1. The main contradictions existing in the rural areas at present
Contradictions, interdependence, and mutual struggle are the internal driving force of social development. Analyzing the current social contradictions in rural areas of the mainland and finding ways and means to solve them is the key to realizing the strategic goal of rural revitalization put forward by the CPC Central Committee. I believe that there are the following five major contradictions in the rural areas at present.
(1) The contradiction between the production mode of small-scale family farmers and the mode of modern agricultural production
At present, the mainland adopts a three-right management system for rural land, that is, village collectives have the right to own land, villagers have the right to contract, and those who transfer land have the right to operate.
In the three-rights management system of land, ownership occupies a dominant position, and the right to contract and the right to operate are derived from it. However, in the real society, some people deliberately reverse the cart and the horse, use the method of strengthening the fixed contracting right to dissolve the nature of land ownership, and even want to replace the status of contracting right and ownership with the right to operate. This is a reactionary force that violates the Constitution and the party's principles and policies. Maintaining collective ownership of land means upholding the basic principle of the socialist system in the rural areas, and this is the fundamental point of protecting the interests of the broad masses of peasants and maintaining social stability.
In the past 40 years of reform and opening up, we have made tremendous achievements in transforming from a backward agricultural country to an industrial power. In 1978, the proportion of urban population in the national population (urbanization rate) was 17.92%, and by the end of 2022, the proportion of urban population in the national population was 65.22%. In 2022, the proportion of urban population increased by 47.3% compared to 1978, and the process of urbanization is also a sign of a modern society. However, we should know that the tremendous achievements in reform and opening up are inseparable from the two major contributions made by the rural areas and peasants. First, rural areas contribute cheap and easy land to urban construction. The difficulty of expropriation and the disparity in land acquisition costs between urban construction land and land for key projects are expropriated from village collectives and private individuals. The United States is a modern country, but as we all know, high-speed rail is rarely seen in the United States, why? It is the difficult process of land acquisition, the high cost of land acquisition, this is a very illustrative example. Second, the rural population has provided sufficient and cheap labor for economic construction. During the period of the People's Commune, several generations of educated laborers were trained, and more than 500 million migrant workers and peasants in the cities made indelible contributions to the economic take-off in the new era. The first and second generations of migrant workers go to the city to work, and most of them do not participate in the overall planning of social pensions, and the working hours are generally more than ten hours, far exceeding the eight-hour work system. According to Baidu Encyclopedia, the mainland Gini coefficient was 0.16 before the reform and opening up, and since 2003, the Gini coefficient has been fluctuating at a high level of 0.479. Internationally, the Gini coefficient of 0.4 is usually used as the warning line for the gap between the rich and the poor, and social unrest is likely to occur if it is greater than this value. The mainland Gini coefficient has exceeded the warning line of wealth disparity for many years. The society has prospered and developed, but the gap between the rich and the poor has widened significantly, and behind this is that the peasants have not received corresponding income treatment for their hard work.
Although the rural population has decreased markedly, the rural labor force has been transferred on a large scale, and most of the people who remain in the rural areas to farm are the old, weak, sick, and disabled weak laborers, thanks to the progress of science and technology, the large-scale use of chemical fertilizers, the popularization of improved seeds, and the large-scale operation of transferred land, the mainland's agriculture has still achieved bumper harvests year after year, and the supply of major agricultural products throughout the country has been basically guaranteed for many years. However, the supply situation of agricultural products is becoming more and more serious, according to the statistics of China Customs, in the decade from 2013 to 2022, the average annual compound growth rate of China's imported food reached 12.3%, and the total amount of China's imported food in 2022 was 139.62 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 3.1%; The import value increased by 10.5% year-on-year. Grain imports in 2022 accounted for 21.4% of the country's total grain output in 2022 (686.53 million tons). In other words, 21 percent of the mainland's grain now has to be solved by imports. The mainland has become the world's largest importer of grain. This has broken through the Party Central Committee's goal of ensuring basic self-sufficiency in the production of major grains. This is a very dangerous thing, because once the mainland's agricultural production encounters a major natural disaster, the imperialists will use grain as a weapon to sanction us, and the consequences will be unimaginable.
One of the most important reasons for the backwardness of the mainland's agricultural and grain production is that the farmland has been divided into fragments, and the family's 20 acres of land have been divided into five or six plots. There is no such farming method in ancient and modern times. In addition, there is a serious phenomenon of land abandonment in remote areas, and governments and rural organizations at all levels have been helpless to deal with it. As a result, there is a huge contradiction between the occupation of land by small family farmers and the adoption of modern agricultural production methods.
(2) The contradiction between the hollowing out of the village collective economy, the weakening of village leadership and management, and the construction of beautiful villages
The villages that have been built into beautiful villages across the country have one thing in common, that is, they have a strong village-level leadership group and the village collectives have strong economic strength.
However, the collective economy of most villages on the mainland is in an extremely weak state, and the collective economy of some villages is still in a blank state. For many years, the vast majority of rural areas have adopted the method of dividing up and exhausting the collective economy, and it is difficult for the leading bodies without the backing of the collective economic strength to make a difference. This is a pair of sharp contradictions that exist in the countryside.
(3) The contradiction between the spirit of independent innovation of farmers and the rigid management of bureaucracy
The masses are the real heroes, and respecting the initiative of the masses is a fine tradition of the party. However, sometimes, the leaders of some localities just do not support the innovation of the grassroots masses. For example, a secretary of a village party branch in Anshun City, Guizhou Province, once told me that in his village, the village party branch came forward to do the work of all the villagers, renovated the farmland in a unified manner, removed the ridges of the farmland, and added more than 100 mu of land. However, the county leaders interfered and forced the extra land to be re-quantified to the peasant households according to the area of each household's contracted land. At the beginning, when the whole country adopted the policy of guaranteeing production to households, although the central government did not publicly issue a document, leaders at all levels forced all localities to divide the fields into households. For example, Huaxi Village, Zhoujiazhuang and other more than a dozen fish that have not slipped through the net without taking the package production to the household have all become the top 100 villages in the country without exception. In the field of public opinion, the feat of 18 heroes in Xiaogang Village dividing the fields according to the red handprints was publicized everywhere, but they ignored or even suppressed the righteous deeds of thousands of villagers in Zhoujiazhuang who demanded that the fields not be divided into households according to the red handprints. Under the leadership of the village party branch, the villagers of Nanjie Village took back the villagers' contracted land and returned to the collective economy, which was related to the fact that the local party and government leaders did not forcibly prohibit it, so it was a great success. There are many people all over the country who have such ideas as Nanjie Village, but they are not as lucky as Nanjie Village, and they don't even have the opportunity to try. At present, village cadres are busy all day long to complete various tasks assigned by the county and township governments, and they cannot fill in the statistical reports. Village cadres seldom have the heart to plan the reform and development of their villages, and even if some people put forward some reform ideas according to the actual situation of their villages, if there is no precedent, their higher-level leaders often adopt an attitude of self-preservation, fearing risks, and do not support the innovation of village cadres.
