Op-Ed Contributors

Debate: Urbanization

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-29 07:52

China is urbanizing at an unprecedented pace, with over 43 percent of its population, or 560 million people, already living in cities today. But what does it all mean for employment and rural culture? China Daily's He Bolin interviews three academics for readers their views.

Xiao Jianzhong: Don't let rural culture die out

As China's urbanization drive intensifies, agricultural society faces a threat. Urbanization doesn't justify destruction of rural culture, says Xiao Jianzhong, an expert with Hangzhou Academy of Social Sciences.

Xiao is most worried about what will happen to rural culture in the swelling urbanization tide. Will policymakers treat it as expendable in making way for urbanization?

Rural culture has always played a significant role in China's history. Many experts say rural culture could be swept away by the wave of urbanization. This makes it all the more important for the government to take necessary steps to preserve rural culture. In fact, the government has to strike a harmonious balance between modernization and an agricultural economy, which is at the core of the country's cultural ethos.

China's rural population is and will continue to be huge despite the industrialization and urbanization drives. China cannot move ahead if its huge rural population is stuck in the past. These people cannot be ignored, nor can their culture be allowed to die an untimely death.

The culture that has grown around farming is at the core of Chinese civilization. This has happened over thousands of years. Since Chinese civilization is basically agricultural, many cultural forms and concepts, - from harmonious society to belief in the unity of human beings and nature - are closely tied to rural areas and their mode of production and lifestyle.

It is important to preserve rural culture and maintain its development to keep Chinese civilization from dying out. It is also vital to maintain a common spiritual home for all Chinese people.

History shows the more diversified a civilization, the more creative are its people. Even in the US, the most advanced industrial society, rural culture has played an most inspiring role. It has helped in the drafting of its constitution with principles like freedom, equality and individual liability. It is rural culture that shaped American arts, from literature and theater to films and music. It has helped produced classics like William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. It has inspired Woody Guthrie, Huddie Leadbelly, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan to create their immortal music. And it has created personalities like Paul Robeson.

Efforts made to protect China's rural culture and traditions are bound to pay off. They will enrich Chinese civilization. The urgency to do so has increased because of China's march toward urbanization.

Rural culture can be protected in two ways: by building cultural heritage museums and by earmarking cultural and ecological preservation zones. But museums display objects that cannot be preserved. Cultural and ecological preservation zones, on the other hand, can preserve the originality and integrity of rural culture. The problem is that such zones cannot be expanded to cover all village cultures around China.

That brings us to two other possible ways of preserving rural culture.

The first is to introduce the concept of cultural economy to rural areas, making villages financially more self-sufficient. They will thus need little or no extra space, energy or infrastructure to preserve their culture and fall prey to industrialization and urbanization.

The second is to encourage more urban people to settle down in rural areas and try their hands at farming. In fact, more and more city-dwellers are rushing to the countryside to relax and breathe the fresh rural air. If more urban people settle down in rural areas, facilities such as water and electricity supply, transportation, social welfare service and medical care in rural areas would improve by leaps and bounds. This, in turn, would help rural culture not only to survive, but also flourish.