The implementation of the rural revitalization strategy will have a major long-term impact on China's urban and rural social and economic development. After the overall goal of the rural revitalization strategy is determined, how to truly implement the relevant policies is an important practical issue. This paper believes that the evolution of urban-rural relations and rural development have their own laws, recognize the laws, and promote rural revitalization according to the situation, so as to reduce deviations in the implementation of the rural revitalization strategy and avoid the occurrence of basic orientation problems. Based on my thinking on the development of agriculture and rural areas in the world and the investigation of the specific policies for rural revitalization recently introduced in various places, the author proposes and discusses the major guiding issues related to social, economic and political efficiency, equality and sustainable development in the process of promoting the strategy of rural revitalization.
First, how to deal with the contradiction between the "ceiling" of agricultural scale operation and the increase of peasants' income
Most developed countries have a high level of agricultural specialization, and the scale of family farms is very large, but the part-time income of family farms is still very important. In the United States, for example, of the average income of farmers, the income from on-farm farming as a percentage of total income has fallen from about 50% in 1960 to about 15% today. 1 This means that most of the income of U.S. farmers comes from areas other than off-farm production. The composition of farmers' incomes in Europe and Japan is generally the same. This situation actually reflects the following characteristics of the modern agricultural economy.
First, although the scale of operation of the farmer's family is getting larger and larger, the change in scale and the change in the income of the farmer have not formed a rising relationship. Theoretically, under conditions of full competition, the income of workers of the same level, regardless of occupation, will tend to be consistent for each working day for a long enough time. At the same time, the law that the increase in labor productivity is inversely proportional to the value (price) of the unit commodity is also in effect, the larger the farm scale, the higher the level of capital, technology, and equipment, the lower the cost per unit output, and the more the farmer can accept the lower competitive price. Capital prices (interest rates) in developed countries also have a slow downward process and have become a factor driving down the cost of products. In short, the group game generated by competition makes the farm scale have a process of accelerating growth, but it has not become a major factor in the increase of farmers' income.
Second, the scale of farm operations also has a "ceiling", but the rigidity is not strong. The data shows that the growth rate of large farm operations in the United States has declined significantly after 2012. 2 The seasonality of agriculture and the marginal efficiency of agricultural equipment decline law determine that the scale of family farms will be "scale is not economical", at the same time, there are more uncertainties in agricultural production, the cost of supervision is higher, a considerable number of agricultural production projects are not suitable for hired workers, and the farmers' income increase encounters a "ceiling".
Third, government subsidies have a certain impact on the composition of farmers' income, but they do not have a significant role in promoting economic efficiency. The author notes that the Engel coefficient in developed countries is roughly inversely proportional to the government's financial support for farmers (calculated according to the proportion of farmers' income). In 2017, the US federal government's food and agriculture expenditure accounted for about 3% of fiscal expenditure, of which about 75% was used for food subsidies for residents, and the funds invested in agricultural production were about 80 yuan per mu of land, which could directly affect the income of farmers by about 20%. 3 In Japan's fiscal expenditure, agriculture accounts for a relatively large proportion, and the apportionment per mu of land far exceeds that of China, but in recent years, Japan's Engel coefficient has not dropped but has risen, reaching about 26%, which is twice that of the United States. In short, the government's large expenditure on supporting agriculture is not conducive to the development of the agricultural economy, and in the long run, it is not conducive to increasing peasants' income.