Li Changping, a well-known expert on agriculture, agriculture and rural issues, put forward the idea of "unification of four powers" and "three-in-one" development of village committees. The "unification of the four powers" means that the unification of rural property rights, financial rights, administrative powers, and administrative powers is exercised by the villagers' committees. The "trinity" refers to the integration of the three functions of village community economic development, community construction and community governance. The peasants are the masters of rural affairs, not the township governments managing them on their behalf. For example, in some places, village-level finances are managed by the township government in a unified manner, and every penny spent by the village must be approved by the township leaders. Leaders should not have ideas that are superior to those of the masses, and only by truly bringing into play the initiative spirit of the peasant masses can we do a good job in rural affairs.
(4) The contradiction between the arduous task of poverty alleviation and the stabilization of poverty alleviation mechanisms
In the more than 40 years since reform and opening up, the mainland has leapt from an agricultural country with a weak foundation and a large population to the world's second largest economy and the largest industrial country. But in the countryside there is a high level of poverty. The National Bureau of Statistics released the 2015 Statistical Communiqué on National Economic and Social Development. According to the rural poverty alleviation standard of 2,300 yuan per person per year (constant price in 2010), the rural poor population in 2015 was 55.75 million, a decrease of 14.42 million over the previous year. In other words, in 2014, there were 70 million poor people in rural areas on the mainland, which is a staggering statistic. We are a socialist country, and the party leads us to take the road of common prosperity, President Xi Jinping said, to ensure that no household is left behind and no one is left behind on the road to a well-off life in an all-round way. Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, on November 23, 2015, the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee deliberated and adopted the "Decision on Winning the Battle of Poverty Alleviation", and the Party Central Committee dispatched a large number of cadres to participate in rural poverty alleviation work, and in 2020, the number of poverty alleviation workers nationwide reached 20 million. After seven or eight years of hard work, on November 23, 2020, the CPC Central Committee announced that all 832 national-level poverty-stricken counties across the country had been lifted out of poverty. However, stabilizing the results of poverty alleviation is still an arduous task in rural areas.
With the reform and opening up, why there are 70 million poor people in the rural areas, and what are the social causes of poverty?
We know that the achievements of reform and opening up are inseparable from the party Central Committee's choice of a market economic system. However, the essence of the market economy is the survival of the fittest, and its nature is to hate the poor and love the rich, and it is an inevitable result to widen the gap between the rich and the poor. However, the CPC Central Committee wants to lead all the people toward common prosperity, and this is a contradiction. Poverty alleviation is a measure to resolve this contradiction. However, this is a temporary measure, and the establishment of a solid poverty alleviation mechanism is the fundamental solution to the poverty of villagers.
There are all kinds of poor households in all dynasties and generations, and the reasons for the poverty of villagers are varied, and it is impossible for any government to eliminate the emergence of poor households. However, during the period of the People's Commune, although the general living standards of the peasants were not high, not a single household could make ends meet. A couple raises six or seven children, and generally each child can complete primary or secondary school and be admitted to a college or secondary school. Nowadays, people's living standards have improved, and the state encourages couples to have a second child, but most people dare not have children, because it is too expensive to support their children to study and start a family, and they really can't afford to support them. During the period of the People's Commune, when the main laborer of some families was sick and disabled, and the family could not earn a job, the production team still provided rations, enjoyed various living treatments, and was given special care. The livelihood of the five guarantee households is taken care of by the production team to the end. During the period of the People's Commune, there was basically no such thing as the government helping the poor, and it was solved by relying on the strength of the collective economy.
Therefore, only when the collective economy is re-established and activated and the collective economy grows stronger, can there be a foundation for establishing an effective poverty-relief mechanism, and the work of helping the poor in rural areas will naturally be solved. In 2018, the author went to Yantai City, Shandong Province, and in 2020, he went to Bijie City, Guizhou Province to investigate the cooperatives led by the Party branch, and found that in villages with good collective economy, there is no need for the government to help alleviate poverty. The party branch in Yantai City has led the cooperative, and the village has set up a village canteen to serve the elderly, and the elderly over 80 years old who cannot cook, poor households, and five-guarantee households in the village provide three meals a day free of charge. For those with inflexible legs and feet, party members are obligated to deliver meals to their homes.
I have a simple and easy way to solve the problem of poverty alleviation in rural areas once and for all. That is, all peasants who have settled in cities and towns will be given land under contract to the collective. The collectives no longer subcontract the recovered land to each villager, but manage it collectively, and if the collectives have the ability to manage it, they can do it themselves, or they can contract the entire plot of land to the large farmers in the village, but the period is not too long; or they can cooperate with foreign companies to operate, and the villagers' assembly will make a democratic decision on which method to adopt. At least 40% of the income from collective land should be set aside by the collective to be used for various public utilities in the village, including poverty alleviation and relief, and the rest should be divided equally according to the population living in the village. Is this approach fair and reasonable? I think it's the fairest and most reasonable. Let me give you an example to illustrate further. For example, there are two couples surnamed Zhang and Wang in the village, each of whom has 5 children, and the older children are all in the school stage, and when the property is contracted to the household, the land is divided according to the number of people, each person is divided into 5 acres of land, and each family is allocated 35 acres of land. Thirty years later, the situation of the two families is that the family surnamed Zhang is smart, and the five children are all employed in the city through the graduation arrangement of junior high school. The children of the family surnamed Wang can't study, and they have no other skills, so they can only stay in the village to farm. After the two children got married, each child was given 5 acres of contracted land. Most of the children surnamed Zhang who work in the city work in government departments, with good salaries and no need to farm, but they still legally enjoy the subsidy for planting grain on 5 acres of land. The child surnamed Wang who stayed in the village, the newly formed small family only had 5 acres of contracted land for the husband, and the land was not enough to plant, so he had to rent land from the Zhang family who did not farm, and the standard rent for one mu of water land was 1,000 yuan. As a result of this, the income of the children surnamed Zhang and Wang will inevitably be distanced, and will the children surnamed Wang not fall into the ranks of poverty? I have always heard that the fact that the stable contracted land has given the peasants a reassuring pill and made them more enthusiastic about farming, and I can't help but laugh in my heart; Is this kind of policy to protect the interests of the peasants who remain in the villages to farm the land, or to protect the interests of the "small landlords" in the cities? The biggest injustice is that the contracted land cannot be changed. Since 70 percent of the population in the villages has settled in the cities, and land and other resources are left for the people in the villages to use, will the people who remain in the villages still be impoverished due to lack of resources? In order to ensure that the people who have moved to the cities cannot get along in the cities, they can be stipulated to live in the villages, and they can continue to share in the profits from the management of the village collective land just like the villagers who have stayed in the villages.
(5) The contradiction between rural autonomy and government management
There is a tradition in the 2,000-year-old feudal society on the mainland, that is, the imperial power is not under the county, and the county is autonomous. During the period of the People's Commune, it was about the people's undertakings run by the people, and the commune would build roads and canals, and build a cooperative medical system dominated by barefoot doctors, all of which would be run by the peasants themselves. Some projects are privately assisted, such as township hospitals, veterinary stations and schools. There are only a small number of public teachers in the school, and most of them belong to the status of private teachers, who earn a share of work in the production team and enjoy a monthly subsidy of 7 yuan. The civil affairs work of helping the poor and the needy is mainly undertaken by the village collectives, which also undertake the task of militia training. There is also a work-study system, that is, the county transfers laborers from the commune production team to participate in the county's road repair and other labor, and the county gives the workers a subsidy of a few cents a day, and returns to the production team to record their work. However, the number of construction workers is very small, and a production team only has one turn every few years.
