Accelerating Urbanization Will Villages Disappear in the Process of Urbanization?

Editor's note: The latest statistics show that the number of natural villages in China has plummeted from 3.6 million to 2.7 million in a decade, which means that "300 villages are disappearing every day". "China's speed of urbanization" is causing people to discuss and reflect. So, will the countryside disappear in the process of urbanization? In this regard, we invited two scholars to have an in-depth discussion. This is the twenty-sixth issue of the column "The Struggle" jointly organized by the Shanghai Oriental Youth Society and this newspaper. Rational urbanization will make the countryside better Zhang Xueliang ● The so-called "end of farmers" is actually the "end of small farmers" ● The goal of urbanization should not be the spatial elimination of the countryside ● The fruits of urbanization need to be shared, and the process of urbanization needs to respect public opinion and folklore With the rapid development of industrialization, urbanization and agricultural modernization, some traditional villages have gradually disappeared, which is an inevitable part of historical development. In China, villages include natural villages and administrative villages. Natural villages are villages formed naturally by villagers after a long period of time, and are the most basic part of rural settlements. Administrative villages, on the other hand, are the lowest level of China's administrative system, usually consisting of a large natural village or a combination of several natural villages, with villagers' self-governing institutions such as villagers' committees or village offices. With China's rapid urbanization process and the migration of a large number of rural laborers to cities, the disappearance of some villages is an indisputable fact. Official data show that China's population urbanization rate exceeded 50% for the first time in 2011; according to our calculations, the number of China's urban population increased from 480 million in 2001 to 670 million in 2009, a 34% increase in the urban population. "The End of Small Farming" So will the countryside really disappear? In fact, as early as the 1960s, Henri Mendras, a famous French rural sociologist, wrote a book entitled "The End of the Peasantry," which aroused strong reactions. As the title suggests, Mendras argued that "if the whole society were urbanized, there would be no more peasants". But even what Mendelssohn called "the end of the peasantry" was not "the end of agriculture" or "the end of rural life", but rather "the end of the small peasant". The end of the small farmer". Today, it seems that the agricultural workers in the developed industrial countries of the world have undergone great changes in their mode of production and way of life, but no matter how the society develops, the farmers will not be reduced indefinitely, and the agricultural workers are still an indispensable and important social group of the whole society, which is evidenced by the fact that the rate of urbanization in the developed industrial countries has been staying at 80% for a long period of time. In this sense, the complete disappearance of the countryside and the peasantry is hardly a reality. In China, we have not yet reached the stage of "the end of the peasantry". Statistically speaking, there is no evidence to confirm that 50 or 300 villages will continue to disappear every day in China, nor is there evidence to deny that the disappearing villages may themselves be the most vulnerable individuals in the sample of villages, and that the disappearance of the countryside may only be a feature of this period of history. More importantly, the uniqueness and heterogeneity of each village requires us to do more rigorous research, otherwise we may commit statistical fallacies. We need to look beyond the cold data and pay more attention to where these disappeared farmers have gone? How are they living in the cities? How are the benefits of the disappeared rural land distributed? Have we preserved the traditional rural culture? The quality of our urbanization needs to be improved, the goal of urbanization needs to be considered, the fruits of urbanization need to be shared, and the process of urbanization needs to respect public opinion and folklore. The quality of urbanization is not high One of the main features of China's current urbanization is the co-existence of "hidden urbanization" and "quasi-urbanization" phenomena, and the quality of urbanization is not high. The so-called "hidden urbanization" refers to two phenomena: first, the existence of long-term urban residents who have not yet acquired the status of full urban residents; and second, the existence of a large number of residents who live in the countryside but have been engaged in non-agricultural industries for a long time. The so-called "quasi-urbanization" refers to the fact that many small towns are very small in size and have backward facilities, and that a large number of residents of established towns, although already urban residents, have not yet left agriculture, nor have their living conditions been fundamentally changed. For the former, improving the quality of urbanization mainly involves the citizenship of rural migrant workers, improving the level of basic public **** services for rural migrant workers, solving the problem of their children's education, and really solving the "new dual structure" in the city; for the latter, it also involves the living conditions of farmers "going to the city and getting into the buildings". For the latter, it is also about the living conditions of farmers "going to the city and moving up to the building", and the need to give farmers employment opportunities. At present, the "urban disease" in some Chinese cities is serious, and the phenomenon of "villages in the city" is very common; we must be wary of creating "rural areas" in the cities while eliminating the rural areas. Compared with the urbanization of the population, the excessively rapid urbanization of land is a problem that has given rise to many contradictions. In the past few decades, the rate of land urbanization in China has been much faster than the rate of population urbanization. After entering the new century, the area of China's built-up area increased from 24,000 square kilometers in 2001 to 38,000 square kilometers in 2009, an increase of nearly 60 percent, which is 26 percentage points faster than the rate of population growth in the same period. The construction of industrial zones and open areas, university