With the establishment of the National Rural Revitalization Bureau, the national agricultural and rural work system has formed the framework of the "troika" of the Central Agricultural Office, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, and the National Rural Revitalization Bureau. Local rural revitalization bureaus have also been listed one after another, and the local agricultural and rural work system has basically copied this structure. On the one hand, it is of course conducive to the implementation of the rural revitalization strategy; on the other hand, the overlapping functions within the system have also brought great influence to the promotion of work. In order to meet the strategic needs of comprehensively promoting rural revitalization and accelerating the modernization of agriculture and rural areas, the agricultural and rural fields urgently need to carry out institutional and institutional changes with an overall and systematic nature.
Some people may ask, in 2018, a round of reform of the party and state institutions was just carried out, and this round of reform was a very successful reform that was repeatedly brewed and recognized by all parties, why did the institutional mechanism become unsuitable again after just 3 years? In fact, in the initial stage of coordinating the modernization of agriculture and rural areas, agriculture and rural areas will become a "fast variable" in economic and social development, and at this time, institutional changes must be able to adapt to and lead economic and social changes. The United States began to launch the process of agricultural and rural modernization around 1970, and in the following 15 years, its rural development institutions underwent more than ten adjustments before they were basically finalized. If we take the United States as an empirical reference, our adjustment range and adjustment frequency are not particular.
Changes in rural development agencies in the United States
First, the agricultural administration system
Usually, we are accustomed to calling the agricultural and rural peasant problems the "three rural" problems, but due to the lack of relevant concepts in the international academic community, some people think that the "three rural" problems have become a unique problem in China. Not really.
Internationally, the Agrarian Question is often used to summarize the political economy and policy changes in the fields of agricultural and rural farmers and land. This concept can be traced back to the early Marxist theorist Carl Kautsky's famous book The Agrarian Question, which has been translated in China as "The Land Question", but in fact its content is not limited to the land issue, but encompasses many aspects of agricultural and rural development. In Japan's discipline system, there is usually a department of agricultural politics under political science and a discipline of agricultural economics under economics, and related research is carried out from different theoretical paradigms. At the same time, it should be noted that China does not currently have a good concept to summarize the political economy or institutional mechanism issues related to the "three rural areas", and in this sense, it is very necessary to introduce the concept of the agricultural political system at an appropriate time.
Carl Kautsky
China's agricultural system mainly includes three categories:
The first is the agricultural management system. It mainly includes the management of planting, animal husbandry, fisheries and other industries, as well as the management of basic elements such as farmland, seed industry, science and technology, mechanization, and informatization as the common support of various industries. This is the basic nucleus and foundation of the agricultural system.
The second is the agricultural management system. It mainly includes the rural land system, the collective property rights system, the consolidation and expansion of the rural collective economy, and the upgrading and improvement of agricultural production and operation relations. This field has a relatively strong characteristics of socialism with Chinese characteristics.
The third is the rural development system. It mainly includes rural infrastructure, public services, rural governance, rural culture, and human settlements. These aspects are mainly aimed at the new problems that have arisen in the expansion of agricultural modernization to agricultural and rural modernization, and they belong to the emerging fields in China's agricultural administration system.
2. Agricultural administrative institutions
Agricultural institutions are the core issues of the agricultural system. After several rounds of institutional reform since the reform and opening up, the adaptability of agricultural administrative institutions to development has been continuously enhanced. However, in the general historical pattern of accelerating the modernization of agriculture and rural areas, the development of agriculture and rural areas is a "fast variable", and the reform of agricultural administrative institutions should keep up with the rapid changes in development. At present, the reform of agricultural administrative institutions needs to be improved in the following aspects.
First, the integration of rural development functions is focused. Judging from the implementation of the current work, the experience and contingent of agricultural and rural departments in grasping rural development are deficient. Of course, this problem should not be overly harsh, and this is also the stage that agricultural modernization will inevitably go through in expanding into agricultural and rural modernization. Judging from the publicly disclosed information, the relevant parties have been considering transferring the core functions of rural development such as rural construction, rural governance, and human settlements to the National Rural Revitalization Bureau. It should be noted that the ministries and commissions and the State Bureaus they manage are a whole in terms of large operational areas, and the concentration of relevant functions in the National Rural Revitalization Bureau means that the rural development functions of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs have been strengthened rather than weakened.