In 1982, the reform of the responsibility system for the delivery of production to households was carried out nationwide. The method adopted is to divide everything that can be divided and sell everything that can be sold, for fear of leaving some collective property for the village cadres to seek personal gain, and it has become a trend to break stones and divide sand.
The collective economy has been cleaned up, but someone has to take care of the affairs of the village, and there must be someone to receive the people who come to the village to handle official business, and the elected leaders of the villagers' groups and the directors of the village committees are unlucky, they have very little subsidies in name, and they have to be returned through the township government from the taxes and fees paid by the peasants, and their homes have become the hospitality points for the cadres in the countryside, who are in charge of living and eating, and the village cadres are often busy for a year, and they are subsidizing money, so no one wants to be a village cadre. As a result, the result of the reform of a village cadre's salary subsidy and the village's collective expenses being borne by the county treasury has been implemented until now. One of the undesirable consequences of this is that the contingent of people who eat the treasury is getting bigger and bigger, and the number of people who support them is the highest in China's history, and the people's burden is unspeakably miserable. Moreover, village cadres earn the government's salary, and they must first be responsible for the government, and only then can they take into account the interests of the villagers. The relationship between village cadres and the masses is far less close than in the past.
In 1982, Article 111 of the newly amended Constitution stipulates that villagers' committees are grassroots mass autonomous organizations. In 1994, the Ministry of Civil Affairs issued a circular on carrying out demonstration activities of villagers' autonomy, proposing that the core content of villagers' autonomy is "four democracies", namely, democratic election, democratic decision-making, democratic management, and democratic supervision. The subsequent promulgation of the law on the content of village autonomy further strengthened the content of villagers' autonomy.
However, there is no collective economy in the village, and the villagers' autonomy can only be an empty word. In the old era, village autonomy also had public property to maintain operation, and there were also public fields in the village, such as school fields, ancestral hall fields, New Year toy fields, temple properties, etc. The Mongols do not farm and have communal herds, the proceeds of which are used to host Naadam. Now that the collective property of the village has been divided, there is no economic basis for the practice of villagers' self-government, and self-government can only be empty talk.
The affairs of the village could not be managed by the villagers' autonomy, and the administrative functions of the government had to be overstepped. The government's responsibilities are getting wider and wider. The pigs raised by the villagers cannot be killed by themselves, but must be slaughtered at a fixed point in the city. Tian, a 53-year-old farmer in Shulan City, Jilin Province, raised a pig by himself, broke his leg, killed the pig himself, couldn't eat so much pork at home, and pulled the remaining 80 kilograms of pork to the market to sell, but just sold one pound and two taels, and made five cents and eight cents after removing the cost, he was caught by the people of the Market Supervision and Administration Bureau, not only confiscated his remaining more than 160 pounds of pork, but also fined him 100,000 yuan. It is not uncommon to see reports of farmers being fined 100,000 yuan for more than 10 yuan from selling vegetables. The peasants squatted on the ground in their yards to eat, and the managers had to come in and correct them. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs issued a ban on farmers not being allowed to apply unfermented cow and sheep manure into the fields, as if farmers did not understand the truth that farm manure should be applied through manure. In some places, peasants are not allowed to plant melons and beans in front of and behind their houses, and they are not allowed to raise chickens and ducks in their yards. There are also agricultural management personnel who go deep into the fields to check whether the farmers have a driver's license for small agricultural machinery. This kind of government's strengthened management of the countryside is increasingly resisted by the villagers.
Second, to solve the rural problems, we must first base ourselves on three starting points
1. Able to steadily improve the level of agricultural production;
2. It can benefit farmers, especially those working in villages;
3. It can achieve the stable development and prosperity of rural society.
3. The path to resolving the main contradictions in rural areas
At present, it seems that there are only two ways to resolve the main social contradictions in the rural areas: one is to adhere to the socialist orientation and take the road of common prosperity; the other is to realize land privatization in disguise, speed up the transfer and concentration of land to the hands of capital, and take the road of American-style capitalist farms. The struggle between the two lines was fierce.
First of all, it is affirmed that the American-style capitalist farm production mode is much more advanced than the mainland's small-scale family peasant production mode, and the output value of agricultural production is much higher than that of the mainland. However, there are significant differences in the environmental conditions and development history of agricultural production between China and the United States. Modern agriculture in the United States was established by white people slaughtering Indians with knives and guns and seizing their land, and each white family owns hundreds or thousands of acres of land, while China is a traditional small-scale peasant economy, where farmers grow their own land or rent landlords' homes, and the general planting scale is only twenty or thirty acres of land for a family. The United States is mostly plain, while China is mostly mountainous, and the natural conditions of agriculture in the United States are much superior to those in China. The United States is a rich country that has already modernized, while China has only been on the path of independence for a few decades. Therefore, the mainland cannot copy the American farm method. However, large-scale management of farmland is an inherent requirement of agricultural modernization, and China is no exception, for example, modern agricultural machinery can only be used on a large piece of land. Originally, the people's communes provided the conditions for the centralized use of land for the development of agricultural modernization, but during the period of the people's communes, great progress was made in the construction of water conservancy and farmland, and agricultural production had developed in the direction of modernization. (Regarding the disintegration of the People's Commune, this article will not discuss it, and a separate article will be written).
If we copy the model of American agriculture, we must adopt the policy of land privatization and promote the transfer and concentration of peasant households' contracted land to capital through market economy and other means. The consequence of this is that hundreds of millions of bankrupt peasants will inevitably be left in the corners of urban and rural society, and their livelihood will be insecure, and they will become a factor of social instability. Therefore, the implementation of the American-style agricultural path in China violates the principles of socialism and infringes on the interests of the majority of peasants. Therefore, we must resolutely oppose taking the road of American-style capitalist agriculture and persist in creating socialist agriculture with Chinese characteristics.
Article 8 of the Constitution of the People's Republic of China: Rural collective economic organizations shall implement a two-tier management system based on household contract management and combining centralized and decentralized management. Various forms of cooperative economy, such as production, supply and marketing, credit, and consumption, in the rural areas are socialist economies under the collective ownership of the working masses. Laborers participating in rural collective economic organizations have the right to operate their own land, their own hills, their household sideline businesses, and raise their own livestock within the limits prescribed by law.
However, some forces insist on violating the principles of the Constitution, discarding the function of unification in the two-tier management system of unification and decentralization, and promoting the reduction of the price of collective property that cannot be divided in the village, such as small water conservancy projects in machine wells, power equipment, and agricultural machinery, to individual members. Chain rail tractors were also sold for scrap metal. At the beginning, the villagers' contracted land was called the joint production contract responsibility system, or the large contract responsibility system, but now the term has evolved into the division of land to households, and the villagers' contracted land has in fact become private property. Many large-scale land operators have treated the land transferred to them as their private property. The Ministry of Rural Agriculture encourages land operators to mortgage the land transferred to the bank. It is as absurd as being denounced by Li Changping that someone can borrow a loan from a bank if he rents a car. In 2016, CCTV focused on interviews twice to expose that in Yunnan, Fujian and other places, some people used deceptive means to collude with rural cadres to defraud farmers of forest tenure certificates, take farmers' forest tenure certificates to bank mortgages, and then run away. One of them, Zhou Zhipin, only paid 50,000 yuan in advance, and signed an agreement with the farmers to handle the forest right certificate of 200,000 mu. In a province, millions of acres of forest rights certificates have been defrauded, and the price of forest rights certificates for one mu of land is usually only 3 yuan.
