Rural construction is a possible way out to avoid economic crisis

On the morning of October 26, Wen Tiejun, a famous expert on agriculture, rural areas and farmers and director of the Rural Construction Center of Renmin University of China, delivered a speech entitled "China's hundred years of Rural Construction-- gradually understanding the objective World in Local practice" at the scene of the "Human thought" Conference in Beijing. it systematically combs another road in the process of China's modernization over the past century: the history of Chinese rural construction with autonomy and local reconstruction as the core.

Wen Tiejun, who is 64 years old this year, has always stressed in his academic orientation that intellectuals come out of their study, put aside their prejudices and devote themselves to the investigation and construction of practical problems in China. He has proved his attitude with his own practice: the township construction center of the National people's Congress, which he presides over, has 200000 volunteers and more than 10 rural development projects.

Wen Tiejun intends to take a development road different from radical modernization, and the theoretical self-confidence behind it comes from the rural construction experience left by the rural construction sages over the past hundred years, and from his whole set of political and economic understanding of China's development mode.

De-radicalization: the Exploration of Development in the era of Economic crisis

At this stage of development, which is currently known as "the rise of China", it is still "today's you and me repeating yesterday's story". Today, China is facing the overproduction crisis of the capitalist world in 1933. There are two reasons why the crisis has not happened yet: one is that China completed the unification that Europeans craved so far during the Qin Dynasty. A huge continental country can shift its excess production capacity to inland construction, which is why the state put forward the idea of "two vertical and three horizontal" and "five vertical and seven horizontal" at the beginning of overproduction in the late 1990s. Even today's "Belt and Road Initiative" and the establishment of the Asian Investment Bank to shift the production capacity of surplus industrial production to inland and even the capital construction of Central and West Asia all stem from this line of thinking.

This idea is quite similar to the new nationalism in Roosevelt's New deal. In the 15 years since it suffered from overproduction in 1998, the country has invested about 15-20 trillion. Because of its narrow territory, Taiwan or South Korea can no longer transfer their excess production capacity to their own infrastructure, so they can only transfer to the mainland. The mainland absorbed overproduction from a variety of other small economies, which lasted for 15 years.

The next way to continue to maintain is urbanization, transforming hundreds of millions of rural people into urban people, and artificially expanding the city as a huge capital carrier, which is our development strategy today.

The problem is that overproduction in the West eventually created an economic crisis and led to war. World War II destroyed the production capacity of all overproduction countries on the small semi-island continent of Europe, and the victors of World War II were the countries with the advantage of a vast continent: the United States and the Soviet Union. Since then, the cold war order of duopoly geopolitical monopoly has been formed. this framework is still continued by our whole ideological and theoretical circle today, and it is difficult to break through.

Even if you use cold war ideology and post-cold war ideology to give some specious explanations to the history of the second half of the last century, can we continue to cross the river by feeling the stones in the future? I can't. Because there is a vast ocean of finance ahead.

Finance is liquid and derives concentration and short-term. This "new three natures" is consistent with the parasitism of the "old three sexes" proposed by the capitalist critics at that time, which leads to decay and dying. Financial capital can be settled in 0.6 seconds, and every online transaction of financial virtual capital can be calculated in milliseconds. Its high mobility leads to the defeat of any real economy, resource economy, and natural economy in front of it-because it takes too long, no matter how short the real economy is long.

At the stage of overproduction, the last stone we touched was Roosevelt's New deal. After World War II, the United States accounted for more than 60% of the world's gold and could issue global currencies. And does China have the conditions to follow the globalization dominated by financialization? Take a look at Asia, whether it is South Korea, Japan, or our brother Taiwan, none of them can walk in.

Asia is an aboriginal continent. When the West was promoting colonization, only a few small economies were colonized in Asia, and only the Philippines was completely colonized in Asia, which was colonized for 400 years. Japan is still 100% indigenous, and the entire Korean peninsula is 100% single nation. China, India and the South Asian subcontinent are all indigenous peoples. The so-called modern system can only be established if the indigenous population of the United States and Australia is less than 5%. Young friends, our generation has a dream, and it's not easy to wake up, so don't go down the road of our nightmare. Feel the stones to cross the river, so far, how to deal with globalization and financialization? A small number of elite friends have given away their wives and children with green cards in their pockets. They are naked businessmen, naked officials and naked professors. But not everyone can send themselves out. What about those who stay?

