Wen Tiejun: 11 thoughts on the modernization of agriculture and rural areas

Thought 1: "Three rural" is the "ballast stone" of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation

China's international environment, since the Obama era of the United States began to emphasize the pullback to the manufacturing industry, no matter which party comes to power, whether Trump or Biden, so that this measure can be continued and tougher, the United States to strengthen the real economy and China's largest export real industry has also formed a confrontational competitive relationship. Judging from this, it has long been an indisputable fact that the two sides are more competitive than complementary, and this is the fundamental fact that the United States ranks China as the number one enemy. Therefore, on the whole, whether or not Taoguang continues to show weakness and weakness, China's external economic, political, military and other environments will be more unoptimistic in the future than before!

In the face of such a complex and ever-changing international environment, what should China do? Instead of beggar-thy-neighbor and marrying off in crisis, we proposed to take "local culture" as the carrier of civilization inheritance, and resolutely chose to take the road of rural revitalization. Because the development experience of New China proves that the rural society can provide a powerful carrier for the "soft landing" of China's economy. In the process of industrialization, the countryside objectively plays the role of a "labor reservoir" for a long time, and the state has been able to internalize and deal with international externality risks with the help of the "three rural" carriers, thus successfully achieving a "soft landing" of the economy for many times.

At present and for some time to come, the mainland is still in a period of important strategic opportunities. To coordinate the overall strategy of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and the great changes in the world unseen in a century, we must correctly grasp the law on the basis of maintaining strategic determination. The central government's emphasis on adhering to the top priority of the "three rural" work is based on a deep insight into the reality of development and an accurate grasp of the law of development. It can be said that in the process of realizing the goal of building a modern socialist country, the basic position of the "three rural" will be more important than ever, and the guarantee role of the "three rural" will also be more important than ever. The significance and value of the "three rural" areas will transcend specific issues, constitute the deep logic of economic and social development, and support the great journey of China's giant aircraft carrier and giant ship to cut through the waves.

Thought 2: The transformation of ecological value is an effective way to reform the supply-side structure

The current economic state, what is the way out now? The way out lies in the current three major strategies: the first strategy is the "One Belt, One Road" strategy, and the second strategy is the domestic sub-regional integration -- now several major economic belts through sub-regional integration, re-evaluate factor prices to form resource capitalization income expectations, and stimulate regional economic growth. The third strategy is the rural revitalization strategy. At present, capital is demanding to go to the countryside, partly because the rural areas have not yet completed the monetization of the resource economy.

In the past five or six years, almost all major real estate companies have approached our team, asking them how to go to the countryside? How to deal with farmers? Everyone has a lot of money in their hands, and they want to go to the countryside to fight with farmers, and it is suggested that they know more about the "three rurals", and outsiders can't play with farmers. In general, going to the countryside has become a basic trend. When we talk about the combination of culture and tourism, the beautiful scenery, scenery and folk culture in the countryside have become the new productive forces; when we want to develop the tourism economy, the fireflies, valley butterflies, frogs, dragonflies and other things in nature in the paddy fields and wetlands have also become the new productive forces of ecological development.

Looking at it this way, we should be able to understand why General Secretary Xi Jinping said that "lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets", and why "ice and snow are also invaluable assets". These are all new elements of productivity that can create a certain value. Since the new factors of productive forces have been greatly expanded, revolutionary changes in the traditional relations of production are required.

Thought 3: The strategy of ecological civilization can only be truly implemented by relying on rural construction

After the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, there were discussions at home and abroad about some new ideas on ecological civilization and rural revitalization, and the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China emphasized that "Chinese modernization is the modernization of harmonious coexistence between man and nature".

Since it is ecological, where is the ecology? Is it in the city? It is all reinforced concrete, and it must be in the countryside, because the mountains, rivers, fields, forests, lakes, grass and sand are all in the countryside. The most important change required by the country's ecological transformation is to change from the expansion of plane resources in the past industrialization era to the three-dimensional development of space resources, which is completely different from the original industrial capital-based industrialization era. Of course, it is different from the virtual expansion in the era of financial capital, what General Secretary Xi Jinping said is that "you can see the mountains, you can see the water, and remember the nostalgia" requires the comprehensive development of the three-dimensional system of space resources. Only the rural society is a cyclical life process of natural resources, and it exists the organic integration between the diversity of natural resources and the diversity of human society, so rural revitalization is the carrier of China's ecological civilization development.

