Where are the villages in the great changes going?

Over the past 10 years, we have been conducting research in rural areas across the country, and we have felt the great changes in China's rural areas. From 2013 to 2015, the teachers and students of the center used the opportunity of returning home during the Spring Festival to write home notes for three consecutive years, writing more than 60 articles in 2013, more than 100 in 2014 and more than 100 in 2015. Judging from the nearly 300 homecoming notes written by the center's teachers and students for three consecutive years, although everyone's hometown is different, their perspectives are different, and their themes are also different, all the homecoming notes naturally converge into one theme of the times. that is, China's rural areas are undergoing unprecedented changes.

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When reading the hometown notes written by graduate students in the center, I found that these students who were about 20 years younger than me generally felt the great changes in their hometown. Interestingly, their memories of their childhood hometown, that is, the rural situation in the 1990s, were very similar to my hometown when I was a child, reflecting the relatively stable social structure in the rural areas before the 1990s. However, after 2000, it is common for farmers to go to cities to work and do business on a large scale in rural China, and farmers' family income is more and more dependent on urban industrial and commercial income outside the village. The rural young and middle-aged labor force goes to the cities, leaving the old and young sick and disabled in the rural areas, and hollowing out is common.

It is even more persuasive to appeal to the statistics the feeling formed by the fieldwork. In 2000, China's urbanization rate was 36%. In 2014, China's urbanization rate has exceeded 54%. In just over a decade, China's urbanization rate has increased by 18%. In other words, in more than a decade, more than 1% of the rural population has entered the city. they work in cities and earn income from cities, spending most of their time in cities. Accordingly, the rural population is getting smaller and smaller, and agriculture is becoming less and less important to farmers' household income.

At the beginning of this century, three levels of great changes have taken place in China's rural areas. The first level is the relationship between the state and farmers. For thousands of years, the state has extracted resources from rural areas, and the national tax on imperial grain is unavoidable. after 2000, the state gradually abolished the agricultural tax and allocated more and more financial funds to support agriculture. the traditional relationship between the state and farmers, which is centered on collecting agricultural tax, is facing great transformation. The second level is the loosening of the long-term and stable social structure in rural areas, not only the basic social structure of the village based on the family, such as clans, families and other family associations have been impacted, but also the family structure itself is in great changes. The third level is the change of the value and meaning of farmers in the world, the concept of succession has been impacted, why to live, what to do in life, has now become a problem.

These three levels of upheaval certainly did not start suddenly at the turn of the century. Since modern times, China has begun to bid farewell to the traditional society which has been circulating for thousands of years and embarked on the road of great changes. Such a great change has taken place in all aspects, the core of which is industrialization and urbanization. But until the 1990s, 70% of China's population was still living in rural areas, the rural society was still relatively closed, the rural social structure was still stable, and everything seemed to be changing and unchanged. By around 2000, the rural change has reached a critical point, suddenly accelerated, and formed an energy that shocked all observers, so that compared with the great changes in the rural areas since 2000, the rural areas in the past thousands of years seem to have not changed.

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The most remarkable thing about such a great change in China's rural areas is that most of the young and middle-aged people in rural areas leave the countryside. Such a change is the result of farmers' choice. On the one hand, the city has more and more employment opportunities, on the other hand, the system reform provides farmers with a guarantee to go to the city. When farmers go to the cities, the problem of large population and little land in China's rural areas has been greatly alleviated, farmers' income has continued to increase, and rural poverty has been greatly reduced. At the same time, in the current stage of China's economic development, farmers often go to the city only for young and middle-aged families, not for the whole family, because the cost of the whole family going to the city is too high. the income of migrant workers is not enough to support their families' decent life in the city.

According to our survey, about 70% of Chinese peasant families have chosen a part-time family planning model, that is, young children go to cities to work and do business, and elderly parents stay in the village to work. Such a household income model can obtain both agricultural income and working income, while the cost of living in rural areas is relatively low, so that peasant families can have economic savings every year. It is easier to live a life with savings. However, such a kind of part-time ploughing is bound to have left-behind elderly people and left-behind children, resulting in the hollowing out of rural areas, and the social structure that maintained the basic production and life order of farmers began to disintegrate.

