Rural Revitalization With Chinese Characteristics

China's practice of draping a brightly decorated capitalist blanket over a socialist skeleton is evident in the Rural Revitalization Plan (2018-22) released September 26.

China's Rural Revitalization Plan aims to designate land for agricultural, residential, forest and ecological uses, upgrade infrastructure, housing, and farming, clean up pollution, protect the environment and create a scenic countryside.

The sprawling 36,000-character Plan is a little more than twice as long as the "Number 1 Document" that laid out the Rural Revitalization initiative earlier this year, yet this "Plan" includes a similar stream of general statements with few details and only a few minor new items. The Plan has great ambitions to overhaul the countryside--to make it richer, cleaner, more scenic, more ecologically balanced, and more closely integrated with cities.

In some ways the plan is similar to the 1958 "Peoples Communes" and the 1970s "Learn From Da Zhai" campaigns that also offered ambitious plans promising a modern, industrialized, idyllic and orderly countryside. This Plan digs up the bones from those earlier plans and will use them as the socialist skeleton for 21st-Century Rural Revitalization: village collectives, state farms, state-owned enterprises, supply and marketing cooperatives, rural credit cooperatives, model farms, and state-owned enterprises are all endorsed as core actors in this year's Revitalization. This time, a stream of pop-capitalist buzzwords learned from experts in Boston and Brussels are glued on the socialist skeleton: industrial parks, high-tech, "smart" farming, industry chains, alliances of companies and cooperatives, profit-sharing, innovation, multifunctionality, geographic indications, ecology, rural tourism, etc. All this is propped up by communist party arrangers and dealmakers and brought to life by a steady i.v.-drip of subsidies into the blood vessels.

The rural revitalization also includes a mash-up of Leninism and Chinese nationalism: there are exhortations to practice "socialist core values," strengthen "rural morality," revive rural culture, to respect the communist party and to respect parents.

Sixty years ago, the "Peoples Commune" movement offered a vision of an idyllic, carefully-ordered, self-sufficient rural community that included farming, grain storage, a militia, industry--many of the same principles in this year's "rural revitalization" plan.

The Plan is much broader than agriculture--it covers rural industry, tourism, sanitation, housing, ecological balance, rural governance, even rural culture, morality, integrity, and a "toilet revolution." But "food security" is declared as a "class one issue." The Plan aims to achieve a delicate balance of simultaneously opening the agricultural economy to the world while upgrading its domestic agricultural sector and forging links between farms, processors, input suppliers and service providers. The Plan's preamble says it presents great opportunities, but worries about prominent risks in international trade. Improving the competitiveness of China's agricultural products and strengthening risk management are identified as "urgent tasks."

The Plan calls for creating an open agricultural economy and improving international competitiveness of China's agricultural products. It includes an "action plan" to upgrade exports of specialty agricultural products. Specifically, it hopes to establish 300 or so specialized agricultural export regions and create a set of "China No. 1, World Famous" agricultural brands by 2020. The Plan aims to upgrade and expand the system of State Farms and turn them into globally competitive food conglomerates. Plans for an open economy include cooperation with "Belt and Road" countries and encouraging Chinese companies to invest in agriculture abroad. The Plan also hopes to boost China's R&D capacity in agricultural technology, set up S&T parks, technology-sharing platforms, and alliances to create world-leading agricultural technology companies.

The Dazhai Commune was the model for a campaign during the 1970s. It also envisioned an idealized vision of farms, housing, mechanization, water projects, and rural abundance.

"Risk management" items will tighten control over imported farm products. The Plan calls for improving biosecurity, strengthening border control, standardizing enforcement of animal and plant inspection and quarantine measures, and cracking down on smuggling of agricultural products.

At the core of the Plan is an exhortation to make massive investments in land that no one really owns. Opaque village collectives are to remain the main owners of rural land. Chronic problems of blurry property rights, disputed boundaries, absentee collective members, and de facto control by clans, business chieftains and criminal organizations will be cleared up. These organizations will be transformed into benevolent share-holding cooperatives that will lease out collective property to businesses infused with integrity and Confucian ethics, who will give villagers priority for jobs as hired hands, will generate a guaranteed fat stream of profits and distribute them to villager/shareholders.