We do not simply emphasize industrial agriculture because under China's current conditions, it is impossible for agriculture to have positive externalities if it is simply engaged in primary production. We have repeatedly suggested to enterprises that if they leverage capital to invest in the place with the deepest sunk cost and form a diversified new business format with the integration of six industries, it is possible to generate and expand the opportunity income space. In the past, we only engaged in agriculture with flat resources as the carrier, so on the one hand, the people in the mountains were poor, and on the other hand, they also left rich and three-dimensional natural resources that were not developed. At present, the central government encourages social capital to enter the three-dimensional development of space resources, which is equivalent to changing the plane resources that investors used to only engage in agricultural development into three-dimensional development of space resources such as mountains, rivers, fields, forests, lakes and grasses.

Thought 4: The Agricultural Path of the Aboriginal Countries of the "Vast Land Giants".

Since the beginning of reform and opening up, we have been keen to learn from Western technology, systems, and culture, and some people even think that Western technology is equivalent to advanced. Even some scholars preach the superiority of the Western model all day long, opening their mouths about "capitalization" and closing their mouths about "industrialization", and they want to accept it all. The 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China put forward the five characteristics of "Chinese-style modernization", and General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized that "there is no fixed model of modernization", and we must no longer copy the model of colonial farms to engage in agriculture.

Columbus's voyages ushered in the first sustained European contact with the Americas, and ushered in the so-called "Great Era" of European exploration and plundering of colonial overseas territories that would continue for centuries. In fact, this is the beginning of colonialism, which is essentially a "crime against humanity" with the state as the unit, and it is a history of the invasion, conquest and enslavement of the peoples of Asia, Africa and America by the European powers during the period of primitive accumulation of capital. On the contrary, for the Native Americans, it meant the beginning of the barbaric and brutal plundering of them by foreign colonists. This is the real history of the United States, which is quite different from the packaged America in our impression.

China is the world's largest continental indigenous country, and this national condition is the foundation of all development in China, especially in the field of agriculture, where the close integration of man and nature can lead to the Chinese modernization of "harmonious coexistence between man and nature". If this is still not clear, the fact that the per capita arable land is nearly seven times lower than that of the United States is indisputably the crux of the problem that the big farm economy does not work in China. A country with a rural population of about 700 million cannot be expected to replicate the experience of a country with a total number of millions of farmers.

It is not only a large indigenous country, but also has the embarrassment of a large population and little arable land, which directly leads to the fact that China's agricultural development is completely different from that of the West, which is the difference between China's guaranteed output maximization and the United States' profit maximization. To put it simply, the foundation of China's agricultural development is the efforts made under the unified control of the people's government to ensure the people's food rations and sufficient strategic reserves, that is, national food security comes first; while the large-scale farm economy of the United States is the global market operation carried out by American transnational capital and large and small farmers in various places in order to earn capital profits.

At this stage, family management dominated by small farmers is still the main form of agricultural management in China, and it is also a reality that China's agricultural development must face for a long time. Therefore, can modern agriculture with capital deepening eliminate the Chinese peasants? No, we are not colonizers, still less can we leave small peasants behind; we must prevent forced land transfer, prevent the concentration of land and other means of production in the hands of a small number of people, and squeeze out the vast number of small peasants; still more, we must prevent a large number of people from becoming an unemployed group that has no way to transfer jobs and no land to cultivate. The mode of agricultural operation must be to adhere to the principle that the big should be big and the small should be small, and there should be no one-size-fits-all approach and no coercive orders.

Reflection 5: The new urbanization strategy is an important support for the comprehensive revitalization of rural areas

At present, the urbanization rate of the mainland has reached 64%, which refers to the permanent population, but the urbanization rate of the registered population is still only about 45%. Some experts have proposed a solution to the problem -- privatization of rural land, complete liberalization of urban household registration, and allowing peasants to sell their land and pay social security and then move to the cities and become complete urban residents. What is more, they believe that the decay of the countryside is a historical inevitability, and clearly play the slogan of "eliminating the peasants".