Second, the deep integration of agricultural science and technology equipment. In the face of the matching and development trend of modernization, the agricultural science and technology management and mechanized management system structure that are still divided according to the traditional thinking have become an institutional shortcoming restricting the modernization of agriculture and rural areas. Judging from the experience of developed countries, agricultural mechanization should occupy a major share in agricultural modernization, but now the agricultural mechanization department is in an embarrassing situation, and even has to go to the field of farmland management to "grab food". The problem of agricultural mechanization should have risen to a systematic problem of agricultural equipment development long ago, and the equipment itself is the materialization and integration of science and technology, and the deep integration of science and technology and equipment is the general trend of agricultural and rural modernization.
Third, the structure of the agricultural ecological environment is reorganized. In 2018, the Central Committee issued the "Plan for Deepening the Reform of Party and State Institutions", which clearly integrated the responsibility of supervising and guiding agricultural non-point source pollution control into the Ministry of Ecology and Environment. Although this reform has been formally completed, in fact, a good coordination mechanism has not been established for several years, and the spirit of reform has been discounted to a certain extent. At present, the work of agricultural ecological environment involves at least 6 departments and bureaus within the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, and there are cases of piecemeal and separate battles, and it is not uncommon for them to overlap and do their own thing.
In fact, it is not difficult to solve this problem. After the centralized transfer of rural development functions to the National Rural Revitalization Bureau, the existing Department of Rural Social Undertakings Promotion has in fact become an empty shell, which can be transferred to the "Department of Agricultural Ecological Environment and Sustainable Development" without increasing the staffing and financial pressure, so as to realize the integration, optimization and reorganization of agricultural ecological environment functions under the historical conditions of the new era.
Third, agricultural policy support
Agricultural modernization is the result of a coupling of elements, and agricultural and rural modernization requires the integration of multiple factors to achieve. In the future, to deepen the reform of the agricultural administration system, it is necessary to strengthen coordination and support in the following aspects.
First, agricultural and rural support. Agricultural and rural work is both different and closely linked, and if the relationship between the two cannot be handled well, I am afraid that it will bring about the problem of duplication of governance or "three disregards". For example, the agricultural ecological environment is highly related to the results of rural human settlement environment governance, the agricultural environment governance is not good, the farmland ecosystem is fragile, the role of the agricultural ecological barrier will be greatly reduced, and if there is pollution in the agricultural production link, it will also be transmitted to the living space. However, there are essential differences in the process logic of the two, the governance of the agricultural ecological environment must be solved in the production process, while the rural living environment is more related to the spatial layout and management measures, and maintains relative independence from the production process. In the field of agricultural policy, there are many similar problems, which require more refined governance measures.
Second, urban and rural support. A scholar once said at a conference that where the city is good, where the countryside is good. As soon as these words came out, many officials sighed. In fact, this scholar is talking about an important law in the modernization of European and American countries: small cities can play an important role in the professional division of labor between urban and rural areas, and greatly improve the "accessibility" of agricultural production efficiency and rural services by providing specialized services. Now, as long as the basic conditions are not too bad, there are well-developed farms everywhere, but their "success" logic is not consistent. In terms of comparative advantage, the competitiveness of the northeast farm mainly comes from the scale efficiency overflow, while the competitiveness of the southeast farm mainly comes from the diffusion of technical efficiency. But even the southern Jiangsu region, which is at the forefront of development, has not yet reached the stage where small cities have driven the modernization of agriculture and rural areas through service efficiency. To accelerate the modernization of agriculture and rural areas, it is necessary to continue to exert efforts in the construction of modern small cities.
Third, the governance of property rights is supporting. Property rights order is a particular issue in Rural Governance in China. The special land system in rural China not only hinders and filters the guiding effect brought about by changes in the social base, but also shapes a unique land property rights order, which has become a specific parameter of rural governance. To comprehensively promote rural revitalization, it is necessary to build an open land property rights order under the conditions of market economy, and arrange the realization form of collective ownership according to the movement of land exclusive social value and technical boundaries, so as to lay the foundation for property rights for the modernization of rural governance.
[This article was originally published in the surging news.] The author Chen Ming is an associate researcher at the Institute of Political Science of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, whose main research areas are rural governance, land system, and rural reform, and has published "On Land Politics" and "Facing China's Seed Problems" (editor-in-chief). ]