Fourth, the main channels for increasing farmers' incomes are increasingly concentrated in the value creation and distribution of rural industrial chains other than direct agricultural production. According to the above analysis, if the agricultural production of the land, especially the production of planting, is not easy to make the agricultural income become the main income of the farmer, so that the total income reaches the average level of the whole society, and the government subsidies are not enough to make up for the difference, then the farmer has to work in the non-agricultural industry to increase the income. From the perspective of value addition, the food industry chain is greater than the agricultural industry chain, and the agricultural industry chain is larger than the rural industrial chain. The value of the rural industrial chain in the United States is about 10 times that of land agriculture, and the proportion of total income in the scale is close to the Engel coefficient of the United States and the proportion of the rural population in the total population of the United States. Rural areas in the United States and EU countries are inhabited by a large number of non-agricultural population, farmers do not have to leave their hometown to work in distant cities, and the value extension space of the rural industrial chain can enable farmers to obtain more income than land agriculture through nearby part-time work. In developed countries, the important main body controlling the rural industrial chain is the huge scale of farmers' cooperatives that can hold cattle ears in the domestic agricultural product market and in the international market, and cooperative operation has become the main channel for farmers' income growth. Seven of the world's top 10 international dairy giants are currently closely associated with cooperatives or are originally farmers' cooperatives. Some cooperatives have recruited members across borders to become international cooperatives, and through the reform of capital structure and distribution relations, the operating efficiency is no different from that of general multinational corporations, and it can be said that large cooperatives are multinational corporations in the world market.
The operation of agriculture and rural economies in developed countries should arouse our thinking on the orientation of China's modern agricultural development. Relying on the expansion of agricultural operations, can Chinese farmers solve the income problem? If China implements a system with family farms as the main body of agricultural operations, can farmers eliminate the income gap between urban and rural areas without working part-time? The answer is no, but without promoting large-scale agricultural operations and maintaining the pattern of small-scale farmers' operations, it is more difficult to raise the level of farmers' incomes. In the future, a large number of professional farmers in China will also need to work part-time, but it is not a "migratory bird-style" part-time industry, but it should be a close-to-one part-time industry that is highly dependent on the rural industrial chain. At present, China has not yet formed a guiding policy idea that meets this requirement. There are more than 2 million farmers' cooperatives in China, with an average of a few in each administrative village, but there are very few cooperatives in the real sense, although the name is called cooperatives, because of their small scale, they cannot carry out business activities in the rural industrial chain. The really active in China's rural industrial chain are leading agricultural enterprises, the actual state-owned State Supply and Marketing Cooperative, the State Tobacco Administration, the private Wen's Group, Yili Group, Shuanghui Group, are all active in the rural industrial chain of enterprises, although they have played an important role in promoting the industrialization of China's agriculture, but not with farmers as members of the cooperative management organization, but state-owned capital or social capital control of the general enterprises.
In order to truly establish a mechanism for farmers to share the value of the rural industrial chain and form a strong link between farmers' income growth and national economic growth, future reforms should form the following policy orientation:
First, we must firmly promote large-scale agricultural operations, continuously improve the level of operation, and realize the transformation of small farmers into family farms. Smallholder farmers cannot be seen as the long-term foundation of modern agriculture. Smallholder farmers cannot really form a close interest connection with cooperatives, and cooperatives made up of smallholder farmers cannot be true cooperatives. To change the understanding of cooperatives, we must not confuse contemporary farmers' cooperatives with agricultural cooperatives before the reform and opening up.
The second is to promote the development of farmers' cooperatives across administrative regions and cultivate giant cooperatives across provinces and cities. Compared with the more than 2 million farmers' cooperatives in China, there are only a few thousand in the United States, and there are only more than a dozen cooperatives in agricultural developed countries within the European Union. The cooperative mechanism must be reformed, and the capital composition and distribution relationship should not be stuck in the old cooperative tradition, but should boldly absorb the operating mechanism of multinational companies.
The third is to explore the transformation of qualified leading agricultural enterprises from state-owned or private companies into farmers' cooperatives. This transformation, which requires taking into account the interests of relevant domestic players and the rules of international trade, is a more complex undertaking.
The fourth is to adjust the guidance policies related to the layout of the city, paying special attention to guiding the headquarters of giant cooperatives that may rise through a variety of policies to be stationed in agricultural production areas, so as to facilitate farmers to engage in various types of work in the rural and agricultural industrial chains nearby.
Second, how to deal with the contradiction between the miniaturization of professional farmers' settlements and the requirements of large-scale public services
In recent years, China's rural research has paid more and more attention to the equality of urban and rural residents in public services, and the strategic plan for rural revitalization also advocates the active deployment of public service facilities in rural areas. The equalization of basic public services in urban and rural areas has become a basic policy for rural development. Comparing with the relevant practices of agricultural developed countries in Europe and the United States, the author finds that our understanding of this policy is biased.
