In the exploration of rural revitalization, what we lack is the imagination of industrial innovation. Empowering agriculture in science and technology and promoting the integrated development of the first, second and third industries can bring greater added value. Integrated development must meet the new consumption needs of urban and rural residents, especially those that cannot be met by cities to increase the added value of agriculture
Family Day activities, parents and children play games on the grassland of the "Natural Kingdom". Photography/Finance reporter Zou Biying
text | "Finance" reporter Zou Biying
Edit | Wang Yanchun
Serious polarization between urban and rural areas not only occurs in China.
In the 1970s, East Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea also faced similar problems after rapidly realizing industrialization and urbanization. To this end, Japan launched a village-building movement, explored regional cultural characteristics, and formed the well-known "one village, one product" development model; South Korea launched a new village movement, promoting the pace of urban-rural integration by adopting practices such as improving rural infrastructure, developing agricultural processing and circulation, and strengthening rural education.
Today, China's industrialization and urbanization have also crossed the critical point of rapid development, and the potential energy of economic growth has slowed significantly compared with the first 40 years of reform and opening up. At the same time, the phenomenon of rural declining, idle factor resources, and widening differences between the rich and the poor in urban and rural areas is even more prominent. Against this background, China's decision-makers have turned their attention to economic transformation and finding new momentum to rural areas, and made the choice of "adhering to priority development of agriculture and rural areas and comprehensively promoting rural revitalization" in the 14th Five-Year Plan issued in 2021.
How should comprehensive rural revitalization be promoted? Which path can be used as a reference system? Due to different land systems, it is difficult for China to copy other East Asian countries' models to revitalize rural economy as it is, but we can find the answer from ourselves.
From the implementation of the Land Management Law revised in 1998 to 2017, the income gap between urban and rural residents in the country and major cities was generally widening, but Chengdu, Chongqing, Xi'an and Hangzhou have become few cities with narrowing gaps. Among them, Chengdu's income gap is the largest. Chengdu’s exploration of agricultural land reform and rural construction in the past 20 years may reflect a little bit of the present.
Director of the Department of Economics, Sichuan University, Yao Shurong Professor, is one of the leaders of Chengdu's land system reform and the first expert to propose the concept of "urban-rural symbiosis". From 2007 to 2015, he served as director of the former Chengdu Land and Resources Bureau, the General Office of the Sichuan Provincial Party Committee, and the Chengdu Municipal Party Committee Reform Office, and was responsible for urban and rural coordination and land system reform. During this period, he witnessed the breakthrough of Chengdu's "small linkage" system, the birth of Chengdu Rural Property Exchange , and how several townships ushered in new development opportunities by revitalizing rural land.
Yao Shurong
How do China's rural construction and urban economy connect, and how can it break the deadlock? Where is the core of rural revitalization? Where will the land system reform go to ? Recently, a reporter from " Finance " magazine interviewed Yao Shurong. He will start with a simple formula to analyze China's path to achieving rural revitalization.
"Finance": In the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, China must make up for the shortcomings in rural areas and handle urban-rural relations well. In your opinion, what are the main paths for China to achieve rural revitalization?
Yao Shurong: The topic of rural revitalization can be thought from the standpoint of the government, enterprises and experts, but let us not forget that the most important thing is to stand on the standpoint of farmers. If farmers can be driven to become rich, rural revitalization will be supported by farmers. How can farmers become rich? We can use per capita GDP to measure the affluence in rural areas. The formula is very simple, per capita GDP=GDP/population. To increase the per capita GDP number, either to reduce the denominator or to increase the numerator.The first path reduces the denominator, which reduces the population in rural areas and allows farmers to settle in cities and become citizens. The second path increases the molecule. First, the government finances support agriculture and spend more money on rural areas through transfer payments . The second is to allow the countryside to grow more GDP.
The first view encourages farmers to be urbanized. Some experts believe that rural revitalization cannot be carried out for decades, and China's development still depends on cities, and the only way out is to let more farmers move to cities. However, from 1998 to 2018, we reduced the population by 300 million, and a large number of farmers moved to the city to work and settle down. Although from a vertical perspective, farmers are richer than at the beginning of reform and opening up, rural areas have become hollowed out and farming is relied on the elderly to farm. Young male laborers have all gone to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen to work, which has brought many family conflicts. Our cities are like Europe and the United States, and the countryside is not as good as Africa. This is the urban-rural gap. Now the Hu Huanyong line has moved to the southeast, and the population is mainly concentrated in the southeast, and the economy has changed from the gap between urban and rural areas to the gap between east, west, south, and north. How to solve it? The mainstream view in the past believed that farmers should go to cities and achieve rural revitalization by reducing denominators, but urban-rural relations and regional relations are entangled. Have urban-rural and regional balance development been achieved? In terms of space, how can we squeeze together?