In this regard, General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out that "in the process of modernization, the proportion of cities has risen and the proportion of townships has declined, which is an objective law, but under the national conditions of the mainland with a population of nearly 1.4 billion, no matter how far industrialization and urbanization progress, agriculture must develop, the countryside will not die, and urban and rural areas will coexist for a long time, which is also an objective law." Even if the urbanization rate of the mainland reaches 70 percent, there will still be more than 400 million people in rural areas. If more than 400 million people in the rural areas are left behind in the process of modernization, and in the end there will be 'prosperous cities on one side and withered rural areas on the other,' this is not in line with our party's ruling purpose and does not meet the essential requirements of socialism. It is impossible to achieve such a modernization!"

The general secretary not only saw the development law of general urbanization, but also made a prediction that the dual structure of urban and rural areas will exist for a long time, and even if the urbanization rate reaches 70% by 2030, there will still be more than 400 million people in rural areas. So, so many people still have to work and live in the countryside, and it is impossible for them all to go to the cities, how can they let the countryside decline and let it go?

In fact, solving rural problems with radical urbanization will yield more problems. Policymakers must not be swayed by a small number of interest groups, because radical urbanization means, to a certain extent, the expansion of capital, especially the expansion of capital in real estate and financial capital, which means that these interest groups will seize benefits on a larger scale.

Brazilian favelas

It is rumored on the Internet that we have been widely criticized for "opposing urbanization", and even labeled as "anti-modernization", but in fact we are opposed to radical big cities as the main carrier, rather than a local urbanization strategy that meets China's actual needs. We advocate "county-level urbanization" at a lower cost for peasants, because there are many large villages with a population of several thousand under the county, and they are all "towns" in the world, and there are many townships and towns with a population of tens of thousands, and the name commonly used in the world should be "cities......

Focusing on the development of large cities or emphasizing the rate of urbanization is a worrying phenomenon in the long run. In response to these hazards, the phenomenon of reverse urbanization has long been seen in Western countries. Therefore, during the two sessions in 2018, Xi Jinping emphasized when participating in the deliberations of the Guangdong delegation to the National People's Congress: "Urbanization and anti-urbanization must be promoted in both aspects." In the process of urbanization, the rural areas must not decline, but should complement and complement each other. ”

The county-level economy and the new urbanization strategy are an important starting point for resolving the current economic crisis and an important starting point for moving towards ecological civilization. Pay attention to clarifying the concept, and the strategy determined by the central government is urbanization rather than urbanization.

Thought 6: The new six industries are an important way to prosper the rural economy

Agriculture has always been an important foundation for a country's development. The era has reached the stage of industrialization, and agriculture tends to be transformed in a modern industrialization way to pursue large-scale mass production. As a result, most countries have included agriculture in the "primary industry", requiring modern chemistry (fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc.), physics (machinery), biology (genetically modified) and other science and technology as the driving force for the development of the primary industry. Of course, this has improved the development efficiency of the primary industry, and farmers can continue to increase the number of "capital goods" and grow more grain or other agricultural products with less labor, and the returns of investors will naturally increase, but this does not mean that economic rationality is reflected in China with more people and less land - a large number of studies have shown that the increase in labor productivity is accompanied by a decline in land productivity; not to mention the continuous increase in capital goods has led to an increase in agricultural costs and a decline in market competitiveness, and once there is no government subsidy, the cost exposure will be difficult to maintain. It can be seen that the development of agriculture in the primary industry alone is not the "industrial prosperity" required by the rural revitalization strategy.

Historically, the countryside was originally "prosperous in all industries". Who ordered farmers to farm the land?

For example, masons, carpenters, tailors, blacksmiths, and pot-mending craftsmen have long been the leaders of the primary industries such as agriculture, forestry, and animal husbandry, and peasants have always been producers of "all industries" since the beginning of China's 10,000-year-old agricultural civilization. At present, some experts have copied the theories of textbooks, saying that if the rural economy is to be specialized, the peasants will only cultivate the land, and the workers will only engage in industry.