To understand the significance of the construction of rural public service facilities, we must start from the understanding of the nature of the countryside. Compared with developed countries in Europe and the United States, China lacks reasonable policies on urban and rural divisions, and the boundaries between urban and rural areas are unclear, which has an adverse impact on the implementation of policies.
The distribution of urban and rural populations in Europe and the United States can be seen in the definition of relevant concepts by government agencies and the implicit definition of academic literature. Such definitions and discussions vary from country to country, and even at different times in the same country. For example, the U.S. Census Bureau defines independent towns with a population of less than 2,500 people as rural areas, regardless of whether they have urban formations. 4 In fact, different states in the United States have different regulations for the establishment of a "city" with legal personality, and the requirements for population size are also different. U.S. government agencies, including the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Government Management and Budget, also have different definitions of rural areas for different purposes. 5
Among the various definitions of the countryside, one commonality is the view of the countryside as an area with a low population density. For the typical agricultural production functional area, European and American scholars tend to regard it as an area with basically no public service facilities except for roads and power facilities. This particular definition is plausible. For large-scale farms, it is necessary for farmers to live in a decentralized manner. However, the construction and maintenance of many public service facilities require economies of scale. In scattered settlements, the government does not have to set up schools, hospitals and other cultural services, usually does not establish a system of sewage pipes, and roads are only simply non-hardened paving, and may not even pave roads. For example, non-agricultural residents living in rural areas of Hokkaido, Japan, usually do not make neighbors with larger farmers, preferring to live in places with a long history and easy access. Mixed residence between the non-agricultural population and farmers is a situation where the population layout has a low level of evolution.
Agricultural production functional areas cannot be extended farther away, nor can they be far from population settlements that can carry major public service facilities to the minimum (such as townships below China County by administrative district, and micropolitan areas classified by the U.S. Government Administration and Budget Bureau). Under the trend of natural evolution of urban and rural areas, the radius of radiation in the township is best within 30 minutes by car. 6 This population distribution pattern is not only conducive to improving the modernization level of agriculture, but also solves the problem of equalization of urban and rural public services.
In general, in the developed economies of Europe and the United States, public services involving fundamental rights, such as social security for residents, do not need to take into account geographical and spatial factors; Public services involving the construction of facilities only achieve equalization of public services on a larger spatial scale, and do not pursue equalization in small spaces. The basic trend is that, with the exception of easy roads (where available includes electricity and running water), professional farmers or farmers in cities of different sizes must share public services with urban dwellers, rather than accessible public services near their homes. This is a reasonable path to balance efficiency and equality in the development of rural public services.
China's strategy to promote rural revitalization should pay attention to balancing efficiency and equality in rural public services. The premise of solving China's problems is to make a correct judgment on the future distribution of China's urban and rural population. In the future, there will be 300 million or 400 million people living in rural areas in China, the total population of 7 peak periods is about 1.5 billion, if the rural population reaches 300 million, it means that the urbanization rate is about 80%, which is already the characteristics of the urban and rural population layout of developed countries. Among the rural population, non-agricultural residents tend to live in larger settlements with better public services, such as most of the existing established towns in China. According to the current statistical caliber, when the Chinese is moving towards 1.5 billion, 300 million people will enter the city. Of the 300 million people in rural areas, about 100 million are employed in agriculture spread across about 6 million settlements with traditional names,8 small settlements with an average of four or five households do not require financial provision of public services other than roads, water and electricity. In addition, most of the 200 million non-agricultural population will be concentrated, forming a township with a scale of about 10,000 people, requiring the establishment of primary schools, hospitals, cultural and sports facilities and administrative services, and the maintenance cost is relatively low.
The reality in China is that the population of each administrative village is less than 1,000 people on average, which is neither a small settlement suitable for modern farmers, nor a large rural settlement of about 10,000 people to effectively build and maintain public service facilities, nor a small city, but an unstable state of scale. In the long run, the number of residential areas will be greatly reduced, and most of them will be divided into small specialized farmer settlements and townships with about 10,000 people. The construction of public service facilities in rural revitalization should attach great importance to this differentiation, and establish such a concept: in the future, most professional farmers will be allowed to obtain public services in nearby cities or towns, rather than concentrating all professional farmers to obtain public services, let alone providing perfect public services for small professional farmers. As long as the distance between professional farmer settlements and towns is on average within half an hour's drive, this mechanism can work effectively.