General Secretary Xi Jinping also summed up when he was working in Fujian in the 90s of the last century, saying: "Why is the phenomenon of weakening of the economic strength of rural collectives? I think that the main reason is that in recent years we have neglected the accumulation and development of rural collective economic strength in our guiding ideology. In the macroeconomic policy decisions related to poverty alleviation and prosperity, the development of collective economic strength has not been put in its proper place. In particular, in some rural areas, when implementing the household contract system, they did not have a good understanding of the difference between unified management and 'belonging to the big piles,' and relaxed the aspect of 'unification,' and those that needed to be unified were not united, but those that should not be divided were divided, and the result was that the original 'great unification' became 'dividing the light and eating the clean,' and moving from one extreme to the other. In some localities, the vast majority of the collective economic strength accumulated since the beginning of the cooperative has come to naught, and the surviving collective economic strength has also lost its foundation and motivation for development. At the same time, government departments lack strong administrative guidance and correct policy orientation. ”
It violates the two-tier management system based on household contract management and combines unified and decentralized management, which is an act that violates the Constitution and does not conform to Xi Jinping's "three rural areas" thinking.
The Law of the People's Republic of China on Professional Farmer Cooperatives was adopted at the 24th Session of the Standing Committee of the 10th National People's Congress on October 31, 2006 and amended at the 31st Session of the Standing Committee of the 12th National People's Congress on December 27, 2017. The law attempts to solve the shortcomings of the small-scale family farming mode of production, and to concentrate land in the form of professional farmer cooperatives to improve the level of agricultural production. However, the law clearly stipulates that "units with the function of managing public affairs shall not join professional farmer cooperatives", so village party branches, village committees and village collective organizations are not allowed to join cooperatives. In fact, the law encourages wealthy rural households in rural areas to achieve strong alliances, and virtually excludes poor households from joining. It should be common sense that without the party's leadership in rural work, the party organizations will often fail to play their role. In the rural society, some people set up cooperatives in order to obtain funds from the state to support agriculture and to obtain tax-exempt invoices for agricultural products from the industrial and commercial taxation departments.
In 2016, I investigated the operation of professional farmer cooperatives in my county, and there were more than 460 professional farmer cooperatives registered with the Industrial and Commercial Bureau in Zhuozi County, of which 194 were registered with the local taxation bureau and 123 were registered with the national taxation bureau. However, there is only one cooperative that has actually been established and operated in accordance with the Law on Professional Farmer Cooperatives, and this cooperative has been in operation for three years and has also gone bankrupt. It can be said that on a national scale, more than 90 percent of the specialized peasant cooperatives sell dog meat on sheep's heads, and they do not live up to their name and operate in empty shells. Of course, there are also a very small number of specialized farmer cooperatives that are doing well, and when I was conducting research in Bijie City, Guizhou, I participated in a symposium attended by the president of a professional farmer cooperative, and those cooperatives were very successful. One of the cooperatives specializes in the production of konjac, planting, processing and sales in one turn, and the benefits are very good, and farmers in the surrounding villages have joined their cooperatives. 100% of the villages in Bijie City have set up collective cooperatives led by the party branch, and all poor households have joined them unconditionally, and the poor households have no funds to invest in shares, and the government has provided 1,000 yuan for each poor person free of charge. But the city does not exclude professional farmer cooperatives and encourages them to develop boldly. In 2021, an official from the Ministry of Rural Agriculture claimed that more than 92 percent of villages on the mainland have professional farmer cooperatives, as if professional farmer cooperatives have become a major way of agricultural production on the mainland, which is a serious exaggeration and misleads the Party Central Committee and the whole society.
The Ministry of Rural Agriculture's 2013 campaign to confirm land rights is a very bad practice. The confirmation of land rights requires that the "four solstices" of each piece of land contracted by farmers be clearly recorded, and satellites and big data centers are used to confirm that the cost of confirming land rights per mu is 37 yuan. In the past, villagers' groups and villagers' committees could exchange contracted land with villagers through negotiation for water conservancy projects, village road construction, or other public undertakings, and villagers could exchange land with each other for the convenience of farming, and it was normal for peasant households to exchange two acres of land for one mu of good land. As soon as the right to the contracted land is confirmed, this kind of land exchange will be in violation of the law. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs has not agreed to this practice for a long time, and only a very small number of localities in the country have done so. Why did the Ministry of Rural Agriculture spend money, effort, and thanklessly to confirm the rights of contracted land? It was bewitched by some public intellectuals with ulterior motives, who said that as long as the land rights are confirmed, the peasants will soon transfer the contracted land out, so that it will be convenient to realize the concentration of land and can adopt large-scale operations. But the fact is just the opposite, some farmers have obtained the land ownership certificate, and suddenly become nail households, and their own contracted land is barren and will not be transferred. Some families just want to turn the land into a family cemetery. According to the data of the third agricultural census, at the end of 2016, there were 1.79 million farmer cooperatives registered with the industrial and commercial departments, of which 910,000 were registered in the agricultural census with agricultural production, operation or services, and 207.43 million agricultural business households, of which 3.98 million were large-scale agricultural business households. There are 314.22 million agricultural production and operation personnel in the country. In other words, there are more than 200 million peasant households engaged in agricultural production and management in rural areas, and a total of more than 310 million people are engaged in agriculture. Smallholder family farmers are still the main mode of production in rural areas.
The deep-seated root cause of the change of dynasty on the mainland is that after decades or hundreds of years of concentration, land has gradually been monopolized by the upper bureaucracy, resulting in the poor people having no place to stand, and once they encounter a disaster year, the poor people cannot survive, so they rise up to rebel. The establishment of a new dynasty readjusted the land, and history turned in a cycle, changing dynasties. It is really naïve and ridiculous to think that once the land rights are confirmed, the peasants will soon transfer the contracted land. What is more important is that they have not taken into account the feelings of the poor people in the hearts of the poor people who have transferred the contracted land to the villagers, and in recent years, there have been phenomena in various localities where landless peasants have gone to the fields of large contractors to pick up the harvesters and miss the fruits of their crops, and this has even developed to the point of half-picking up and half-robbing, and this is a terrible sign. The Communist Party is a party of the poor, and everything should be considered in the interests of the poor.
At the same time, some people who are firmly committed to the socialist road are also exploring how to concentrate the land of every household and adopt modern agricultural methods and large-scale planting and operation to increase agricultural output and output value. The first to make a big breakthrough was Tangyo Village, Anshun City, Guizhou Province.
