
The most important feature of modern society is that the people in it are independent individuals, firmly retaining the right to choose their own lives, and believing that life has infinite possibilities. However, we often lament the lack of meaning in our work, complaining that the meaning of life has been drained by repetitive labor. In fact, this touches on the essence of modern society: it is a complex system based on the social division of labor of people, who play the dual roles of producer and consumer at the same time, and also play the role of service and service. Modern society is a system of interdependence between people, which the French sociologist Durkheim called the organic solidarity of modern society. The whole social system improves the overall production efficiency through people's specialized labor, and the individuals in it are particularly eager to "retrieve" their own time due to the repetitive nature of their daily work, hoping to realize the life ideal of "the world is big, I want to see it". The infinite possibilities of life are the promises of modernity to people, and the real professional pressure constitutes the requirements of people, so the more leisure they have, the more people have to withdraw from the "everyday" and go to places they have never been to enrich their lives. All of the above constitutes the structural factors that allow the formation of "human flows".
From the essence of the operation of modern society, whether it is around the competition for talents, or focusing on the drainage of crowds, it is no longer a question of whether to "grab", but how to "grab" and how to "grab" benignly. Because the instantaneous and high-intensity mobility of people in daily life has become one of the important characteristics of modern society, the data formed by people's action trajectory and behavior trend has become a kind of "flow information" with strong national economic attributes with the blessing of artificial intelligence.
Therefore, how to capture and utilize this kind of human mobility and activate the economic and social effects of this mobility has become an important issue for managers. In essence, whether it is "grabbing talents" or "grabbing people", it is not a one-time effort, the former needs to formulate talent policies that meet the needs of local development, and it is also necessary to let the introduced people "make the best use of their talents" and live and work in peace and contentment; The latter needs to create a good social atmosphere, enhance service awareness, and form a brand effect.
People, population, talent, is the core elements of the economic operation of modern countries, population is data, talent has standards, but "people" is the premise of everything, only from the perspective of people-oriented, a deep understanding of the relationship between individuals and modern society, in order to respect the individual under the premise of correct understanding of the mobility trend and characteristics of people, but also around the "people" to carry out healthy competition and improve the level of development of the key.
The author is Meng Qingyan, professor and doctoral supervisor of the School of Sociology, China University of Political Science and Law
*:Economy**.