The author's survey found that due to the small size of the population, the investment efficiency and service level of public services in rural settlements are very low, such as the insufficient amount of sewage, the sewage pipelines and sewage treatment facilities in some villages are difficult to use normally. Due to the low utilization rate of paved roads, some farmers dug up the pavement and crushed it into rubble to sell to road builders; When the countryside put on movies, there were generally few audiences, and the "rural bookstore" was a door. In the long run, public service investment that is not compatible with the size of the population cannot attract farmers to stay in the countryside. If rural public services cannot be rationally arranged according to the layout of urban and rural populations, it will cause great waste. Figure 1 proves this judgment.
Figure 1 Changes in urbanization rates, wage rates and rural population transfers
Assumptions: (1) The wage rate of farmers increases with the increase of urbanization, the rural population decreases, the level of scale operation and labor efficiency increases, and the wage rate of farmers increases F1; (2) The increase in urban wage level is determined by exogenous variables, and the urban wage rate is C1.
At the urbanization rate R1, the government increased the real income of farmers by building rural public service facilities, so that the real wage level of farmers reached F2. At this time, the two wage rates are equal, and the urbanization rate is temporarily stable at R1, which is lower than the equilibrium urbanization rate R2 when there is no government input.
As the urban wage rate further increases to C2, a new equilibrium appears between the two wage rates, and the urbanization rate stabilizes at R3. However, in the time period from C1 to C2, the rural population decreases, the cost of maintaining rural public service facilities rises, the quality becomes worse, the real wages of farmers decrease, assuming that the farmer's wage rate drops back to F1, the urbanization rate is not stable at R3, but increases to R4, which has two negative consequences: (1) 11 The migration of farmers to the city becomes uneven, and the farmers who delay entering the city between R1 and R2 due to the improvement of rural public service facilities enter the city in the later period. (2) 12 In this case, a loss of national wealth is actually created, as shown in figures a, b and c.
Third, how to deal with the contradiction between the decline in the Engel coefficient and the development of multi-functional agriculture
The decline in the Engel coefficient is due to the development of the modern economy. If the Engel coefficient is reduced to less than 15%, not only is food cheap, but it is also conducive to the government's use of food purchase subsidies to help the poor, improve their nutritional status, and eliminate intergenerational poverty. China's current Engel coefficient is about 30%, in order to meet the standards of affluent society, the Engel coefficient still needs to decline, but the multifunctional orientation of agriculture may contradict the decline of the Engel coefficient.
Judging from the experience of European and American countries, the realization of large-scale operation of bulk agricultural products is conducive to improving labor productivity and reducing the production cost of agricultural products, thereby reducing the Engel coefficient, rural tourism and some high-value-added agriculture, which may not be conducive to improving the overall efficiency of agriculture, making it difficult to reduce the Engel coefficient.
The growth of the industry has its own laws: (1) over a long period of time, the daily wages of the same level of labor are similar, especially in the agricultural field; (2) The replaceability between foods is high, food with slow increase in labor productivity will become a luxury, and some agricultural products seem to have a high unit value, but it is possible to withdraw from the market, such as agricultural competition in Europe and the United States retains the production varieties with high labor productivity, while the varieties with low labor productivity withdraw from the market. As the popularity of science increases, the marginal substitution rate between foods will be smaller. In agricultural developed countries or regions, the proportion of organic agricultural products with low real labor productivity is not high. Organic agricultural products are grown in developed countries in the European Union for no more than 10% of the total area, and organic food sales in the United States account for 4.2% of total food sales (2014). If unified as an indicator of agricultural GDP, this value will be even smaller. If we pay attention to the safe and pollution-free production of bulk agricultural products, the substitution of organic food for ordinary food will decline.
