Friend guide. If land privatization loses the basis for rural survival, the majority of peasants will not be able to establish themselves in the cities, and it is likely that slum slums will intensify simultaneously with rural social conflicts, and large-scale social unrest will be inevitable and will be far more intense than in other developing countries.
Note: This article is based on Professor Wen Tiejun's book "Thinking of Danger in Danger: ** and Rural Governance" and Professor Wen's discussion on land issues. We invite you to pay attention and think together.
The "three rural" problem is not only a phenomenon unique to China, but also a common and long-term problem in most developing countries. In this regard, serious scholars in the West do not believe that their experience or theory can solve the "three rural" problems in developing countries in a targeted manner.
However, the idea of "land privatization + marketization of circulation will inevitably lead to large-scale agricultural operation" put forward by the mainstream of Western academic circles has been widely echoed in our country, in addition to the background advocated by interest groups, partly because it appears to be very "complete" in terms of theoretical logic: because private property rights can be traded in the market most smoothly, privatization is the premise of marketization. Subsequently, marketization will form an "invisible hand" to promote the scale of land, which may form economies of scale in agriculture, and then enable agricultural investors to obtain higher returns for improving the coefficient of equipment or adopting advanced technology, which will also form the competitiveness of the agricultural economy under the conditions of market economy.
This set of theoretical logic looks beautiful, but is it really the case? In our extensive domestic and international surveys, especially in comparative studies of developing countries, we find that the logic of "land privatization + marketization of land circulation will inevitably achieve economies of scale" lacks empirical basis in developing countries and East Asian countries. Whether in the long course of history or in the course of concrete changes in reality, it is difficult to find objective experience that supports this logic.
Even in the old Europe among the developed countries in the West, those colonial suzerains such as Britain, and the industrialized countries of East Asia, such as Japan, which completely withdrew from their colonies after the defeat of the war and no longer have the conditions for large-scale emigration, objectively do not have the conditions to rely on institutional arrangements such as "privatization of property rights + marketization of circulation" to achieve economies of scale in land. In other words, the agricultural experience of the European Union, Japan and South Korea does not support the subjective theoretical logic of "land privatization + circulation marketization".
Although this theoretical logic does have a specific and individual country's empirical basis in the world, it cannot be copied by later generations.
In the process of the transformation of old Europe from a traditional agricultural society to modern industrialization and urbanization, the suzerainty transferred its surplus population, the poor and even the criminal population on a large scale, and plundered the resources of the colonies and semi-colonies for themselves. This process alleviates the contradiction between population, land and resources, alleviates the pressure of social transformation brought about by industrialization and urbanization, and forms the prerequisites for building a modern political, economic, social and other institutions.
In those newly established colonial countries, which were mainly composed of European immigrants, because of their large local indigenous populations and the remaining indigenous populations being enclosed in "reserves", and monopolizing vast land and natural resources, the internal contradictions derived from their resource endowments are much more relaxed than those in countries that are still mainly composed of indigenous populations (such as China and India).
It was during the centuries of large-scale colonization in Europe that the institutional costs of Western industrialization were able to be transferred from the inside to the outside, and the resources from the outside to the inside. With this, these old European countries have avoided the long-standing "three rural" problems in China and other third world countries.
Looking at the world, we can see that only the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and other countries with no more than 10 large farms can have the conditions to achieve economies of scale and generate agricultural scale benefits, and almost all of them are the products of large-scale killing of local indigenous people and expanding their territories in the process of colonization.
In addition, although the developed countries in old Europe have been marketized for hundreds of years, they have not realized the "scale management" that only exists in textbooks, and they are still dominated by small and medium-sized farms, and 2 3 agricultural operators are still part-time. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, among the industrialized countries and regions of East Asia, entered the Western model of market economy earlier than we do, but their agriculture is still dominated by small-scale farmers.
In addition, Western agriculture is mostly inseparable from high subsidies. Even in the United States, where economies of scale have been achieved, agriculture does not operate entirely according to the dogmatic theory of the free market. As we all know, the United States receives much more subsidies for large-scale farm agriculture than any other developing country.
It can be seen that the prerequisites for the successful realization of industrialization, urbanization, and large-scale and industrialization of agriculture in the developed countries of the West (note that the "smooth" is highlighted here) are in essence colonialism and imperialism. Without these two mainstreams derived from Western-centrism, there is no way to talk about the modernization of the Western model.