The second view is to spend money on the countryside, lead the countryside with cities and make up for farmers with workers, and give more and less to the countryside. The urban-rural coordination policy after 2002 is to increase transfer payments to rural areas, and Chengdu is a pilot reform zone for coordinated urban and rural areas. China completely abolished agricultural tax in 2006, fully popularized nine-year compulsory education in rural areas in 2006, covered rural minimum living security system in 2007, covered new rural cooperative medical system pilot in 2008, and covered new rural social pension insurance pilot in 2012. In addition, from 2003 to 2007, the central government's financial support for rural areas and rural areas reached 1.56 trillion yuan, and in 2008 it reached nearly 600 billion yuan. However, the income gap between urban and rural residents has not narrowed, but has hit a new high of 3.33 times, which is the highest multiple since the founding of New China. Can the problem be fundamentally solved by spending money in the countryside? The development of cities is changing with each passing day, and the gap is still widening. If other problems are not solved, it is useless to just spend money.
Now we need to consider more whether the countryside can grow on its own and grow more GDP. How great is the potential to make farmers rich by developing traditional agriculture? Compared with other countries, China has less arable land per capita, which is the basic national condition. Our per capita GDP is very low compared with developed countries such as Ireland , the United States, Canada, and Japan, and even some developing countries are not as good as those of them. But from the perspective of land yield, China's level is higher than the average level of developed countries. Scholar Chen Jiping believes that the contribution rate of land output has basically reached the limit allowed by the current technical level, while the contribution rate of labor output is at an extremely low level. The agricultural output level no longer has much growth potential under the restrictions of land supply. Relying on the further development of agriculture to increase farmers' income and narrow the urban-rural gap is not an effective path. This is basically consistent with the views of Yao Yang, President of Peking University’s National Development Institute. Teacher Yao also believes that the core of rural revitalization is not the development of agriculture.
"Finance": How to enable the countryside to grow itself? What room does China's rural GDP still have to grow?
Yao Shurong: people will pursue enjoyment if they satisfy their food and clothing. After 40 years of economic development, the rise of the urban middle class, and the upgrading of the consumption structure of residents, everyone has achieved a comprehensive well-off society and began to pursue enjoyment. The comparative advantage of rural and urban areas has emerged. We can look for opportunities for industrial reconstruction in the countryside based on the most basic needs such as food, clothing, housing, transportation, and entertainment. Wearing tends to pursue natural materials such as cotton, linen and wool, and personal hygiene and beauty pursue natural and modern ancient methods. The era of healthy eating has arrived, and various local agricultural, forestry, fishery and animal husbandry products can be developed for health and beauty care.New business formats such as leisure agriculture, rural tourism, homestays, and vacations, and healthy elderly care have emerged. The "second home" within one or two hours of driving around the city may be the direction of the future, but you must be careful to develop excessively and become a city without a city or a countryside. Only by flexible land planning, clear property rights system and supporting infrastructure can we give full play to the comparative advantages of rural areas. In addition, the development of tourism activities such as rock climbing, bird watching, and specimen collection can also turn the disadvantages of remote and remote mountainous areas into advantages. What we lack in rural revitalization is the imagination of industrial innovation. Empowering agriculture in science and technology and promoting the integrated development of the first, second and third industries can bring greater added value. However, integrated development must meet the pursuit of new consumption needs of urban and rural residents after achieving a well-off society, especially those consumption needs that cities cannot meet, in order to increase the added value of agriculture. To achieve these industrial innovations, it is difficult to achieve the elderly over 60 or 70 years old who are now staying in the countryside. Therefore, the city’s capital, talents and technology need to be empowered to the countryside and complete the industrial reconstruction. Overall, rural revitalization is just around the corner because farmers move to cities, finance support for agriculture, and rural industrial reconstruction.
"Finance": Can the way capital goes to the countryside and reconstruct industry be done? There has always been a large amount of land and cheap labor in rural areas, but in the past 40 years of reform and opening up, the attractiveness of rural areas to capital is far less than that of cities. What is the crux of the inability to capital and talents?