In 2014, Tangyo Village in Anshun City, Guizhou Province, suffered a major flood that had not been seen in a century, causing houses to collapse and farmland roads to be washed away. In the face of this serious disaster, Zuo Wenxue, secretary of the party branch, led the whole village to re-engage in the collective economy, which was a great success and was known as the Tangyue Road. The core experience of the "Tangyue Road" is: under the strong leadership of the party branch, the villagers will be organized, take the road of common prosperity, and build a beautiful new socialist countryside. Tangyo Village realizes the integration of the village and the community, the joint stock association, the "seven rights" are the same, and the management model of "one clear and seven unified" is confirmed. The "seven rights" refer to: the right to contract and manage land, the right to use farmers' homesteads, the right to forest, the ownership of collective land, the right to use land for collective construction, and the property rights of small water conservancy projects. After the implementation of the "Seven Rights" and the joint stock operation of Tangyo Village, all the villagers who had previously opened up the wasteland and occupied the collective barren slope land indiscriminately had to return it to the village collective. For houses built on the collective land, it was decided at the villagers' meeting that the right to use the extra land could be handed over to the collective at a rate of 50 yuan per square meter. The management content of "one clear and seven unifications": "one clearing" means that the collective and individual property rights are clearly distinguished; the "seven unifications" are the unified planning of the whole village's land, the unified planting and sales of products, the unified use and management of funds, the unified accounting of village affairs and finances, the unified use of cadres, the unified planning and construction of beautiful villages, and the unified handling of banquets in the whole village. The role of villagers' autonomy has been brought into play, and village rules and conventions such as the "Red Nine Articles" have been formulated, with the party branch managing the whole village and the villagers managing party members. The production and operation activities of the village community are carried out by branches and teams, such as transportation teams, construction teams, vegetable planting cooperatives, tourism companies, etc.
The operation and management of Tangyo Village is not the division of labor system of the people's commune in the past, but adopts the mode of modern enterprise management, which distributes profits according to modern factors of production, and focuses on the income of peasant laborers, and the people in the village work in different positions such as agricultural groups and construction teams, and all earn wages, such as the daily salary of a master in the construction team is more than 300 yuan, and the salary of a small worker is 100 yuan. A peasant woman works 26 days a month and earns a minimum basic wage of 2,400 yuan per month.
The collective has established a fixed profit retention ratio system. At the end of the year, after deducting production costs and labor expenses, the net profits of cooperatives shall be redistributed according to the three-three-four system, that is, 30% shall be retained by cooperatives as reproduction funds; 30% shall be retained by village committees as village collective public welfare funds; and 40% shall be redistributed according to the number of acres of land occupied by villagers. There are two main types of income for the villagers in Tangyuo Village: one is labor income, accounting for 80 percent of the total income, and property income, accounting for 20 percent, mainly land rent income, and the cooperative pays the villagers 300-700 yuan per mu for renting back the contracted land according to the quality of the cultivated land. However, unlike those who work outside the village, these enterprises are owned by the village collective, and the villagers are also the owners of the village collective, and they have the dignity and right to be the masters. They work in cooperatives on the spot and have a stable wage income, and cooperatives have a fixed and stable income from renting and subcontracting farmers' contracted land, and they can also get secondary share dividends from collective management when they become shareholders of the contracted land. If the manager of the enterprise is not well managed, the villagers have the right to dismiss the manager, which is not the same as working outside the village.
It took only three years for Tangyo Village to achieve a great turnaround, and now it is a wealthy village in Guizhou Province, with an endless stream of people from all over the country visiting the Xi. At the end of 2019, the collective economic income reached 6.38 million yuan, and the per capita income reached 20,136 yuan. In 2021, Tangyo Village was rated as an advanced model of poverty alleviation by the CPC Central Committee and the State Council. The village has been rated as a national civilized village and town, a provincial civilized village, a provincial advanced party organization, a national rural tourism key village, a national 3A scenic spot and other honors.
Some people say that Tangyo Village is a typical example of the government piling up money with money, and others can't learn from it.
I have at hand a statistical data from a reliable source.
In 2014, Tangyo Village suffered from floods, and the government invested in disaster relief:
(1) In 2014, the most severely affected white paper factory needed to be repaired into the walled road, mainly used to buy cement and other materials, and the Leping town government paid for it, spending 300,000 yuan, and the people invested in the construction of the road.
(2) In 2014, the government distributed disaster relief funds to 130 farmers from 36 households, with a subsidy of 10 yuan per person per day for a total of 60 days, totaling 82,800 yuan.
(3) In 2014, the government spent 64,000 yuan to build a new house for Qiu Huaxiang's household, which was the most severely affected by the disaster (Qiu Huaxiang and his wife are both disabled).
(4) In 2014, the government distributed 600 kilograms of rice to the affected farmers in Tangyo Village.
In 2014, Tangyo Village was hit by a catastrophic flood, and the government invested a total of 446,800 yuan and 600 kilograms of rice.
In 2015 and 2016, the government invested in the post-disaster reconstruction of Tangyue:
(1) In 2015, 138 pieces of cotton clothing were allocated to the victims of Tangyuo Village.
(2) In 2015, the government invested a total of 20,964,410 yuan in the maintenance and façade renovation of the houses around the badly affected white paper factory, stone village and village committee building.
(3) In 2015, 380,000 yuan was spent on road repair and road reconstruction from the village committee building to Shizhai to the cement plant.
(4) In 2015, 670,390 yuan was built for a parking lot.
(5) In 2015, 1,865,200 yuan was used to repair the cultural square (of which 1,500,000 yuan was the project fund for one project and 365,200 yuan was the fund for the shantytown reconstruction project.) ）
(6) In 2015, Qingdao counterpart assistance funds of 3.4 million yuan were used to build vegetable planting greenhouses.
(7) In 2016, the government supported the development of agricultural industry with 300,000 yuan for the purchase of lotus root seeds and the development of lotus root planting.
In 2015 and 2016, the government invested a total of 27.48 million yuan and 138 cotton clothes for the post-disaster reconstruction of Tangyo Village, including 3.4 million yuan from Qingdao.
In 2017, Guizhou Province's "Six Action Plans" were implemented in Tangyuo Village:
(1) In 2017, 974,000 yuan was repaired to the group road.
(2) In 2017, 5 million yuan will be repaired for industrial roads.
(3) In 2017, 35,000 yuan of garbage bins were purchased.
(4) In 2017, 2,334,003 yuan of Tonghu Road was repaired.
(5) In 2017, the courtyard renovation was 4,424,295 yuan.
(6) In 2018, the street lamps of each villager group were 1.8 million yuan.
(7) In 2019, 130,877 yuan of garbage transfer stations will be built.
Total: 14,698,175 yuan.
Illustrate:
1. The changes in Tangyue Village have attracted widespread attention throughout the country because the People's Publishing House published the book "Tangyue Road" by Wang Hongjia, the "Party Building" magazine of the Central Propaganda Department and the People's Publishing House held the "Tangyue Experience Symposium and the Tangyue Road" Seminar at the National People's Congress Conference Center, and the "People's Daily", Xinhua News Agency, CCTV, Qiushi magazine, and "Role Model" filmed by the Central Organization Department all gave positive reports. The book was published in December 2016, and a book launch and seminar was held in Beijing on December 10.