Agricultural tourism is an important model for the development of multi-functional agriculture. Government officials in poor areas pay more attention to the effectiveness of rural tourism in poverty alleviation. However, from the perspective of academic research, this effect has not been confirmed. Deller analyzed the changes in poverty rates in rural America from 1990 to 2000 and found that rural leisure tourism played little role in explaining changes in poverty incidence.
For industrial and commercial developed countries, the excessive development of rural tourism even has a certain negative impact on the agricultural economy. Some scholars believe that Japan's policy of promoting rural tourism has led to serious problems in agricultural development. Rural tourism played a certain role in maintaining and increasing the income of Japanese farmers in the early days after World War II, but with the rise of the Japanese economy, a large number of tourists switched to travel abroad in Japan, and the development of rural tourism slowed down, and the impact on agriculture was difficult to eliminate. On the one hand, farmers engaged in tourism are reluctant to promote land circulation, resulting in fragmentation of land and difficulty in forming large-scale operations; On the other hand, cities and agricultural areas are spatially intertwined, making it difficult for Japan (especially in several urban areas and surrounding areas) to form a management system of "small farmers + social professional services" in China's agriculture. Small farmers in Japan have more advanced modern machinery and equipment, but most of them are only suitable for small plots of land, and it is difficult for large machines to move through the city streets to another farm. This kind of multi-functional agriculture has also caused the price of farm land to rise, so that some residents who are actually separated from agriculture are reluctant to transfer land, Japanese agriculture has been "horticulturalized", and the cost of operation has increased, resulting in high prices of agricultural products and an increase in the Engel coefficient. According to the Household Income and Expenditure Survey of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (households with more than 2 people), the average Engel coefficient in Japan exceeded 26% in 2016. From 1993 to 2013, Japan's Engel coefficient has remained above 24%, significantly higher than that of developed countries in Europe and the United States, and has risen rapidly after 2014. Without compensation for foreign trade in agricultural products, Japan's food supply situation would be even worse.
We have reason to worry about the "horticulturalization" of Chinese agriculture for a certain period of time in the future. First, housing prices in cities remain high, peasants working in large and medium-sized cities have a poor living environment, and left-behind elderly people or women in major grain-producing areas have become land caretakers, and the willingness to circulate land is not high. Second, the rural living environment has gradually improved, and the development of rural tourism and pension industry has reduced the willingness of peasant households to circulate land. The mixed residence of farmers and anti-urbanization populations has expanded the scale of some villages, and contiguous land may be divided by residential areas, which has increased the difficulty of using large agricultural machinery for agricultural production. In the process of implementing the rural revitalization strategy, the rural infrastructure investment budgets of some local governments have shown the characteristics of "softening" or "politicization", so that farmers who can enter the city for a certain period of time are reluctant to go to the city, and some peasant households even buy houses in the county town, and build houses in the countryside as usual, hindering land circulation. The author's investigation of "agricultural comprehensive parks" in different areas found that a large number of non-agricultural facilities and farmland are mixed with the layout, which reduces the contiguousness of farmland, and even some areas deploy a number of projects that require the use of hardened ground in agricultural complexes covering an area of 200 to 300 mu. Third, the high ground rent rate affects the scale of agricultural operations. Under the pressure of high land rent, investors tend to "high value-added" agriculture, and banks lend money to investors, forming agricultural operation risks.
Therefore, there needs to be a trade-off for multifunctional agriculture. First of all, it is necessary to establish the principle that the state should focus on supporting the modernization of the production of bulk agricultural products and the market determines the derivative functions of agriculture. Although the derivative functions of agriculture must be developed, the government's financial support should be cautious. Second, it is necessary to appropriately predict the prospects of various types of rural settlements, adjust the layout of rural settlements, and realize large-scale continuous farmland management. Through differentiated rural infrastructure and other public service project construction policies, "reverse urbanization" residents can be guided to live separately from professional farmers, so as to increase the concentration of the former and gradually form small settlements in the latter. Finally, it is necessary to establish a land planning and management policy system and operation mechanism with a degree of decentralization and decentralization, improve the predictability of rural land use, reduce agricultural land rent, and make land rent truly reflect the scarcity of all kinds of land. Appropriately merge and integrate the current policy settings of several land protection areas, and strengthen the protection of land related to the production of bulk agricultural products.