Our survey also found that regardless of whether the theoretical logic of Western economics is reasonable or not, most of the developing countries that blindly copy the Western economic system and practice the dogma of "privatization + marketization" are deeply trapped in the "development trap" and cannot extricate themselves. At present, there are no successful examples of how agricultural modernization can successfully solve the problems of increasing local poverty and food insecurity by relying solely on land-scale economies of scale, and the relative success is precisely the result of not following this theoretical logic.
Whether it is India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, the common dilemma faced by the developing countries with large populations, is that in the process of industrialization, they cannot obtain external accumulation and transfer costs to the outside, and can only obtain the original accumulation of capital from the inside, mainly from the "three rural", and can only digest the cost of the system internally.
In this predicament, if land is privatized and bought and sold freely, the result is not only rapid and low-cost industrialization and agricultural modernization, but on the one hand, the countryside withers, small farmers go bankrupt, and landlessness is the opposite. On the other hand, landless peasants are flocking to the cities in large numbers and finding employment – not urbanization but urban slums. According to the logic of Western theory, the results of practicing "land privatization + circulation marketization" are all polarized between the rich and the poor, guerrilla warfare in rural poor areas, the proliferation of gangs in urban slums, and even terrorism.
With the complete privatization of land, even if land resources are abundant and large-scale operations are realized, if the conditions for transferring the costs of the industrialization system to foreign countries are lacking, then the "three rural" problems will still exist.
India and China are both the largest developing countries in the world, with more arable land in India and more arable land per capita than China, and the natural conditions of agriculture are also better than China's. However, the privatization and free circulation of land in the market have brought to India the landlessness of 1 3 peasants under the conditions of land tenure by landlords and plantation owners, and the emergence of rural guerrillas and urban slums on the other.
Look at Mexico again. In the early years, the colonization of Mexico by Westerners led to a significant reduction in the indigenous population, so Mexico was relatively rich in land resources. In order to realize that the tiller had his land, a revolution broke out in Mexico, followed by the radical Cárdenas reforms. The globalization of capital and the advent of the North American Free Zone** since the 90s have accelerated the process of reopening the process of land privatization and market concentration in Mexico, resulting in the social revolt triggered by the well-known violation of the rights of indigenous peoples - the peasant guerrilla activities in Chiapas that have lasted for more than 10 years.
And Brazil. On the one hand, the natural conditions are superior, the urbanization rate has reached 82%, the per capita national income was once close to 8,000 US dollars, and large farms abound. But on the other hand, Brazil also has a nationwide hunger and a massive "landless farming movement", and every big city has a few large slums with millions of people!
We did a United Nations-backed project to study why most developing countries have never been able to get out of the development trap, and we found something wrong with it: Latin America is very rich in agricultural resources, but it is mainly controlled by multinational corporations, which does not provide food security for the local poor, and is more about making a profit in the international food market, so although the bulk crops are grown locally in Latin America, the profits are on Wall Street.
For example, Ecuador is the world's famous banana country, but bananas, logistics and settlement are not in the country, agricultural products as raw materials are mostly taken away by multinational companies, there is no local processing industry development conditions, domestic food and clothing and other consumer goods ** is higher than the international market. As a result, the income of transnational capital is abroad, and the Ecuadorian people have almost no conditions to form large-scale deposits, and of course, they have no financial investment ability, which eventually bankrupts the country's finances and the whole country switches to the US dollar as the currency in circulation. Then there will be no basic conditions for macroeconomic regulation and control. It can be seen that if the sovereignty of resources is not in the hands of the country, there can be no talk of localized development at all, which is the development trap of Latin America.
What is puzzling is that there are many experiences that fail because of copying the dogma of "privatization + marketization", but many scholars in the domestic theoretical circles still believe in it.
Through comparative research, we have found that East Asian countries and regions have been the most successful in land reform in the world.
If we look at the whole of Asia as a continent of indigenous populations, we will find that the scale of land in Asian countries has so far been very low, regardless of the system, basically a small-scale peasant economy. The only Asian country that operates on the American model of big farms is the Philippines, which is still a relic of the colonial era, and because the land rights of the indigenous people are not recognized by foreign colonizers, even if twenty or thirty large family farms are formed in the country, the land ownership is not owned by the indigenous people.
East Asian countries have done a similar thing on the issue of land reform, that is, to distribute land equally among rural households according to their population, which has become the most basic prerequisite for the relatively stable development of industrialization in East Asian societies after the war.
