Cities no panacea for all rural ills
(Shanghai Daily)
Updated: 2006-03-14 09:30

Who are the winners or losers at the Mahjong table is a good way to start a conversation with suburban residents who were formerly peasants but have recently been urbanized.

For many ex-peasants who have a secured livelihood (thanks to increasingly generous relocation compensations) but do not have proper employment, this game supplies them with an occupation.

I am sometimes surprised at the lack of moral judgment among locals with regards to gambling, for gambling is considered a cardinal sin in traditional Chinese culture. The urbanization has freed many from the tyranny of the soil, as life is no longer a backbreaking struggle to wring something from the farmland, but the sudden change of social fabric and the availability of leisure have left many disoriented.

Still, on the whole Shanghai farmers are the envy of the nation. They are accorded virtually all the social benefits deemed worthy of any Shanghai urbanite.

But in many other places in this country of sharp urban-rural dichotomies, we are less sure of what urbanization really means. The rapid economic growth has come at a price, which includes the amount of farmland turned to commercial use.

And does urbanization apply to the over 100 million migrant peasants, mostly in the prime of their life, who choose to leave their home to work in cities as construction workers, garbage collectors, security guards, restaurant waitresses or other employment deemed menial by urban folks?

What is encouraging is that recently there have been growing discussions of urbanization - its full implications, its Chinese relevance and its limitations.

According to Wen Tiejun, a senior professor of Agricultural Economics at Renmin University, it is impossible to totally urbanize Chinese peasants (about double the combined labor forces of all developed countries) without resulting in numerous urban slums, continuing rural deprivations, and a host of other untoward social repercussions.

Wen, a scholar in rural issues known for his emphasis on field studies, has recently been much in the limelight, not least because his debunking of the urbanization myth and advocacy for rural reconstruction seems to be in agreement with the New Countryside Construction concept as set out in detail in China's 11th Five-Year Plan.

Wen's basic proposition is that after nearly one century of industrialization, China has reached a stage when industry should give back to agriculture.

Wen believes it is financially possible for the industrial sector to help reinvigorate the countryside because China has experienced robust growth in recent years.

Before 1997 China's financial revenue was less than 10 percent of its GDP, now it is approaching 30 percent. At this level the State is fully capable of investing generously in public goods in the rural communities, specifically in the rural infrastructure and social security.

Ultimately, when the rural-urban nexus becomes a mutually enhancing interaction, Wen envisions a society of harmony where rural villages are idyllic retreats far from the hustle and bustle of the city.

The peasants would all use traditional farming methods, preferring manure instead of chemical fertilizers, thus able to repay urban support by supplying them with much healthier organic foods. Not surprisingly this would be characterized by some as a Utopia.

Probably anticipating such critique, Wen conducted a living experiment by launching the James Yen (Yan Yangchu) Rural Reconstruction Institute in Hebei's Dingxian County (later renamed Dingzhou City) in 2003.

The institute offers free training sessions to farmers and volunteers who, following two weeks of training, will return to their home villages to initiate local countryside reforms.

Though it is too early to predict the outcome of Wen's efforts, what he is doing is probably already illuminating policy makers.

Wen is encouraged that in a recent Party document, for the first time in ten years, peasant cooperative organization is again mentioned.

Lacking adequate village-level organizational coordination, any reform initiatives will be seriously compromised. Worse, as grassroots organization weakens, the spaces thus vacated are quickly filled up by strong family clan forces or local upstarts.

As a matter of fact some villages are beginning to think of recollectivizing themselves. Xiaogang Village in neighboring Anhui Province is often cited as a precursor for reform when in 1978, confronting certain starvation, some families risked imprisonment by shifting to family-based farming at a time when communal cultivation was the only form acceptable.

Now after experiencing years of stagnation in farm production, village leaders are considering recollectivization.

Exactly how rural organizational reform will pan out remains anyone's guess. But one thing is clear: Village cooperatives hold the key to common prosperity in the countryside which is unlikely to be made richer simply through urbanization.