Fourth, whether it is possible to achieve no difference in the nature of urban and rural society
The rural revitalization strategy is aimed at the fundamental task of eliminating the dual structure of urban and rural areas and achieving coordinated urban-rural development. Accomplishing this task requires a judgment on policy orientation. The mechanism of coordinated urban-rural development should be defined from the constraints of efficiency, equality and sustainable social development.
1. Efficiency mechanism for coordinated urban-rural development
If factor inputs in different areas can obtain roughly equal marginal rewards, the efficiency of factor allocation can be maximized. Agriculture is a sector of the national economy, and the marginal efficiency of factor inputs in the agricultural sector cannot be significantly lower than that of other sectors for a long time. It is a misconception that agriculture is regarded as a special sector, that there is "necessary leisure" in it, that it is part of an effective working day, allowing agriculture to have low labor productivity. If farmers have to do other non-agricultural work far from home, but sacrifice part-time opportunities for the sake of observing the production of agricultural products nearby, it can be seen as a necessary inefficiency. If there is no unreasonable government intervention in the urban and rural population layout, non-agricultural investors will form a competition for cheap labor, produce an industrial layout suitable for farmers and workers, and establish a mechanism for equal income of equal workers in urban and rural departments.
The understanding of the significance of the existence of smallholder farmers and the promotion of related policies have influenced the formation of these mechanisms. The existence of small-scale farmers is a fact, but there is a certain distortion in the judgment of this fact. In the main agricultural producing areas, especially the main grain producing areas, the actual agricultural operators are professional service households. Farmers with contracted land spend less and less time on agricultural production and become "landside farmers", with elderly families or women "guarding the house". They are not only "pseudo-small farmers", but also "home landlords" who are unwilling to transfer land. The smaller the share of agricultural income in total household income, the more likely they are to become special rural dwellers who guard the land but do not engage in agricultural production.
Real smallholder farmers also exist in large numbers. Some scholars believe that small farmers can bring "external benefits" to society, but in fact, large farms are more likely to adopt circular agriculture techniques than small farmers. The acquaintance society composed of small farmers is not as good as imagined, especially the acquaintance society at the low-income level, which is prone to personal attachment and difficult to protect privacy.
Therefore, it takes a considerable amount of time for smallholder farmers to transform into farmers as a whole, but not because of the longer time and process, the large group of smallholder farmers cannot be solidified.
2. Mechanism for the fair distribution of national income in the coordinated development of urban and rural areas
Efficiency and equality are often seen as a pair of contradictions, but in fact, equality and efficiency are not contradictory if equality is defined by taking into account the input factors that generate income. In conflict with efficiency is egalitarian distribution. Generally speaking, in the primary distribution of national income, that is, in the trading link of the factor market, let the market play a regulatory role, which can ensure efficiency. If the government intervenes, it should also improve the skills of workers through increasing investment in education, and raise the wage level of various industries through industrial upgrading. Other direct interventions in factor prices can undermine economic efficiency.
For the problem of income differences that still exist after primary distribution, it is generally believed that there is no economic equilibrium that satisfies the maximization of benefits. If justice is to be found in the redistribution of national income, other different frames of reference need to be introduced, for example, the "fate of the community" as the basis for analysis. The author tries to propose a "just solution" of national income redistribution and to do a certain extended analysis (see Figure 2).
Figure 2 Equality and efficiency in transfer payments
Suppose that the income of the rich will become the income of the poor through transfer payments from the government. In the process of subtracting one and increasing the utility of both sides, the marginal utility decreases; In the process of reducing the utility of the rich, the marginal utility increases, which is in line with the law of marginal utility. The sum of the utilities of the two has a maximum value, and at this time, the transfer payment rate corresponding to the maximum value is the "equilibrium point" that reflects the interests of society. But this is not really the equilibrium that mainstream economics usually says, because in this process, the maximization of the interests of the rich is not to give money to the poor, and the maximization of the interests of the poor is to transfer all the money of the rich. It can be assumed that in this process, there is a "respect" or "prestige" transaction between the rich and the poor, that is, the poor get money and the rich get fame. This hypothesis actually has a universal reality. But the trade of fame is mostly effective in acquaintance societies, and in large-scale societies, the realization of transfer payments depends on pressure from the state.
