China's "Farmers" are returning to the essence of "occupation"

China's "farmers" are returning to the essence of "occupation" they represent, and increasingly lose the meaning of "identity" in the traditional context. It can be said that the traditional Chinese concept of "farmer" is changing.

From the class division of "scholar, peasant, industry and commerce" thousands of years ago to the current household registration distinction between "agriculture" and "non-agriculture", in a sense, Chinese farmers are not just "people who take agriculture as their profession".

With the gradual deepening of China's new urbanization and household registration system reform with people as the core, and the gradual construction and cultivation of modern agriculture and new agricultural operators, farmers in the traditional sense will gradually enter the new historical stage as citizens, and the farmers who operate agriculture will no longer be a party in the dual structure of urban and rural areas.

Nearly 300000 rural residents in Deqing County, Huzhou City, Zhejiang Province, on the east coast of China, together with the remaining nearly 140000 non-agricultural residents, have been uniformly registered as "Zhejiang resident hukou" since September 2013.

The change of a few figures in the thin household registration book is behind the filling of the gap in the treatment of registered urban and rural residents, and the bridging of the historic huge gap between urban and rural dual structure.

After Deqing unified urban and rural household registration, the minimum living security for farmers was changed from 80% of the standard for urban residents in the past to a unified standard, and low-rent housing and affordable housing were changed from a single guarantee for urban residents to covering all registered residents in the county.

Uncle Cai, a 64-year-old farmer from Zhongguan Town, Deqing County, was involved in a traffic accident in April 2013 and received only 51539 yuan in compensation according to the standard of agricultural hukou. After the local household registration reform, according to the unified standard for Zhejiang residents, Uncle Cai received more than 90,000 yuan in compensation.

Wu Jinhe, a staff member of the urban and rural restructuring office in Deqing County, said: "the implementation of household registration reform has opened a channel for the citizenization of the rural population and is the basis of urban-rural integration."

It is estimated that nearly 400 million farmers in China will be citizenized by 2030.

The proposal of the 13th five-year Plan, which guides China's construction and development in the next five years, proposes to deepen the reform of the household registration system and promote the whole family of the transferred agricultural population capable of stable employment and living in cities to settle in cities, and have the same rights and obligations as urban residents.

The "opinions on further promoting the Reform of the Household Registration system" issued by the State Council at the end of July last year clearly pointed out that we should establish a unified household registration system in urban and rural areas and abolish the distinction between the nature of agricultural hukou and non-agricultural hukou. The basic date for the establishment of this new household registration system is set at 2020.

Zhao Chenggen, a professor at the School of Government Management at Peking University, said that this means that China's urban-rural dual household registration system, which has been in place for more than half a century, will officially end five years later.

After the founding of New China, in order to realize national industrialization in a relatively short period of time, China implemented the policy of agricultural subsidy to restrict the flow of rural population into cities, and the dual system of urban and rural areas was gradually formed and continuously strengthened.

In a specific historical period, this urban-rural dual household registration system has played an important role in promoting economic development and maintaining social stability. however, China's constantly improving market economic system requires equal exchange and balanced allocation of urban and rural factor resources. the goal of building a well-off society in an all-round way requires the coordinated development of urban and rural areas and the benefits of development to all citizens.

The 13th five-year Plan proposed to promote the coordinated development of urban and rural areas. We will continue to encourage industry to feed agriculture and cities to support rural areas, improve the system and mechanism for the integration of urban and rural development, and promote the equal exchange and rational allocation of urban and rural elements and the equalization of basic public services.

Analysts say that Chinese farmers will not maintain a gap with the non-agricultural population in terms of employment, education, health care, social security and housing in the future. The word "farmer" will gradually peel off the "discriminatory" meaning of its welfare status and become a concept of occupation.

China is still the largest developing country in the world, facing the tremendous pressure of feeding a large population, while the problems such as the restriction of agricultural resources and environment, the imbalance of production structure and the low quality and efficiency of development have become increasingly prominent. There is an urgent need for China to change the mode of agricultural development and promote agricultural modernization. The realization of agricultural modernization requires not only the guidance of new agricultural operators, but also a team of high-quality professional farmers.

Zheng Fengtian, deputy dean of the School of Agriculture and Rural Development at Renmin University of China, said that agricultural modernization can not only solve the problem of food security and ensure the growth of grain output, but also liberate the rural labor force. so that it can be involved in a new type of industrialization and urbanization.

The 13th five-year Plan proposes to construct a policy system for cultivating new types of agricultural operators and to train new types of professional farmers.

China is speeding up the cultivation of new types of agricultural operators, such as family farms, professional large households, farmers' cooperatives and leading enterprises in agricultural industrialization. In the process of improving the level of intensive, large-scale, organized, socialized and industrialized agricultural management, a number of new professional farmers and high-quality new agricultural producers and operators are emerging as the times require.

The Yanting station of the "post-80s" is a farmer in Yinjia Village, Jijia Town, Jiutai District, Changchun City, Jilin Province. After graduating from technical secondary school in 2002, he began to grow grain with two small agricultural machines and 10 hectares of transferred land. The year before last, he registered and established the Greenfield Home Family Farm and began to operate on a large scale. The land turnover increased to 50 hectares, and agricultural machinery expanded to 9 sets, basically realizing the whole process of mechanization.

Different from his parents and even grandparents, Yan Tingzhan's title of "farmer" is the result of voluntary choice. Such professional farmers will be engaged in agricultural production in the future, but enjoy the same treatment rights as urban residents.