In order to promote the strategy of rural revitalization, China should not only pay attention to the development of agriculture, which is known as the primary industry, but also pay more attention to how to make use of the spatial and ecological resources of the countryside and give full play to its comparative advantages of "ecological industrialization and industrial ecology", so as to make the vast number of farmers rich. We believe that not only should we consciously protect the multi-occupation and diversification of traditional farmers, which itself has effectively eliminated environmental pollution due to the agricultural cultural heritage of "planting and breeding" and "intercropping", but also that the diversification of the rural economy has caused the rural society to absorb a large number of skilled craftsmen as a reservoir of labor, which is conducive to long-term social stability.

Thought 7: Further improve rural governance

Since the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China, the rural autonomy built within the small rural social system has gradually decayed in the process of industrialization and urbanization over the past century; no matter what kind of doctrine it is, the construction of state power so far has not provided a good solution to the problems of "three rural" and "three governance" (county governance/township governance/village governance), which has long plagued the process of China's spiritual and political civilization.

Looking at the whole world, all developing countries that are "late-developing endogenous" in their pursuit of industrialization objectively have to extract surplus from the "three rural" areas before they can enter the primitive accumulation of capital, since they no longer have the conditions to directly transfer contradictions to overseas like in the West. As a result, any discerning person will see that the more late-developing countries copy the West in terms of superstructure, the more they have to extricate themselves painfully from this institutional trap of negative externalities caused by the high transaction costs between government governance and traditional small farmers, regardless of whether their ideas are of universal value in relation to their national conditions.

Accordingly, the problem of "three governances" in China's rural areas is not only a century-old problem since modern times, but also different from the high degree of social tension in most other developing countries. Any effort to build an institution in rural China must consider how to maximize compatibility or minimize conflict between the upper and lower cultures, that is, between the formal system and the vernacular culture, and therefore, the endogenous "centralized" centralized system in the irrigation agricultural civilization of the small rural community system, which was formed by maintaining rural autonomy at low cost, forms the basis of the "steady-state structure", which was initially considered a negative institutional experience and may be worth re-examining today.

To sum up, we are probably discussing the biggest difficulty in understanding the foreign basic Marxist theory in the context of the Chinese language in the countryside: under the constraints of a highly dispersed and too small surplus small-scale peasant economic base that is difficult to fundamentally and effectively change in the short term, should we reconstruct the rural superstructure "at low cost", or continue to maintain the modern superstructure with already high operating costs and transaction costs?

No matter what kind of doctrine we agree with, we should no longer be limited to the debate on theoretical issues in the face of the situation of rural governance, but we must also face the "problem of the century" in reality—the problem of institutional costs caused by the high transaction costs between any external subject, including the government, and scattered peasants!

It is necessary to build a three-level rural governance system. First of all, for villages (communities), it is necessary to improve the degree of rural organization and reconstruct the internal governance pattern of communities. Second, with regard to county governance, it is necessary to establish a grassroots work orientation. Finally, for rural governance, the key is to achieve scale gains and improve public services. At the same time, the revenue is kept in the domain and the internal low-cost governance is maintained.

Thought 8: The key to urban-rural integration lies in the free flow of factors

We believe that the practical significance of the urban-rural integration strategy lies in two aspects: first, it is closely integrated with the policies of "industry staying in the county" in the "county economy" and "new urbanization", which has become the basic adjustment made by the state to the five major contents of the rural revitalization strategy. The second is the revision and upgrading of the "urban-rural co-ordination" and "urban-rural integration" proposed earlier, and the so-called "integration" that used to cover the countryside with the urban model has been upgraded to the free flow of elements in the urban and rural markets.

After the reform and opening up, especially since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, after experiencing different stages of development such as urbanization development (urban-rural integration), urbanization development, and urban-rural integrated development, the mainland has made remarkable new progress in the policy thinking of urban-rural integration.