2. In 2017, Guizhou Province implemented six action plans for infrastructure construction of "Xiaokang Road, Xiaokang House, Xiaokang Water, Xiaokang Electricity, Xiaokang Xun, and Xiaokang Village", and the projects implemented in Tangyuo Village totaled 14,698,175 yuan. These infrastructure construction projects are inclusive policies enjoyed by all villages in Guizhou Province, and are extremely important achievements in Guizhou Province in strengthening the infrastructure construction of all villages. These projects were carried out by engineering teams outside Tangyo Village, which itself did not handle funding.
In 2017, the government supported the agricultural industry development and construction project in Tangyo Village:
(1) In 2017, the morel mushroom planting project was 1 million yuan.
(2) In 2017, the chive planting project was 983,000 yuan.
(3) In 2017, the planting project of characteristic vegetable industry was 700,000 yuan.
(4) 100,000 yuan for pumpkin planting project in 2018.
(5) In 2018, the construction of cold storage was 1.05 million yuan.
Total: 3.833 million yuan.
According to the above statistics, there are mainly three funds, namely 27.48 million yuan of disaster relief and development support funds, including 3.4 million yuan of Qingdao counterpart assistance funds. At that time, Tangyuo Village, as a disaster relief village, a key poverty-stricken village, and an advanced village with outstanding disaster relief performance, was helped by the government and the counterpart assistance units with a total of 27.48 million yuan, which is not a large amount for a large administrative village with 10 natural villages, and it is a very normal financial support. Although there are funds to support the construction of plazas and parking lots, this is also in line with the government's project requirements for supporting and funding the development of rural tourism. In that year, Inner Mongolia achieved 10 projects with full coverage in rural areas, and generally helped villages build squares free of charge. The six action plans for infrastructure construction, the projects implemented in Tangyuo Village have a total of 14,698,175 yuan of funds, which are enjoyed by all villages in Guizhou, and the construction party and fund management are managed by the county-level government, which is not a special care for Tangyo Village.
In 2017, Tangyo Village won 3.833 million yuan in funds for five projects of government agricultural industry development and construction.
I would like to say here that the amount of funds that governments at all levels on the mainland have provided to the development of the agricultural industry is huge, and some people have told me that the amount of funds for the country's assistance projects is more than 120 trillion yuan a year. However, these funds cannot reach the farmers, and individual farmers and village committees cannot connect with government support fund projects. It is up to the various professional farmer cooperatives and companies called them to undertake government projects. Most of the professional farmer cooperatives established in the society sell dog meat under the guise of sheep's heads, and do not really operate. Even the professional farmer cooperatives that operate normally are dominated by urban and rural capital, and they rarely absorb poor households to participate, and even if poor households participate, they have little say and no guarantee of interests. A considerable amount of the government's funds for agricultural projects have fallen into the black hole of corruption caused by the collusion between officials and businessmen. There are news reports that there is a place to carry out farmland construction projects, the acceptance is qualified, the project implementer took the money away, the reporter went to investigate, and found that there was a faucet installed in the field, and there was not even a pipe underneath, this is a specific case. Even if the project is actually built, it will benefit a very small number of wealthy farmers, and it has nothing to do with the majority of the villagers.
Xiaoweizi Village, Muping District, Yantai City, is a small village of 146 households, and the party branch led the cooperative established by them to win 5.03 million yuan in funds for the "high-standard land construction project". With this fund, the whole village will be built into a beautiful and wealthy home at once, and the income of the cooperative's orchard will hit the target of 10 million yuan in a few years. Lu Yuegang, secretary of the party branch, told me that the cooperatives led by the party branch in our village were transformed from private cooperatives, and there were only five or six people in the original private cooperatives, and I was one of them. If our private cooperatives win 5.03 million funds, they can also build modern orchards, but only a few of us will benefit, and now the 503 yuan funds are injected into the cooperatives, and everyone in the village has a share, but foreign shareholders have no right to enjoy it, this is the difference. Tangyuo Village is on the right path by using the collective strength to win funds for government-supported agricultural projects, ensuring that the funds can be used well to benefit all villagers.
The key to the real take-off of Tangyuo Village lies in the internal driving force of the collective economy, and the help of external funds is only an external factor, and the external factor is played by internal factors. Governments across the country have used many support funds to create local advanced and typical cases, but they often disappear after a while.
Wang Hongjia concluded in the book "Tangyue Road": A good society is not about how many rich people there are, but about not having poor people. Since its founding, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has worked for the benefit of the poor and thus created a better society. The greatest achievement of a village is not the number of rich people, but the absence of poor households. Only under the leadership of the party, which does not forget the original intention, gathers all the villagers to develop together, and mobilizes the strength of the whole village until the last poor person is lifted out of poverty, is the greatest political achievement.
Subsequently, the Tangyue road experience spread to the whole country like a spark, and Yantai, Shandong Province first blossomed and bore fruit at the municipal level.
In 2017, the Organization Department of Yantai City of the Communist Party of China learned from the experience of Xi Tangyue, adapted measures to local conditions, boldly innovated, forged ahead, and vigorously promoted the cooperatives led by the party branch, and in 2021, 70% of the villages in the city have established cooperatives led by the party branch. The Yantai Party branch leads the cooperatives not to be managed by the village and the community, and the village community is separated, but the secretary of the village party branch serves as the chairman of the cooperative, which is an institutional regulation. Villagers join cooperatives on a voluntary basis, while others join cooperatives with a portion of their land and operate their own businesses. The cooperatives adopt a joint-stock cooperative operation, in which the villagers convert all their land, cash, labor, and other property into cash, and use cash to determine the share of shares. People from other villages and companies can also apply to join cooperatives, but the shares of foreign funds are generally controlled within 20%, which is also in line with the requirements stipulated in the Law on Professional Farmer Cooperatives to ensure that farmers occupy a dominant position in cooperatives. The existing public land, water conservancy facilities, public property, idle land, barren mountains and other resources in the village are converted into cash shares in the cooperative. In the process of building modern orchards, because the ridges left by each family during the land division are removed, 8% of the land can generally be increased, and the part of the increased land is also owned by the village collective. The funds invested by government departments for agricultural development projects and various funds for supporting agriculture in the village are also converted into shares and owned by the village collective. Therefore, in fact, the village collective is the largest shareholder of the cooperative led by the party branch, and it is logical for the party branch secretary to serve as the chairman of the cooperative. After the profits of the cooperative are submitted for accumulation, they are owned by the members of the cooperative and distributed according to shares. The income obtained by the village collective from the cooperative according to the shares shall be owned by the registered people of the whole village, and shall be used for public utilities of the whole village, public welfare undertakings, or investment in other industries. For example, the orchard management team is composed of people elected by the general meeting, and other members of the cooperative participate in the orchard labor, which is settled according to daily labor, monthly wages or contract labor, and can also employ workers from other villages. At the end of the year, the net income of the orchard, the management team withdraws management fees and bonuses on a pro-rata basis. The Yantai Party branch led the cooperative, which fully mobilized the enthusiasm of the villagers. I have visited more than 30 cooperatives in Yantai, and the general framework is basically the same, but the specific system of each village is discussed and formulated by the villagers at the meeting according to the actual situation of the village. Therefore, the Yantai Party branch led the cooperatives to get better and better, and developed healthily and steadily, attracting people from all over the country to visit and study Xi.