towns, and new government office buildings are among the important ways of land urbanization. There are many reasons behind the over-rapid land urbanization, with local government land finance being one of the most important, and the damage to farmers' interests being an indisputable fact. Our goal of urbanization should not be to eliminate the countryside spatially, and there are many successful cases of compact urbanization in foreign countries, which are worthy of our reflection. We should pay special attention to solving the problem of fair distribution of rural land interests in the process of urbanization. For peri-urban farmers in developed areas, the core of land system reform is to redistribute the undue benefits of urbanization among local governments, developers and peri-urban farmers, to reform the land acquisition system, and to increase farmers' share of land appreciation benefits. For farmers coming out of the countryside in backward areas, it may be difficult to benefit from current land gains, but we also need to protect their right to benefit from the potential future value and gains of land. The land revenue of the rural areas in the backward regions may not be large today, but it does not mean that the land revenue will not increase in the future in the coordinated development of urban and rural areas. We should not disregard their interests, and we should not allow them to return to their hometowns without a door amidst the wave of urbanization. Revival of Rural Society In the process of urbanization, we need to have more humanistic care and less of the so-called modern civilization's rough encroachment on traditional culture. The roots of China's traditional culture lie in the countryside, and traditional villages retain a rich and colorful cultural heritage, which is an important carrier for carrying and embodying the traditional civilization of the Chinese nation. Due to the imperfect protection system, some traditional villages have disappeared or been destroyed. How to make China's transition from an agrarian civilization to an industrial civilization more natural and healthy, and how to respect public opinion and folklore in rural land development is also an important proposition to be studied. So, what will the ideal Chinese countryside be like in the future? The French countryside described by Mendelssohn gives us some insights. In the 1984 reprint of his book The End of the Peasantry, he elaborated on the astonishing renaissance of rural society, "the countryside is modernized, there are more people again," "today's country people enjoy all the comforts of city life," and agricultural laborers and country dwellers have been catching up with the countryside since 1970 onwards have caught up with the urbanites, in some other respects they retain an advantage (the size of their homes), children in the countryside go to school in buses, in primary and secondary schools they attend classes with city children, the countryside has become completely urbanized in terms of lifestyle, "the urbanites have slipped away from the city at the slightest possible moment", the city also appears to be ruralized. Isn't this the kind of countryside we want? (The author is deputy director and associate researcher of the Center for Regional Economic Research at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics) Traditional Rural Areas are bound to disappear in the process of urbanization Liu Xinjing ● Urbanization will definitely lead to the gradual shrinkage of rural and agricultural space ● China's traditional rural areas and agriculture must be transformed and developed ● The fundamental impetus for the disappearance of traditional rural areas lies in the disappearance of the traditional farmers The disappearance of traditional rural areas and the expansion of urban space are the two sides of the same coin. From 1949 to 2011, the number of cities in China increased nearly sevenfold, and the urban population grew 6.7 times. At the same time, as a container to hold the population, the space of the city has been expanding, with the built-up area of China's cities covering 8,842 square kilometers in 1984 and 41,768.4 square kilometers in 2010, a growth rate of 372%. The continuous expansion of the city means the continuous shrinkage of the countryside, by 2020, China will also have 150 million people from the countryside to move to the city, if calculated according to the urban construction standard of 100 square meters / person, there will also be 15,000 square kilometers of non-urban areas into the urban area. It can be seen that as China's urbanization progresses, the shrinking of rural areas is a general trend. As William Gundry said in Political Arithmetic, industry tends to be much more profitable than agriculture and commerce tends to be much more profitable than industry, so labor is bound to shift from agriculture to industry and then from industry to commerce. Within a limited space, urbanization based on industry and commerce is bound to lead to a gradual shrinkage of rural and agricultural space. Traditional agriculture constrains the process of urbanization Will the shrinking rural areas one day disappear forever? Marx said in Capital that the productivity of agricultural labor that exceeds the individual needs of the worker is the basis of all society, and although the status of agriculture is declining, this only means that the total amount of its contribution is a share of GDP, and that the basic position of the agricultural sector in the national economy will never change, so from this point of view, the countryside will never disappear. However, it is a historical inevitability that large-scale agriculture, represented by machine production, replaces the smallholder economy. Agriculture can also adopt large-scale collective production as industry does, and the latter can provide the larger investment and more material production conditions needed for agricultural improvement, and the small-farm economy, as a "remnant of an outdated mode of production," is "irretrievably heading for extinction. ". In his book Transforming Traditional Agriculture, Schultz argues that traditional agriculture is one in which peasants farm and live the same way for generations, cultivating the same type of land, sowing the same crops, and using the same factors of production and technology year after year, and that it is a stagnant and long-standing small-farm economy that basically maintains simple reproduction. This passage can also be used to describe China's traditional agriculture, "China's