For farmers to go to the city, of course, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages for peasant families, and the disadvantages outweigh the advantages for the order of production and life in the village. Coincidentally, the state has begun to transfer payments to rural areas on a large scale since 2000, which has not only provided the minimum security and difficult assistance for the most vulnerable groups in rural areas, but also established a wide coverage of new rural cooperative medical systems and new agricultural insurance for farmers, alleviating the absolute poverty in rural areas. At the same time, the state is also making great efforts to improve rural water circuits and other infrastructure and basic public services.

State investment has solved some of the problems in rural areas, but state investment is not omnipotent. When the traditional power to maintain the basic order of production and life in the village weakens or even disintegrates, and there is no other force to take over, various problems arise in the rural society.

These problems are shown not only in the specific things such as garbage, but also in vicious human competition, disorderly comparison of housing, indifference in interpersonal relations, increasing prevalence of gambling, proliferation of underground religions, and so on. it involves almost all aspects of production and life in rural society. It is these problems that come together, showing a shocking picture of the countryside, touching everyone who works and lives in the city who return home for the Spring Festival.

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There is no doubt that solving the above problems and rebuilding the order of rural life need the intervention of external forces, especially the support of national finance. However, the state can not only transfer resources to rural areas, but also combine top-down transfer payment with farmers' bottom-up demand expression. If resources to the countryside do not improve the organizational ability of farmers, but let farmers form the idea of dependence, the organizational ability of rural areas is even weaker, it is difficult to say that such resources go to the countryside is successful.

China's rural areas are large in scale and vast in territory, and there are great differences between regions. The economic development of the eastern coastal areas is relatively rapid, and urban belts, including rural areas, have been formed. with the influx of a large number of foreign people, the rural areas not only do not become hollow, but become more prosperous. From the perspective of rural areas in the eastern region, a small number of villagers have become rich and become entrepreneurs by setting up factories and doing business; most of the villagers can work locally and earn income to support their families; while migrant workers find it difficult to integrate into the developed coastal areas. they make money in developed areas and are ready to go back to their hometown to spend. In other words, there has been an obvious economic differentiation and social differentiation in the rural areas of developed areas.

The rural economy in the central and western regions is relatively underdeveloped, and there is an outflow of a large number of rural people, and even the whole family goes to the city to stop farming. These farmers whose families go to the city to stop farming will transfer the land to the families who still have to rely on the land for income. As a result, about 10% to 20% of the main income of the total number of farmers in rural areas is in rural areas, where social relations are in rural areas, the family structure is complete, and the family income is not lower than the income of migrant workers. Such "middle peasants", together with the elderly and children left behind in rural areas, form a relatively stable structure, which makes it possible for national resources to go to the countryside and the formation of endogenous order in rural areas.

The state can provide infrastructure and public services for farmers, but it is difficult for the state to solve the problem of "the last kilometer" from state input to the needs of farmers. These problems are common, including the "last kilometer" of water conservancy construction, the "last kilometer" of village roads, the "last kilometer" of agrotechnical services, and so on. They are not mainly engineering problems or state input problems, but the problem of insufficient organization of farmers.

Grass-roots village community organizations are very important because farmers have a large number of household-by-household affairs that are "not good, difficult, and uneconomical". These matters involve not only production and life, but also the style and appearance of the village. The loss of excellent traditional culture in rural areas, poor filial piety, out of control of human competition and other problems, although there is the background of the impact of urbanization and marketization, but the lack of organizational atomization of the village is lack of resistance to these shocks, is also an important reason.

In our research, we found that some rural areas with close kinship can often give a positive response to the rapidly changing social reality, such as reaching a consensus through ethnic consultation, so as to effectively avoid the vicious expansion of human expenditure. This gives us inspiration that the most fundamental thing in rural construction is the construction of grass-roots organizations. Under the background of urbanization, only by organically combining the construction of grass-roots organizations with national resources to the countryside can we respond to the needs of farmers for the basic order of production and life, and grasp the bull's nose of rural construction in the era of great changes!