Urbanization is not the fundamental way to solve the three rural issues

The reality in China is that although there are more than 0.1 billion peasant laborers in the 0.94 billion peasant population who work in cities, there are still about 0.8 billion peasants living in scattered rural areas. No matter how the country's big cities change, most of the 3 million rural Chinese village communities are still village communities. The small rural community system inherited from thousands of years of traditional culture, as the general economic foundation of the countryside, has basically not changed. Moreover, the local differences in rural areas are very large, can we simply link the economic base of this traditional system of small rural communities directly with the so-called modern rule of law society or modern superstructure, to which even urban dwellers are not fully adapted? Is it possible to copy the current system of developed countries today, and that would achieve the modern rule of law?

If this is the case, then before doing it, please compare horizontally which large developing country with a population of over 100 million in the world has not copied it? But which one has completed industrialization like China? Which is not more than 30% poverty rate, serious or even more than 50%? And no matter how high the per capita income is, most of them are still urban-rural dual structure. The so-called urbanization mainly relies on large slums to concentrate a large number of poor people. The benefits of this copying system are obtained by a few elites and the cost of the system can only be borne by the majority of the people!

For example, in the other four large developing countries in Asia with a population of over 100 million, free elections in the superstructure, multi-party parliamentary democracy, and privatization and marketization in the economic base have long been implemented; scholars, as part of the elite group, have also been able to share the benefits of the system as a "knowing family"; however, as a whole, they have not developed as well as China in industrialization and urbanization in participating in global competition as a nation-state.

The question raised is, as a developing country, what on earth do we want? What on earth do our farmers want in China? The mainstream of today's academic circles is privatization, marketization, liberalization and globalization, which are the so-called "Western-style four modernizations" that have actually replaced the "official four modernizations", or more neutral, industrialization, urbanization, monetization and capitalization. However, even if these "changes" are completed, they may not be able to solve China's "three rural" problems.

Everyone knows that the "four Western-style" can be logically established-only privatization can be marketized; with market-oriented free trade, "commodities are natural equalizers", the new middle class It is bound to demand political liberalization; finally, it leads to global integration. Otherwise, there would not be so many "officials and people" taking these claims for granted.

However, the trouble lies in the fact that the institutional costs that will inevitably be formed in the process of realizing this logic will be transferred to the rural areas, so the difference between urban and rural areas will inevitably increase, and the factors of productivity will inevitably flow out of the "three rural"; of course, there will be Increasingly severe "three rural" issues. In recent years, some people even think that China only needs to copy the American system and everything will be fine. But they ignore a common sense, "China has no farms, the United States has no farmers"-90% of China's land is operated by more than 0.2 billion farmers, and 90% of the land in the United States is operated by 170000 farmers. The reality in China is that the plain area accounts for only 1/8 of the country's land area, and the plain area that matches the four suitable agricultural resources of water, soil, light and heat only accounts for less than 10% of the country's land area. Deserts, mountains and plateaus are certainly not the choice of entrepreneurs to run factories, so industry must be concentrated in the plains and coastal areas, so cities must also be concentrated in the plains and coastal areas, so that agriculture, industry, cities and population are mainly concentrated in the plains and coastal areas. Therefore, the widening of regional differences in China is the result of the constraints of China's economic geography, which is "cascade distribution", rather than the result of man-made or institutional disasters.

Twenty years ago, the author, like many people, also regarded urbanization as the fundamental way to solve the problems of agriculture, rural areas and farmers. He believed that as long as urbanization was accelerated, hukou was opened, and farmers were allowed to enter the city, the problems of agriculture, rural areas and farmers would be easily solved. However, through the investigation of many developing countries, as long as the population exceeds 0.1 billion, it is not found that the urbanization of any country is successful. If China also uses large slums to achieve urbanization, it is just a kind of "spatial translation and concentrated poverty"-the scattered poor population in rural areas becomes a relatively concentrated slum population-the result is often a concentrated outbreak of social contradictions.