sericulture and brewing, planting melons and beans, began in the Shang Dynasty; sowing and fertilizing, deep ploughing, popularized in the Warring States period; taxing, taxing, strong and suppressing the end of the advocate of the early Qin Dynasty; sickle, axe and plough, spade, shovel, hoe and harrow, the first time in the Western Han Dynasty. For thousands of years, the various factors of production and farming methods handed down from generation to generation by farmers have basically not undergone any fundamental changes and breakthrough development". In the context of urbanization, traditional rural areas and agriculture have become the key constraints to China's modernization, and the reality of the problem and the focus of the contradiction requires that China's traditional rural areas and agriculture must be transformed and developed. Rural and agriculture usher in an era of change The first is the problem of resources. Scarcity of land resources and human resources is an important factor contributing to the transformation of traditional rural areas and agriculture into modernization. By the end of 2010, the total amount of arable land in China was less than 1.826 billion mu, close to the 1.8 billion mu red line. Per capita arable land was less than 0.1 hectares, less than 1/2 of the world average and 1/4 of that of developed countries.Moreover, the phenomenon of rough land use in rural areas is still very serious in China, and at present, China's farmers' collective construction land is 168,000 square kilometers, which is 3.4 times more than that of urban construction land. At the same time, in the process of industrialization and urbanization, a large number of rural labourers have moved to the cities and to the secondary and tertiary industries, resulting in the abandonment of a large amount of good land in the countryside, the massive loss of young and strong rural labourers, and the abundance of "hollow villages". The double shortage of land resources and human resources has caused rural economic development to seriously lag behind industrialization and urbanization, and small-scale agriculture is often unable to cope with large markets, leading to problems such as the ups and downs of agricultural prices. Establishing the concept of compact development, transforming the way rural land is operated, and upgrading the modernization of rural areas and agriculture are the inevitable choices to change this situation. Second is the product problem. 2011, China's grain output for the first time jumped on the 1.1 trillion pounds, realized the first half-century "eight consecutive increases", creating a new record for five consecutive years over one trillion pounds, reaching the 2020 food production capacity planning level. But behind this "miracle" is the highlight of food safety issues, such as food, vegetables, fruits and other primary agricultural products in the production process of chemical pollution, such as biochemical technology, large-scale uncontrolled abuse of Chinese people into a "nothing to eat" of the embarrassing situation. The large-scale uncontrolled abuse of biochemical technology has plunged Chinese people into the embarrassing situation of "having nothing to eat. At the same time, over-exploitation and predatory management have led to serious problems such as soil nutrient imbalance, declining capacity to support basic land use, and soil degradation, with "heavy use but low nutrition" and "use but no nutrition". The issue of food security remains a potential threat. Inadequate institutional mechanisms are certainly an important reason for the frequent occurrence of agricultural safety problems, but more importantly, the current mode of production in rural areas and agriculture is no longer adapted to the needs of the development of rural productive forces, the family-based land management mode can not meet the needs of the market, and the traditional agricultural labor practices and technology levels can not coordinate the pursuit of profit and social responsibility between the contradictions. In this sense, the era of change and innovative development of rural areas and agriculture has come, and traditional rural areas and agriculture will inevitably fade into historical memory. Once again, there is the environmental issue. Environmental function is one of the five functions of rural areas and agriculture, but traditional rural settlements are relatively scattered, lacking scientific planning and necessary infrastructure, domestic garbage and breeding waste have not been effectively treated and recycled, some high energy consumption, high pollution, resource and overcapacity projects have been shifted to rural areas, and the abuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides has also seriously polluted the soil and water sources. According to the National Pollution Source Census, there are currently 150 million mu of contaminated arable land, 32.5 million mu of sewage irrigation, and 2 million mu of solid waste stockpiles occupying and destroying fields, with contaminated arable land accounting for more than 10% of the total arable land area, resulting in a reduction of grain production by more than 10 million tons per year, and a direct economic loss of more than 20 billion yuan. From this, we can see that the ecological environment of China's rural areas has been precarious, if the traditional way of production and life does not take a fundamental change, the consequences will be unimaginable. New farmers no longer repeat the life of their fathers Resources, products and the environment compared to the disappearance of the traditional countryside, the fundamental driving force is the disappearance of traditional farmers. As Schultz puts it, "In short, a man bound by traditional agriculture cannot produce much food, no matter how fertile the land. Conservation and hard work are not enough to overcome the backwardness of this type of agriculture." It is an indisputable fact that traditional farmers are no longer adapted to the needs of rural economic development. In contrast, the new generation of farmers after 70, 80, 90, despite the higher level of education, most of them have had urban experience, but it is difficult for them to return to the countryside, even if they go back will no longer repeat the life of their fathers and mothers, and the emergence of the new farmers and continue to grow, will certainly make the traditional countryside completely out of the stage of history, which is the traditional rural areas are bound to disappear the fundamental reason.