The distribution of income between urban and rural areas in China is peculiar. If the conditions for the fairness of the overall distribution of national income formed in theory are used to analyze the problem of urban and rural income gap in China, more factors should be considered, and it is also prone to the problem of orientation. The author's research found that the following three situations are worth noting.
First, extensive mobilization of all kinds of organizations and enterprises to help the poor, there is a problem of soft budget constraints or political constraints. Abstractly speaking, it is easy to directly intervene in the problem of factor market prices, such as Chongqing's "land ticket system", land in different regions, forming the same land ticket price, does not reflect the scarcity of land, but the Chongqing government believes that this is conducive to helping poor people in remote areas. The author believes that the price of land transactions that occur in economic activities should be determined by the market, and the help to the rural poor should be through the redistribution channel of national income.
Second, there is a problem with the mechanism of helping the rural poor get rid of poverty. Charitable and poverty alleviation activities carried out in villages should use the "fame trading" mechanism of acquaintance society, and the rich people who go out of the village should be the main body of poverty alleviation behavior; The general assistance to the poor in the village should be through various social security systems, with the government as the main actor. At this stage, the income generated by the "strengthening of the collective economy" is widely promoted as a source of welfare growth for village residents, but the village does not have a strict budget for public finance, which is actually the performance of "no separation between government and enterprises" in the countryside and should be changed.
The third is how to help the "stubborn" poor farmers scattered in rural areas. There is an absurd judgment in society that associates poverty with specious concepts such as laziness and inferiority. In the vast majority of cases, people will form stereotypes about the poor, and even make up a lot of stereotyped stories to spread falsehoods, format and categorize them. From an evolutionary point of view, there will be no one in the world who regards eating and lazy cooking as a value pursuit. Assuming that there have been such people, they will also face a lot of survival problems, the probability of effective spread of genes is very small, even if the genes are mutated, the elimination mechanism will limit the mutant population to a very small range. Poverty is a relative concept, absolute poverty varies around the world, and relative poverty abounds. There are three situations of poverty: the first is that the average American is richer than Mexicans in general because they are completely absent from a production system, and Americans are in a highly specialized system of social division of labor, able to produce large quantities of goods at low cost, with higher levels of real wages, and Mexico is the complete opposite; The second situation is related to discrimination, such as the reluctance of private enterprises in India to employ low-caste people, according to the law, government departments must employ low-caste people, but usually place them in low-income jobs, this situation has changed in emerging sectors, but it is still very serious in general, and the discriminated population is often not easy to escape poverty; The third situation is related to health conditions, and some scholars have pointed out that the physical pain index of poor people is higher, they do not sleep well, and they wake up more times at night. 17 In addition, the susceptibility of poor people to use narcotic substances is also related to physical condition.
The occurrence of the above three situations can also be traced back to the deep-seated causes. A highly centralized society may be monopolized by a small number of people in various economic resources, fair trade in the market is restricted, the social division of labor is difficult to expand, and ordinary people can easily fall into poverty; The market is underdeveloped, the solidified social hierarchical order is not easily impacted, and the situation of the poor is not easy to improve; Weak social mobility and local bad habits make it difficult for some people to get rid of the disease.
In the third case, the poor population is the "stubborn" population that is difficult to get rid of poverty, they are not suitable for living in the countryside, and the government should arrange them in appropriate positions in the city, but this is not the current direction of poverty alleviation and poverty alleviation work. The correct orientation for promoting the coordinated development of urban and rural areas should be to gradually transform rural areas into areas where three kinds of people live and work: the first is farmers with a relatively high level of specialization, such as farmers; The second is the group of people who work in other parts of the agricultural industry chain, they are no longer farmers in the strict sense; The third is the "reverse urbanization population" that has a special preference for rural areas. The first type of rural residents are suitable for decentralized residence, the latter two types of residents are suitable for appropriate centralized residence, and the size of the settlement should reach the scale that can support the effective operation of basic public service facilities as much as possible.
