Читать книгу Rural Finance in Poverty-Stricken Areas in the People's Republic of China - Xuechun Zhang - Страница 15

Industrialization and urbanization should become an organic part and an important development phase in establishing a new countryside. Given the PRC’s vast territory and the sharp differences in economic development among different regions, the building of a new countryside is bound to start first in more-developed regions. Customarily, we use the word sannong to describe countryside-related issues, but such a generalization risks blurring the policy focus. Roughly categorized, the issues of agriculture, rural areas, and farmers occur in three different regions of the PRC, requiring the adoption of individual strategies suited to the characteristics of these regions.

In most coastal regions, the core sannong issue is the transformation of rural areas. Most coastal regions have gone through the industrialization phase, so they have a high proportion of nonagricultural labor and well-developed small townships. The building of a new countryside in these areas should focus on urbanization. An appropriate mechanism of land turnover should be created to encourage farmers to voluntarily leave their land and become new urban dwellers. The building of a new countryside has entered this final phase in certain mature regions where farmers not dependent on land represent a certain percentage of the total population.

In the central regions, the core sannong issue is about agriculture. Again, the key to building a new countryside is to encourage more farmers to move out of the agriculture sector and become migrant workers or new city dwellers—urbanization. At the same time, land is increasingly concentrated in the hands of skilled farmers, which prevents agricultural production from fluctuating due to the migration of labor and also forces industry to nurture agriculture through subsidized scales of production, increasing agricultural income. This marks the intermediate phase.

Most coastal regions have gone through the industrialization phase, so they have a high proportion of nonagricultural labor and well-developed small townships

In western regions, the issues of sannong center on the issues of farmers. To a large extent, subsistence guaranty depends on fiscal transfer. At the same time, the government can use mandatory education and vocational training to help farmers find jobs in nonagriculture sectors. These regions are in the primary stage of the building of a new countryside.