In order to promote the further integration of urban and rural areas, the "Opinions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on Establishing and Improving the Institutional Mechanism and Policy System for the Integrated Development of Urban and Rural Areas" issued in 2019 clearly stated that it is necessary to "resolutely eliminate the shortcomings of the system and mechanism, and promote the free flow and equal exchange of urban and rural elements and the rational allocation of public resources", and the "Outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development of the People's Republic of China and the Long-Range Objectives Through the Year 2035" issued in 2021 proposes to "establish and improve the equal exchange of urban and rural elements, The two-way flow policy system will promote more flow of factors to the countryside and enhance the vitality of agricultural and rural development". The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China is in the same vein, pointing out that "adhere to the priority development of agriculture and rural areas, adhere to the integrated development of urban and rural areas, and smooth the flow of urban and rural elements." ”

As a developing country with a huge population and geographical scale, the key to realizing the integrated development of urban and rural areas lies in starting from the institutional mechanism, changing the one-way outflow pattern of rural factors, dredging the circulation of urban and rural factors, allowing the equal and free flow of land, capital, labor and other factors, and encouraging the formation of a steady-state circulation system in which urban and rural needs complement each other and factors flow in both directions.

Thought 9: Rural revitalization is the revival of 10,000 years of Chinese farming civilization

We recognize that rural revitalization is the basic strategy of the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation". The ontology of the Chinese nation, which has been inherited for thousands of years and has been "standing on its own in the forest of the world's nations", is the continuation of China's agricultural civilization.

The report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) devotes a chapter to the content of "promoting cultural self-confidence and self-improvement, and creating a new glory of socialist culture". It can "enhance the backbone and confidence of being Chinese", is our deepest cultural soft power, is the matrix of our cultural development, and accumulates the deepest spiritual pursuit of the Chinese nation.

And where is the cultural source of Chinese civilization? It comes from the traditional Chinese local culture and originated from the 10,000-year-old Chinese agricultural civilization.

When it comes to culture, we are the least lacking in resources, and we have always been extremely confident, and the vast 5,000-year-old civilization is inexhaustible.

When did the Chinese nation begin to lose self-confidence? Probably we have to start with the industrial revolution and the so-called modernization of the West. Since then, our cultural self-confidence has gradually declined. All kinds of modern vocabulary, discipline systems, and discourse systems were originally created by the West, and they must be led by others under the Western-dominated discourse system. As a result, in the immaturity of young people, "the moon abroad is rounder than at home", and our cultural self-confidence has no self-confidence at all. Not to mention the agrarian civilization and rural culture, which have no economic development value, have become a "backward" culture that is not welcomed and cannot be put on the table.

How did the Chinese nation, as an indigenous people, become a country in the land of East and Central Asia, and multiply as a political country that continues history for more than 4,000 years. But the history of humiliation in recent times has left us unable to lift our heads, and it is finally time to rebuild the self-confidence of the Chinese. It can be said that China is a long-standing political country in the world with indigenous people as the main body. In the past, it was said that China existed as a state in the cultural sense, not as a country in the political sense, nor as a nation-state. These are the histories of faith in Western textbooks that have no archaeological evidence for China, so the history of ancient civilizations is considered to be legends.

After thinking about these issues, we can understand why this generation of Chinese intellectuals still carries a heavy burden and should reconstruct China's discourse system in a timely manner. This makes sense that China, as an indigenous country, has a history of development that has existed independently of the West for thousands of years.

After a basic understanding of the West, we strongly advocate the establishment of an "East Asian intellectual community"! Although this is a lonely struggle, it must also be done. Only when the "East Asian Knowledge Community" connects the past and the next can we understand what the "East" is.

Thought 10: Rural revitalization is the only way to consolidate the achievements of poverty alleviation and move towards common prosperity

We have always believed that the greatest comparative disadvantage of the world's disadvantaged people is the high scarcity of capital. And the root cause of this is low self-accumulation. From this point of view, the results of the anti-poverty method implemented by overseas foundations in selecting targeted poor households for relief are generally "a drop in the bucket and useless";

In recent years, China has won the battle against poverty in an all-round way with a new national system. The most critical experience during this period is that the national capital assumes the investment responsibility of "heavy assets" in view of the basic problem that the disadvantaged groups are unable to accumulate capital independently, and the second is the demand for the implementation of the "new national system", which has led to the tilt of fiscal, financial and social capital, as well as all preferential policies towards agriculture, rural areas and rural areas, with a cumulative investment of more than 10 trillion yuan. If we take the average of 90 million poor people, about 100,000 per capita and hundreds of thousands per household; this kind of large-scale investment has greatly transformed the production conditions in rural and remote areas, and peasants and other disadvantaged groups in rural areas who lacked the ability to accumulate capital in the past have the conditions for developing new productive forces with light assets, and have gradually formed the ability to accumulate on their own. This is an institutional arrangement conducive to the transition to a fair and balanced development of society.