Yao Shurong: In fact, rural areas also lack land, mainly construction land, especially concentrated and continuous construction land. Land use must comply with the use control. If agricultural land is planned, agricultural production can only be carried out; if construction land is planned, non-agricultural development and construction can be carried out. Our original concept was to carry out development and construction in cities and farm in rural areas, so the allocation of urban and rural land was very different. But now reconstructing rural industries, rural areas also need construction land for non-agricultural industries. For example, if an enterprise wants to build a pastoral complex project in a township, it requires 100 acres of concentrated and continuous construction land, but the rural allocation is basically agricultural land, and there are even a lot of permanent basic farmland, which cannot be settled at all. Falling down means occupying cultivated land indiscriminately and using land illegally. The company had a waste of time to talk to the local government. Both sides were willing, but in the end they could not get it.
According to the current land system, there are four major inequality in urban and rural land rights. First, property rights are inequality. Rural collective land also has the functions of farmers' identity and social security, and does not have property attributes and cannot be traded freely; in the past, urban land has basically achieved market-oriented and capitalized allocation, with property attributes. Second, circulation is inequality. We allow agricultural household registration to be converted to non-agricultural household registration, non-agricultural household registration to be converted to agricultural household registration, and we do not allow rural land transactions to , and urban residents are also prohibited from going to the countryside to buy land and houses. Third, exchange inequality. Rural land has been converted into urban state-owned land through agricultural conversion and expropriation, and the distribution of land value-added income is unequal, which is very obvious in the land acquisition in the past. Fourth, planning inequality. Construction land is mainly allocated to cities; rural areas assume the responsibility of ensuring national food and ecological security, and mainly allocated agricultural land. Rural areas can only develop traditional agriculture with low added value. No one wants to be poor, so they just look for money in the city. The young and middle-aged laborers have all gone to the city, which is an important reason for the decline of the countryside. Therefore, to revitalize rural areas, we must change the land system, turn the four major inequality into complete equality, let the market determine resource allocation, and realize the free flow of land between urban and rural areas.
"Finance": Since the 1980s, China has abolished the agricultural tax that has lasted for thousands of years and optimized rural public services through urban and rural coordination. The reform of urban-rural equity in land has also been called for for a long time. Why is the substantial progress slow?
Yao Shurong: The past land system involved three major issues: when it comes to rural land transfer and transactions, especially when it is relaxed to buy land in the countryside, we are prone to think of farmers' displacement and peasant uprisings.In the rural China for thousands of years, we have formed a deeply rooted concept of land. In ancient times, land was not only the lifeblood of peasants, but also the lifeblood of bureaucrats and gentry. Many people have studied hard for ten years. After passing the exam and becoming officials, they start asking for land and houses, from literati to bureaucrats, from bureaucrats to landlords. This is generally the case in peacetime. By the end of the dynasty, officials and businessmen colluded with each other and merged land, resulting in the displacement of farmers; after the peasant uprising, they began to enfeoff the princes and reward the territory, forming a new land wealth possession pattern. The history of ancient China is a cycle of pursuing land wealth. Therefore, Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong both regarded "the farmer have the land and the living have the house" as their revolutionary pursuit. But now after decades of development and changes in China, the urbanization rate has reached more than 63%. After the changes in urban and rural population and structure, what are the out of date? Should all be overturned or all retained? This is what we need to think about.
Second, constraints on food security and ecological security. Whoever controls food will control humans. Food is seen as important as currency wars and oil wars, and the country dares not relax the food problem. For food security, we have set a red line of 1.8 billion mu of arable land and adopted a series of control measures, which are known as the world's strictest arable land protection system. However, ensuring food security is not entirely equivalent to ensuring 1.8 billion mu of arable land. Over the decades of development and changes, agricultural technology has made great progress, and people's dietary structure has undergone great changes. How much arable land do we need to guarantee? The amount of cultivated land is related to the basis of the construction of the land system. Is it necessary for us to calculate the amount of cultivated land more fully and accurately? The idea of ensuring food security needs to shift from negative protection of the quantity of arable land to active protection of arable land quality, and broaden other paths other than arable land protection, such as desertification control, increase in arable land, and overseas rental and purchase. At the same time, we are also worried that driven by comparative interests, will we occupy arable land by randomly occupies arable land and use any means to develop real estate?