After World War II, Chinese mainland, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan successfully industrialized, modernized, and urbanized small rural communities as the basis of the system. With the exception of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, China, which were supported by the United States due to the geopolitics of the Cold War, East Asia has not simply copied the Western dogma of "privatization + marketization" in terms of system. The so-called "Japan-Korea-Taiwan model" is mainly to establish a comprehensive cooperative system on the basis of the small-scale peasant economy, and to monopolize rural finance, insurance, real estate, wholesale purchase and sales, tourism and health care and other profit-making fields in an all-round way, so that the cooperatives can make up for the lack of income in the field of agricultural production by using other profits of cooperatives in all agriculture-related fields.
Taking Japan as an example, land reform is almost synchronous with the establishment of comprehensive cooperatives, and all the capitalized interests in the rural economic field, including finance, insurance, and real estate, are concentrated in this monopoly cooperative, and all preferential policies are given to cooperatives but not to private enterprises. At the same time, it is also strictly forbidden for any private capital and foreign capital to enter the rural social and economic field, and it is rare for NGOs funded overseas to enter the rural society. All economic gains generated in the rural sector are returned to farmers in a high proportion through integrated farmers' cooperatives. In this way, the rural areas and the peasants will be stabilized.
In Japan, the urban economy is largely monopolized by the six major chaebols, while the rural economy is largely controlled by the comprehensive "Agricultural Cooperatives" (Agricultural Cooperatives). Whether it is finance and insurance, real estate, tourism, restaurants, supermarkets, wholesale, etc., everything is strictly controlled in the comprehensive cooperative system, and any external capital is useless no matter what. Although in 2001 it was officially opened to natural persons, in 2011 it allowed corporate legal persons to enter agriculture. Until now, however, very few Japanese companies have been able to go to the countryside to participate in the competition of agricultural cooperatives, and few entrepreneurs have dared to challenge the monopoly of agricultural cooperatives.
From the perspective of East Asian history, since ancient times, East Asia has concentrated on countries and regions dominated by small-scale peasant economies, and more people and less land are the main resource endowments faced by the development of East Asian countries and regions.
From the perspective of Chinese history, the Jingtian system appeared in the Shang Dynasty and was very mature by the Western Zhou Dynasty. In the Warring States Period, private ownership of land was implemented to reward military merits, but this system caused many social problems: the existence of private ownership of land made the landlord class's desire for annexation stronger, and land annexation not only caused a large loss of state-owned land, but also caused the confrontation between the landlord forces and the peasant class, bringing greater social contradictions and class struggle problems.
For thousands of years, Chinese peasants have demanded that "the tiller has his land". The founding kings of all dynasties often implemented the "uniform land exemption", and then there will be a gradual emergence of powerful households occupying the land, so Zhongxing important ministers often put forward the idea of suppressing the powerful and powerful. If Zhongxing's important ministers were "on the side of the Qing monarch" and the annexation of land by the powerful was not suppressed, the fall of this dynasty would inevitably be accelerated; If the idea of suppressing the powerful is implemented, the dynasty can be continued. In general, the one-time exemption from the field formed the institutional basis for a dynastic cycle of about 200 years.
Land reform in modern history meant that all dynasties had to divide land per capita. In 1949, through the land reform, our party made 88 percent of the peasant population unrelated to the urban modernization system, and the new regime only had to solve the problem of feeding less than 12 percent of the urban population, and the financial burden was reduced. At the same time, because of the division of land, the peasants not only pushed carts to support the people's army in fighting the war, but also the agricultural products that the state wanted to collect at a discount were the material basis for establishing the official financial system. Objectively speaking, because the vast number of peasants regained their enthusiasm for production because the cultivators had their own land, the new regime from 1949 to 1950 relied on the small peasant economy to alleviate the crisis of modernization that had been perpetuated.
And what is the main reason why most other countries built through the National Democratic Revolution fall into crisis as soon as the revolution succeeds? The revolutionary regime was unable to cope with the widespread poverty of the urban slum population. How did China respond at that time? It was nothing more than an agrarian revolution that brought the peasants, who made up the majority of the population, home to participate in the division of land. When the whole social and economic crisis is severe to a certain extent, no matter who is the leader, the response is very simple: as long as we promise that the peasants can divide the land equally, and at the same time, we must not destroy the foundation of the small peasants, and the peasants will surely go home happily, and the urban crisis will be completely alleviated.
At present, China's rural land system has been tested by practice over a long period of time, and on the whole it is in line with China's national conditions. Therefore, although the "three rural" issues have been criticized, they are still relatively minor compared with other developing countries. In my opinion, if there are no conditions to make major policy adjustments in the macroeconomic environment outside agriculture at present, we should continue to uphold the basic economic system in the rural areas and not change it lightly.
