Revitalising China’s rural regions is Xi Jinping’s next priority
- For President Xi Jinping, a widening urban-rural divide is not helping the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation
- With Beijing having declared victory in its battle of ending extreme poverty, Xi is now replacing it with a grander project of “comprehensive rural revitalisation”
China’s Central Rural Work Conference, an annual gathering for the nation’s leaders to discuss agriculture and areas where many of the country’s poorest residents live, has sent a consistent message over the last quarter century: Beijing values the importance of its vast countryside and the more than half a billion people who live there.
It is a remarkable improvement from 2000 when Li Changping, a rural cadre, wrote in a famous letter to then-premier Zhu Rongji that “our peasants are really suffering, our countryside is really poor, and our farming is in great danger”.
But despite this, the countryside remains a weak link. Per capita income in rural China is around a third of that in urban areas, and retail sales – a rough measure of consumer spending – was just a sixth of that in urban areas last year, even though 40 per cent of the population lives in the countryside.
Many towns and villages are struggling with an exodus of both talent and funds to cities. It is said that, in many parts of rural China, it is an unwritten rule that to get married, the bridegroom’s family must buy a flat in a nearby city.
Xi told the latest Central Rural Work Conference that “if we want to rejuvenate the nation, we must revitalise the countryside”. And as such, Xi said China will exhaust the power of the whole party and the whole of society to make its farming “efficient”, the countryside “good for living”, and the country’s peasants “rich”.
As Beijing declares victory over the battle of ending extreme poverty, Xi is now replacing it with a grander project of “comprehensive rural revitalisation”.
The meeting, however, did not offer any substantial changes to the existing institutional framework in rural China. Land will continue to be owned collectively and contracted to rural households for a very long period of time, while grass-roots governance will be firmly in the hands of Communist Party cells.
As such, China’s rural revitalisation will be about the commercialisation of agriculture, the improvement of public services, and fixing problems such as pollution.
An interesting decision made at the meeting is that Xi has listed grain security as a “political responsibility” for both provincial governors and Communist Party chiefs.