Third, cities have formed a land-driven development model in the past 20 years. The government expropriates farmers' collective land as state-owned land. The government platform company takes the land to bank mortgage financing, and after obtaining loans, it carries out infrastructure construction, making the city high and enhancing the attractiveness of the city. A large number of people pour into the city, bringing about the demand for residential housing. This is land finance. Subsequently, developers who are optimistic about the urban real estate market compete to enter the city, and the government auctioned land at a high price to obtain land finance .
also the land industry. The government attracts investment and sells industrial land in a low-cost and wide-supply manner, attracting many industrial projects to enter cities. Industry is coming and GDP is going up. But industrial enterprises also use land to mortgage loans for banks, and many enterprises sell dog meat with sheep's head and use land to lend money to banks to do other things. Residents also have to use the land and house to go to the bank to mortgage the loan. All the capital chain of China's economic operation is tied to the land. There is a line behind this. As long as everyone thinks that urban housing prices will continue to rise, this game seems to be able to continue to play. However, until the price continues to rise, it seriously exceeds the income of residents and the costs of enterprises, the asset bubble will burst and a systemic crisis in finance may occur. So can the rural land market be opened? Can real estate be carried out in rural areas? Will it lead to a decline in housing prices? How to change the reform?
"Finance": China revised the Land Management Law in 2019. 21 years have passed since the last revision of the law, and urban and rural society has undergone tremendous changes. After the implementation of the new law, what changes have occurred in China's land system ?
Yao Shurong: Land Management Law focuses on revisions. First, the scope of land acquisition has been narrowed. Land acquisition is mainly used for public utilities. At present, people may have some controversy over the development of large-scale areas approved by the provincial government. Second, the land acquisition compensation standard has been raised. The change from the original annual output value multiple method to the current district comprehensive land price is calculated based on seven major factors, and provinces have announced it one after another. Third, the land acquisition procedures were improved.From post-approval announcements to pre-approval announcements, from " two announcements and one registration " to "three announcements and one registration" + social stability risk assessment + hearing. In the past, land acquisition compensation and resettlement agreements were signed with the land owner, and now they require that they must not only sign with the owner, but also sign with the user owner. Many places may not be able to be collected in the future. Fourth, the entry of rural collective commercial construction land into the market has been opened, which is mainly reflected in Article 63 of the new law. Article 62 is a provision on homestead land, one is to allow voluntary and paid withdrawal, and the other is to encourage revitalization and utilization. However, there are still some unknown points about the entry of for rural collective commercial construction land for .
"Finance": What are the unknown things?
Yao Shurong: First of all, there is no determination regarding the scope of entry into the market. Can collective commercial construction land in urban planning areas be put into the market? Is it an urban planning area or an urban planning area? Some people believe that the market can be entered within the urban planning area, while others think that it is not possible; some people believe that the market cannot be entered within the urban planning period and within the town planning area. Secondly, can rural collective commercial construction land be used for residential development? The law states it as "industrial, commercial and other commercial purposes". Therefore, some people believe that from the logic of urban and rural equal rights reform, state-owned construction land can be developed in residential areas, and collective construction land should not restrict residential development; some people believe that if there is no list of residential buildings, it will definitely not be used for commercial housing; some people believe that the word "etc" means that the listing is not complete, it should be possible; and some people think that based on the systemic risks to the real estate market and land finance, it opposes the use of residential development.
The entry of rural collective commercial construction land must also be subject to government control. How much collective commercial construction land should be supplied in rural areas every year not only comply with the plan, but also included in the government's land supply plan. It can only be entered into the market after government approval. It is not that farmers and enterprises have agreed to enter the market, but if they want to enter the market, they will enter the market. The problem now is that the government has a lot of control, which has brought about a series of problems. Local governments are used to the idea of managing state-owned land in the past and do not want to let go of this market. There are also issues involving idle land disposal. The written agreement signed in the new Land Management Law stipulates the start time, completion time, development and use conditions, etc. If it fails to meet, it will be recovered according to the idle land.
"Finance": In the past two years, the reform of China's rural land system has begun to accelerate, especially the "three pieces of land" reform of rural land acquisition, collective commercial construction land entry into the market, and the homestead system. How should we judge the future direction of China's rural land system?
Yao Shurong: Generally speaking, in the future, the scale of land acquisition is smaller, the cost of land acquisition is higher, and the difficulty of land acquisition is greater. It is even more difficult for everyone to obtain a piece of state-owned construction land in the city. It mainly revitalizes existing land. The monopoly on land supply has been broken. In the past, the government provided exclusively, and in the future, collective economic organizations will be the main land supply entities. Judging from the revision of the new Land Management Law, land system reform is to restrict local governments' land acquisition rights, deconstruct the land-driven development model formed in the past, and promote high-quality transformation and development of the economy and society. Urban-rural relations have always been in a dynamic evolution. We should neither stay at the cognition of local society and should not go beyond radical reforms in the historical stage. At present, we are in a complex historical stage of intertwining rural areas and urban areas. Our future land system should be more flexible and flexible, and we should give rational care to the land use demands of different groups, and cooperate with the three major goals of efficient, fair and sustainable use.