However, poverty alleviation is not the end, but the starting point of a new life and new struggle. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council emphasized that after winning the battle against poverty and building a moderately prosperous society in an all-round way, it is necessary to do a good job in rural revitalization on the basis of consolidating and expanding the achievements of poverty alleviation.

Consolidating and expanding the achievements of poverty alleviation and effectively connecting with rural revitalization is related to the construction of a new development pattern with the domestic cycle as the main body and the domestic and international cycles reinforcing each other, and to the overall situation of building a modern socialist country in an all-round way and realizing the second centenary goal. Such a holistic strategy will of course be accompanied by large-scale investment to increase the country's huge assets left in the countryside.

It can be seen that to achieve the effective connection between consolidating and expanding the achievements of poverty alleviation and rural revitalization, the first is to take the village collective economy as a micro carrier in the internal mechanism, so that this huge asset can be effectively connected in property relations. Second, it is necessary to promote the socialization and innovation of urban-rural integration with agricultural supply-side reform. Third, through the construction of digital villages, it will connect with the big data of various consumers in the city, and truly match the people's yearning for a better life with the rural ecological resource assets through the integration of big data.

To sum up, we need to build two engines: ecological economy and digital economy.

Thought 11: The new rural collective economy must learn to eat rent

What is the collective economy? The result we have learned in such famous villages as Zhanqi Village is that the collective economy is a rent-collecting economy. This is not something we came up with, but from the practical experience of Gao Demin, the secretary of Zhanqi Village.

Today, the central authorities advocate the development of a collective economy, and many people do not know what the collective economy does, and today's experience in Zhanqi Village tells us that the collective economy is not mainly engaged in production, but learning to create rents, increase rents, and then eat rents.

The rural collectives are the owners of the land and the owners of the resources in the village area, and of course, the political nature is different from that of the landlords in the past. If we must make the village collectives have to do farm work in addition to collecting rent, then it is tantamount to letting the landlords go to the fields to work in the past, and let the tenant farmers go to the cities to work, and the position will be reversed. Of course, it doesn't mean that the past is necessarily right, there is no right or wrong, we just make an analogy.

If you look at the four little tigers in Guangdong's "Pearl River Delta" and the developed agricultural areas of Shunde, Foshan, Nanhai, and Zhongshan, what are the village collectives doing? What kind of rent is he collecting in Zhanqi Village, he is collecting "resource rent", "scenery rent", "shop rent", whether it is the 18 squares in the village, the snack street, or the mother farm, all these resource assets are rented out to tenants, and then the village collective eats "shop rent", which is "commercial rent".

In the past, the landlords collected "primary industry rents," Huaxi Village collected "secondary industry rents," Guangdong's "Four Little Tigers" collected "secondary industry rents," and Zhanqi Village collected even more advanced "tertiary industry rents." Sometimes people say that we can't run a collective economy and that our village has nothing, and that's because we don't put the village collectives in the position of "rent-eaters."

Therefore, what is the purpose of engaging in a collective economy is to eat rent. The agricultural society eats land rent and agricultural rent, the industrial society eats factory rent, and now it is an ecological society, and what it eats is resource rent, space rent, and shop rent. Zhanqi Village engages in homestays, farmhouses, and leisure agriculture, but in fact, it is a shared "bed board" rent.

We could easily see the snow-capped mountains in Zhanqi Village. The very important theme of rent collection is "Tangchang at the foot of the Snow Mountain", "Battle Flag at the Foot of the Snow Mountain", and even "Battle Flag of Dujiangyan Essence Irrigation Area". What do all these discussions illustrate? If we want to develop our collective economy today, we should increase the number of rents collected by the collectives and the resources that exceed those outside the collectives and cannot be collected for rent, and the collective economy will develop.

Source: Academic Sannong

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