Rural households are supposed to be the main participants in farming, but the plan calls for forming new-type agricultural businesses by carving out usage rights to farmland that can be consolidated and leased out to "family farms," farmer cooperatives, and agribusiness companies via rural land rights exchanges. Villagers' rights to land will be extended to give them more certainty about control of land. Banks will be cajoled into making loans to these new farming businesses on the basis of vague use rights to land they have sub-leased from the opaque collectives. Agribusinesses are expected to issue loan guarantees to banks on behalf of the farmers they purchase commodities from.

Business moguls are expected to invest in land that can only be used for the purpose prescribed by planners in the crazy quilt of zones laid out over the countryside. The plan calls for "scientifically delineating" space for urban, ecological, agricultural land use, and urban fringe development zones. There are "red lines" for protection of cultivated land, ecological protection, and coastal biological resources. No less than 103 million hectares of "permanent farmland" will be shielded from development by 2020. There will be 67 million hectares of "high-standard" fields by 2022.

An earlier 5-year plan's division of the country into seven major farm production regions and belts for specialization in 23 commodities is endorsed by the Revitalization Plan. The plan reiterates another plan to delineate zones where livestock and poultry are banned, limited, or encouraged that was introduced in the 2006 Livestock Law but ignored until 2013 when the communist party was embarrassed by 10,000 dead pigs floating into Shanghai's River. Land will be set aside for agricultural industry parks, science and technology parks, and innovation parks. Land will be designated for residential use, but villages will be consolidated. Small, marginal villages in areas with poor land and subject to "natural disasters" will be abandoned while important villages will be upgraded.

The plan regurgitates existing programs to use cropland more efficiently to achieve "a degree of self-sufficiency" by "stabilizing rice and wheat production," shifting land from corn to hay and minor grains in marginal regions, and coordinating development of livestock with fodder crops and pasture. The plan calls for firming up production in key cotton, oilseed, sugar, and rubber-producing regions. Exhortations to develop villages and towns specialized in particular commodities, developing brands, and improving quality and safety are not new. An industrialized aquaculture industry will gradually displace wild-catch fishing. For many initiatives the Plan relies on "model farms"--a mainstay of communism since the 1950s.

The plan envisions that China's farmers will need a steady intravenous drip of subsidies. The Plan promises to devise a mechanism to steadily increase government spending on agriculture. Fixed asset investment will be steered toward agriculture, including a set of major "foundational, long-term, influential" projects that will address weaknesses in agricultural infrastructure.

The Plan says subsidies will be better targeted, more precise, and "green." They will be steered toward the scaled-up "new-type" farmers. Subsidies will continue for shifting corn land to fodder crops, rotating corn with beans and minor grains, and setting up livestock farms to demonstrate the collection and utilization of waste. Machinery subsidies will be given for ecological equipment, large tractors, and other new priorities. One of the few new ideas is a promise of government policy support to help agribusinesses form profit-sharing links with farmers and possible government injections of funds into cooperatives and other organizations secured by cropland or forest property rights.

The corn reserve procurement system will be "improved" and subsidies for "marketized" purchasers of corn will be improved. The Plan also makes vague promises to "improve" or "rationalize" minimum prices for rice and wheat, subsidies for soybean, cotton, oilseeds, and sugar. It promises to reform state-owned grain enterprises, build up "backbone" enterprises, and attract new enterprises to the grain market. New initiatives include pilots for cost and income insurance for rice, wheat, and corn growers, and pilots for weather index, price index, and loan guarantee insurance.

Chinese leaders know they have taken on a tough task. They are attacking deep-seated problems that have led to atrophy of the countryside. In contrast to the frenzied campaigns of the 1950s and '70s, this plan's concluding text acknowledges that rural revitalization is long-term, difficult, and requires patience. The plan's authors anticipate that agricultural and rural modernization can be achieved by 2022 in developed coastal regions, the outskirts of big cities, and in villages with a strong collective economy. It might take until 2035 on the "main battlefield" on the outskirts of medium and small cities and small towns, villages on plains and hills. Efforts need to be focused precisely on the more difficult regions where modernization may not be achieved until 2050: old liberated areas, minority areas, border regions, and villages where it is difficult to consolidate fields.