Our current system of land property rights, which distributes land and other resources to households, can actually be called "risk-free assets of the peasant economy and part-time business." Why is it a risk-free asset? Because land is not traded in the market, but through political distribution. The reason why farmers who have been given land are reluctant to trade in the market is that land is the basis of the "one family, two systems" economy, that is, keeping this land can at least allow the family to eat, and family members can stay in the countryside or go out to work. So we will see that in reality, even people who have become bosses in the city have to fly back as soon as they hear that the village has been redivided. No one wants to throw away the land that originally belonged to them. This is said to be the land complex of Chinese peasants, but it is also a special operational feature of the mechanism of internalization of risks in rural society.
At present, many of our localities are trying to break the original land pattern, using the withdrawal of villages and towns, trying to break the social and cultural relations within the original village community that have a binding effect on the property and income distribution system, and breaking the pattern of "acquaintance society" in the countryside, as if this can reduce the cost of land expropriation by the local government. It has been observed that although the policy since the 80s of the 20th century has been encouraging land transfer, in fact, the spontaneous circulation of "usufruct rights" has been occurring in large numbers, while the complete circulation of real voluntary relinquishment of ownership has hardly occurred. It is precisely the current system of collective ownership in rural areas that makes farmers take it for granted that they have the right to acquire a piece of land property free of charge as a collective member, and use it as a risk-free asset to pursue higher risks and returns from other businesses, so that they can maximize their risk returns.
At a meeting more than 10 years ago, I met Xiong Deming, a migrant worker who had asked the prime minister to help him ask for a salary. At that time, I asked her, "What if I still don't get my final salary?" Her answer was very interesting, saying, "If you can't get it, you will go home, and raise a few more pigs." This also shows that farmers rely on the internality of the smallholder family economy to resolve external risks.
China's economic development to this day has two valuable experiences: first, China's industrialization and urbanization have not been accompanied by large-scale slum formation, which is the only example in the world's most populous developing countries; The second is the rural land system, in which land is evenly distributed according to the population and property rights are owned by households, which has not only provided the peasants with a basic guarantee for their survival, but has also objectively become the basis for a soft landing in China's previous economic crises. The premise of these two experiences is to ensure that peasants are free to go to the cities to work and do business, and they are also free to return to their hometowns to work and earn a living. In fact, for the majority of peasants, only in this way can they maintain a relatively good income.
Once the first service capital is allowed to go to the countryside and form institutional land privatization and free market trading, there will certainly be institutional benefits of "resource capitalization" in the short term, but the institutional costs brought by it are bound to be borne by the whole society: on the one hand, under the strong intervention of the alliance between local power and capital, small farmers who are already unprofitable in agriculture will lose their land in large numbers, although it is a voluntary transaction on the surface, but in fact they are coerced by powerful interest groups; On the other hand, the loss of the basis for survival in the countryside will make it impossible for the majority of peasants to establish themselves in the cities, which is likely to lead to the simultaneous intensification of slumification and social conflict in rural areas, and large-scale social unrest will be inevitable and far more intense than in other developing countries.
When radical developmentalists stubbornly copy Western textbooks and destroy vernacular societies, there will be no more basic conditions for a soft landing in China.
Another important reason why land privatization is completely unfeasible in our country is determined by the single-party system in our country. After the privatization of land, the state first lost the ownership and overall control of land, and it was impossible to ensure the food security of China's more than one billion people. The issue of food security will create more problems like a chain reaction, involving all aspects of China's economic, political, and military development.
Since most developing countries have the "three rural" problems, and there is no precedent for using short-term and radical means to solve the "three rural" problems, it is best to alleviate China's "three rural" problems based on the current basic system and take the road of long-term, improved and rural revitalization.
In the radical modernization stage of accelerating industrialization and urbanization, the three elements of the countryside are bound to have a net outflow, the resulting social conflicts are too complex, and the peasant groups involved are too large, so we should be cautious about every move in this field.
From the current point of view, the family operation dominated by small farmers is still the main form of agricultural management in China, and it is also a practical problem that China's agricultural capitalization development must face for a long time. For example, can modern agriculture with deepening capital eliminate Chinese peasants? No, because we are not foreign colonizers, and common prosperity cannot leave small farmers behind! To this end, it is necessary to prevent the forced transfer of land, the concentration of land and other means of production in the hands of a small number of people, and the forced extrusion of the vast number of small peasants, and still more to prevent a large number of people from becoming a group of "lumpen proletarians" who have no way to transfer jobs and no land to cultivate. The mode of agricultural operation must persist in adapting measures to local conditions and the conditions of the time, and cannot be one-size-fits-all, still less can it be forced to give orders.