The cooperatives led by the Yantai Party branch are actually tied together with the collective ownership of land and the contracted management rights of the villagers, and the land and other resources in the village are invested in the cooperative enterprise, and the land is converted into shares according to the market price, which maintains the role of a shareholder as a collective, and represents the land transferor, and chooses the partner out of the active position. This protects the interests of the collective and the villagers, allowing them to participate in the huge profits brought by industrial innovation. At the same time, it has opened up channels for capital and technology to enter the countryside, leaving a huge space for the development of the company.
Yu Tao, Minister of the Organization Department of the Yantai Municipal Party Committee, believes that the greatest advantage and most effective working method of the Communist Party of China is to mobilize the masses and organize the masses. If the village-level collective economy is "empty shell", politics will be "empty shell", this is the basic principle of Marxism that the economic base determines the superstructure. Strengthening the party's leadership and implementing the principle of "party branches leading cooperatives" is the general starting point for systematically solving various problems in rural areas. Developing and strengthening the village-level collective economy is by no means a purely economic issue, but a fundamental policy for consolidating the party's ruling position and achieving common prosperity, and it is a major political issue. Therefore, the rural revitalization work of Yantai City is to strengthen the construction of village party branches as a breakthrough, and innovatively put forward the model of cooperatives led by party branches, giving full play to the function of party organizations to mobilize and unite the peasant masses, and organizational departments at all levels have played the role of the main force.
As of August 2020, Yantai has built 2,779 cooperatives led by party branches, accounting for 42% of the city's villages, pioneering the development and expansion of the collective economy at the prefectural and municipal levels, and exploring the road of agricultural cooperation in the new era.
Li Changping is a well-known expert on agriculture, agriculture and agriculture in China, he founded the China Rural Rural Construction Institute, and cooperated with the local rural party committee and government to build a new countryside in the form of a non-governmental professional team, and has successfully built more than 200 pilot projects across the country, with remarkable achievements.
The core concept of Li Changping's research results on the "three rural" issues is that the system of collective land ownership and the system of village community community is the foundation of China's founding of the country, and it is necessary to reorganize the peasants and change the status quo of inefficient rural organizations, ineffective finance, and ineffective property rights. Rural resources, assets, and funds will be intensively operated, property rights will be traded, resources will be turned into property rights, funds will be turned into shares, and villagers will be turned into stockholders, so as to realize the "separation of multiple rights and mixed sharing" of villagers under the common property rights of village collectives The rural property rights model with Chinese characteristics enables the villagers to truly have reliable property income; the party branch should lead the cooperatives and firmly follow the socialist road of common prosperity for all villagers; the village communities should have built-in finance to solve the problem of ineffective rural cooperative finance and enhance the endogenous development momentum of the villages; and the rural revitalization should have a professional team to participate. To this end, he created a professional team of the Rural Construction Institute to directly participate in the construction of rural revitalization in various places. The specific operation methods of the Rural Construction Institute are as follows: the local party organization and government are the leaders of the rural reform experiment, the village party branch and the village community are the leaders of the experiment, the villagers and members are the main body of the experiment, the professional team of the Rural Construction Institute is the collaborator of the experiment, and the farmers are the main force of rural revitalization. Property rights, financial rights, administrative rights, administrative rights, and financial rights should be returned to the administrative villages, so that the administrative villages will become truly powerful and energetic economic entities, possess a strong leadership ability in governing and building the villages, take the road of independent construction and development, and build the rural areas into a beautiful community home; cooperatives should operate production, supply, and marketing in an integrated manner, and use the strength of the team to purchase the means of production and the villagers' daily necessities at wholesale prices, so as to reduce the purchase costs. Cooperatives should be used to integrate various resources such as rural land, forests, rivers, idle land, and villagers' residential land, so as to attract investment in the city, break down the barriers of urban and rural circulation, and realize the sharing of urban and rural resources.
The "unification of the four powers" proposed by Li Changping refers to the unification of rural property rights, financial rights, administrative powers, and administrative powers. The "trinity" refers to the integration of the three functions of village community economic development, community construction and community governance. We will build the rural areas into a powerful and dynamic collective economic community.
I have visited Li Changping's pilot project in the Inner Mongolia Dalat Banner Shulinzhao Cooperative, and I would like to briefly introduce the Shulin Zhaoming model.
The cooperatives in Shulinzhao Town can be summarized as a cooperative model of "one system, two platforms" and "three-layer and four-level linkage". The third layer is "leadership and guidance layer, main body layer, and cooperation layer". One system, that is, "one village", "four cooperatives" and the cooperative system. "One village" refers to the administrative village, the administrative village establishes a cooperative led by the party branch, and the cooperative consists of four departments, also known as the four cooperatives, and the "four cooperatives" refer to: mutual fund cooperatives, land cooperatives, housing cooperatives, and consumer cooperatives, each of which operates and accounts separately. At the same time, associations of integrated farmers' cooperatives have been established at the town level.
The fourth level is "household level, community level, village level, and town level", and they are gradually taking shares, mutual assistance and participation, and multi-point cooperation, which truly gives full play to the advantages of cooperation.
After the establishment of cooperatives and cooperatives is completed, the three levels of towns and villages should call on the vast number of peasants to join the corresponding cooperatives as much as possible, such as land cooperatives, housing cooperatives, or comprehensive peasant cooperatives. It is also possible for some farmers to only participate in consumer cooperatives, and they can enjoy the preferential prices of agricultural materials and daily necessities purchased by cooperatives. Individual farmers no longer join the cooperative.
The two platforms, namely the online and offline platforms for rural property rights transactions, the offline platform is called the Shulinzhao Town Rural Property Rights Service Center, and the online platform is the "Rural One" website created by the Rural Construction Institute, which interacts online and offline and promotes synchronously.
Li Changping believes that the collective economic cooperatives led by the party branch are special legal entities and landowners, and they include departments (asset center, credit cooperation department, insurance cooperation department, land cooperation department, housing cooperation department, purchase and sales cooperation department, technology department, brand department...... ), enterprises (wholly-owned enterprises, holding enterprises) and professional production and marketing classes (professional cooperatives: such as strawberry, yam and other professional cooperatives) are in charge of the big ship of the agricultural economy and the overall situation; if the party branch only leads the professional cooperatives, it is the boat of the agricultural economy, it is impossible to truly realize the autonomy of the villages.
Although the village community communities run by Tangyue Village, Yantai City, and Li Changping are inconsistent in form and have their own strengths, they have one thing in common, that is, the party branch leads the cooperative. Today, villages Xi from their experiences and practices have blossomed all over the country, and I believe that a spark can start a prairie fire. In addition, there are still quite a few village-run collective economies throughout the country that are very distinctive and successful, and they need to be summed up and popularized.
Li Changping said: The kind of propaganda that allows peasants to transfer all their land to the hands of capital and relies on dozens or hundreds of land transfer fees per mu is like trying to solve the problem of poverty, and the peasants lose control over the means of production and lose hope for development. Practice has proved that only the Communist Party is a party that serves the people completely and thoroughly, and only by relying on the party's leadership can the peasants in impoverished areas shake off poverty and move toward the road of common prosperity.