3. Mechanism of sustainable social development in the coordinated development of urban and rural areas
The so-called "nostalgia" is the feeling of "social friendliness". There are many factors that determine whether "nostalgia" can be generated, and one of them is the population density of a certain space. Chinese scholars have done less research on this aspect, and there is not even a proper translation of "social friendliness" and "nostalgia". "Nostalgia" is originally a public good, but it is becoming the object of "transaction", and the city cannot carry "nostalgia" and has to spend money to "buy" in the countryside. Can we make "nostalgia" a common free item for urban and rural residents? This is also a very important question of orientation.
The living environment of urban residents is too crowded, and it is difficult to generate a sense of "social friendliness". When living too crowded, people's work performance will drop significantly, forming frustration, temperament depression, and loss of creative vitality. The average population density of Chinese cities is not high, but the density of residential areas is very high. The plot ratio conducive to the mental health of residents should not exceed 2, with an average of about 1.5, but it is very common for the plot ratio of Chinese residential areas to exceed 5. It can be seen that there are problems in China's land planning management system, but it has nothing to do with "more people and less land".
The asymmetrical distribution of urban and rural areas of "nostalgia" is a serious problem in the long run, which is the "urban failure" in urban and rural development. To solve this problem, we must deepen the reform of the urban and rural planning and management system.
5. Extend the discussion and conclusions
In the thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution, factors such as climate change, populations migrated, and often wars were triggered. The migration of steppe peoples to agricultural areas is even more bloody history. War is a continuation of politics, and in traditional agrarian societies it is a norm. The agricultural sector concentrates a large population, and the oversupply of labor is difficult to generate demand for labor substitution technologies, forming a low labor productivity trap. After the "enclosure movement", a large number of commons in Britain were developed, privatized, improved the proportion of human land, created a demand for labor substitution technology, and also expanded the industrial product market for the British Industrial Revolution. This is a significant increase in the rural population in the UK, not a process of rural population being driven to the cities. The British Industrial Revolution and its expansion into the European continent produced the largest population migration in human history. This population migration, which did not lead to a war for land, fundamentally changed human history. In countries that have successfully industrialized, the welfare gap between urban and rural residents has undergone a process of formation, widening, and disappearance, which is also a process in which the population leaving agriculture enters the city from slow to fast, and finally gradually slows down. There were also wars after the Industrial Revolution, but wars were no longer related to population migration, and the new population migration was from the countryside to the city. The Industrial Revolution and the successive technological revolutions that have taken place since then have continuously boosted the vitality of cities, the continuous progress of labor substitution technology in agriculture, and the reduction of the relative value of food, laying the material foundation for the formation of a welfare society. Cheap food also reduces human dependence, expands freedom, achieves social transformation, and lays the social foundation for political democracy. The Industrial Revolution internationalized the social division of labor, the markets closely linked different countries, and even reorganized national sovereignty in a tight common market. From this we see the dawn of forming a community with a shared future for mankind.
The above trends contain the basic requirements of the policy choice of contemporary national urban and rural construction. The policy orientation of China's rural revitalization should be to continue to promote urbanization as a benchmark, reduce the agricultural population, and make agriculture an internationally competitive industry. It is necessary to take the integration of urban and rural society as the core goal, rationally arrange the urban population and rural population, establish an urban and rural zoning system with Chinese characteristics, form miniaturized and decentralized professional peasant household settlements, and build a spatial pattern of appropriate concentration of non-agricultural rural population; In accordance with the principle of giving priority to efficiency and taking into account equality, it is necessary to deploy rural public service facilities, and under the premise of a moderate and balanced distribution of various types of cities, professional farmers can share more public services with citizens in cities; It is necessary to reform the land planning and management system, open up institutional space for cities to carry "nostalgia," and enable urban and rural residents to jointly form a "socially friendly" mentality and build a harmonious society.
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Editor's Note:
This article is transferred from: Dang Guoying. Some Major Guiding Issues on Rural Revitalization[J/OL].Social Science Front, No. 2, 2019