Li Changping said: After the Communist Party conquered the country, the cornerstone of the country was the system of collective ownership of land! Only when land is collective can the system of village communities be established and party branches be built on village communities. Is it okay for the party branch to be built on Evergrande? Why is it feasible for the party branch to be built on the village community? Because there is the system of collective ownership of land, which is the cornerstone of the property rights of the Communist Party.
Since collective ownership of land is the cornerstone of the Communist Party, no matter who cultivates collective land, everyone should be responsible. Why is it that the "responsibility fields" that peasant households originally planted collectively have now become "their own fields"? And without any responsibility, state subsidies are also directly distributed to peasant households without the collectives. Farming is irresponsible, subsidized, and long-lasting. The field of responsibility has become a field of welfare and a field of private use. Since it has remained unchanged for 30 years and has been extended for another 30 years, the initial average "responsibility" has become the "welfare" that is now extremely unfair, and the "welfare fields" have become tumors for agricultural development, into tumors for the construction of grassroots organizations, for the harmonious construction and development of rural society, for rural governance, and for the development of rural socialist causes.
Zhang Jie, a well-known scholar, once put forward a view that the collection of rural taxes and fees should be resumed, and his words caused misunderstanding among many people in society. In fact, Zhang Jie's view is consistent with Li Changping's. In every organization in modern society, the rights and obligations of the participants are unified, and they cannot only have interests but not fulfill their obligations, and if they do not fulfill their obligations in the organization, this mechanism is to cultivate selfish people. As for the government's support for rural areas, agriculture, and farmers, there can be more ways to support it, not in exempting agricultural taxes and fees, but also in a more appropriate form to return taxes and fees to the rural areas. For example, in rural medical insurance, participants must have their own part of the payment, and the same reason that the government's matching medical insurance funds cannot be distributed to individuals.
The problem of land abandonment has not been resolved for a long time, and in essence, some officials regard the contracted land as the private property of the villagers. If we adhere to the principle that rural land belongs to collective ownership, support village collectives in recovering abandoned land from villagers in accordance with regulations, and sublease the recovered land by village committees in various forms, even if no one subleases, they can also plant pasture grass that does not need more management, and there will be profits, and the phenomenon of abandoned land will occur.
In April 2016, General Secretary Xi pointed out during his inspection in Anhui that "no matter how rural reform is reformed, the collective ownership of rural land cannot be changed, the cultivated land cannot be reduced, the grain production capacity cannot be weakened, and the interests of farmers cannot be harmed", which is the bottom line that must be guarded in rural work.
On September 21, 2018, Comrade Xi Jinping pointed out in his speech at the 8th Collective Study Xi of the Political Bureau of the 19th Central Committee: "We must do a good job in the political direction of the rural revitalization strategy, adhere to the nature of collective ownership of rural land, develop a new type of collective economy, and take the road of common prosperity." ”
We know that Brazil is located in the Amazon Plain, and it has excellent conditions for the development of agricultural production. At the beginning of his presidency, Brazilian President Lula mentioned in a public speech that most of Brazil's land is in the hands of a small number of farmers and multinational capital, who monopolize Brazil's agricultural production and food supply, causing many Brazilians to go hungry and have no food. How easy it is to change the situation of the capitalist monopoly on agriculture that has already formed! The situation in Brazil must not occur in the circulation of land on the mainland.
We know that in Brazil, Colombia and other countries in the Americas, peasants have launched landless peasant movements, and they have occupied some abandoned land and partially occupied the land of farmers. It is a form of peaceful rebellion. In India, a peasant uprising led by the CPI-Maoists competed for land for cultivation. Because, it is the greatest human right for everyone to have something to eat, so their actions are justified and reasonable.
Zimbabwe, under the leadership of President Robert Mugabe, used revolutionary means to drive out white farmers and divide the land equally among the landless blacks. Mugabe was hailed as an anti-imperialist hero by progressives around the world, but decades later, the country's agricultural production was in shambles, and the people's lives were in dire straits, and in 2017, he was ousted. Why is it that if the land is divided equally among the blacks, agriculture will not be able to do well? This is because there are many factors that contribute to the increase in agricultural production and income, and it is far from enough to arouse the peasants' enthusiasm for farming, and in particular, the loss of domestic and foreign markets for agricultural products is fatal.
When the peasants transfer land to capital, will they be able to get the transfer fees year after year? Will the transfer of the contracted land permanently result in the loss of the right to contract and manage the land? The villagers have misgivings about this. Because in real life, there are too many phenomena of land operators going bankrupt and running away. Once the transfer land operator runs away, the villagers' land rent is gone, leaving the township government with a piece of chicken feathers. This phenomenon occurs everywhere and can be said to be commonplace. Agriculture is a low-profit industry, but now the circulation of land operators have to bear excessively high land rent, in many places the standard rent of one mu of water land is 1,000 yuan, the high rent is really terrible, far higher than the old society around the skin of the land rent, the excessively high rent makes it difficult for land operators. Many people in the city rent land in the countryside, not caring about the harvest in the next few years, but about the right to use the land in many years, hoping that the land will increase in value in the future.
The positive and negative experiences at home and abroad tell us that the way out for China's agriculture should be reorganized. Lv Xinyu put forward an important point of view, she said: "Therefore, how to re-transfer land back to the collective, resist privatization, reunite small farmers, respond to the market in a collective way, and use this to undertake the state's support funds for cooperatives, and open up a new type of socialist rural market economy with Chinese characteristics?" Moreover, the vast world of entrepreneurship - a village where young people can return can fundamentally solve the problem of urban slums. "I think Lu Xinyu's views are in line with Xi Jinping's "three rural areas" thinking and are correct and feasible.
I believe that in order to implement the rural revitalization strategy put forward by the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core, we must first strengthen the collective economy, truly return land ownership to the collective, and make it clear that villagers only have the right to contract the use of land, not the right to occupy it. Village collective organizations in the form of cooperatives, villagers in the form of contracted land, or village collective organizations in the form of anti-rent and subcontracting, the villagers' scattered land integration, the mode of operation according to local conditions, can be operated by cooperatives themselves, can be operated in cooperation with foreign capital, can also be in the administrative village or open bidding to the public to contract out for business, in a variety of forms, so as to achieve large-scale modern agricultural production of land, China's agriculture is still very promising, the rural revitalization strategy proposed by the Party Central Committee will definitely be realized.
Bibliography:
Lv Xinyu | Countryside, Revolution and "Chinese Modernization": A Global South Perspective
Wang Hongjia's "Tangyue Road" and "Towards Rural Revitalization" (the book was selected as the national party member education and training textbook selected by the Organization Department of the CPC Central Committee)
Li Changping is the author of "Built-in Finance and Endogenous Development Momentum of Village Communities" and a series of comments he published on the Internet
Yu Tao's "Organizational Work Path and Practice"
Zhi Guangjun, "Yantai Experience - The Road to Rural Revitalization"
(Source: Kunlun Ce Network [Original] Revised Draft, Author's Authorized Release)