As a result, during this century of radicalization, some less radical people have tried to take an alternative path-the century-old rural construction that accompanied China's formation of national sovereignty.

Before the 1950s, China was only a traditional continental country that had no governance ability and was destroyed. After 1950, it was a sovereign country with no serious negative externalities after three land wars.

What is the negative externality of sovereign states? Developing countries are stuck in the bottleneck of development, often because most of their countries are formed by transactions when they form sovereignty, resulting in the possession of economic resources to maintain sovereignty by multinational corporations. This negative externality makes the cost of maintaining sovereignty a transaction process, and it is high-cost to support the so-called modern regime, such as the parliament, the presidential system, the national defense system, the western system of higher education and so on. Today, more than 1/3 of the finances of most modern developing countries, which are regarded as cases, are given by the sovereign state, which is either given or collapsed, and the condition is obedience. Therefore, the reason why most developing countries cannot get up is that they did not go through a tragic revolution when they formed their sovereignty. After China's revolution, its sovereignty was once de-externalized.

One hundred years of rural construction is the practice of saving the nation beyond the history of radical struggle. At the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China, the traditional state power disintegrated, but the Republic of China tried to copy the stage in which the western regime could not be established, the etiquette collapsed and the rural society declined. In the same period, there were top-down national salvation thoughts, such as industry, education and science and technology. The rural construction, which advocates the citizenization, is precisely from the bottom up, and it is classified as "other national salvation practices" in the "Road to Revival" exhibition of the National Expo.

Since the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China, there have been about three times of rural construction in history:

The first time was the cooperation between the government and the people. In Zhaicheng Village, Dingxian County, Hebei Province, at the end of 1904, the country gentry maintained autonomy in the face of chaos; in the 1920s, under the circumstances of infighting among warlords and local separatist regime, the weak central authorities acquiesced in local separatist forces to invite social forces to resolve the lack of rural governance; the baojia system, which was pushed by the government, turned into inferior gentry and Japanese aggression in 1937. After World War II, the government of the Republic of China built the West China Experimental area, which was the last rural construction experiment established by intellectuals. In the early rural construction school, Yen Yang Chu went into exile, Lu Zuofu committed suicide, Tao Xingzhi died of illness, Liang Shuming was equivalent to the Rightists, but Huang Yanpei was spared.

The second time is the official-led rural construction. In 1950, we achieved the same small-scale peasant economy as Dabao today, and the decentralized society was unable to resist any deprivation of capital. When the people's Republic of China was founded in 1949, it was national capitalism economically, but in 1953, it was state capitalism, which was from the primitive accumulation of private capital to the primitive accumulation of state capital. In this process, highly scattered small farmers have the problem of transaction costs, so it is inevitable to form the organizational construction and system construction of the local society led by the state.

In the 1930s, what the rural construction school was doing, such as what Yen Yang Chu of Chongqing was doing with dollars, Yan'an was actually doing the same. It is nothing more than cooperatives as the carrier to achieve good governance in rural areas. Therefore, by the 1950s, the people had been widely mobilized and good governance could naturally be achieved, and it was almost impossible to find any developing country in the world that could mobilize the whole people. You note that China has the highest employment rate of women in the world, and as a result of the institutional heritage, the employment rate of women today is still as high as 84%, the highest in the world. In fact, it is only because your grandmothers took part in the literacy class to liberate women. When a revolution that can get property for free is accepted by most petty bourgeoisie, everyone is mobilized.

The organizational construction formed in the 1950s lasted until the 1970s when the primitive accumulation of industrial capital was basically completed. After entering large-scale production, it is no longer necessary to extract and accumulate from agriculture, and large-scale dry work has been restored in rural areas. Purely from the perspective of property relations, there is no essential difference between what Mao and Deng did.

The third time is a new round of rural construction movement with the folk as the main body since China joined the WTO in 2001. After this, we will analyze the historical background and experience of the first two rural construction movements in China.

Cost transfer and Rural Autonomy: the political and Economic basis of Rural Construction

At the end of the Qing Dynasty, the Westernization Movement failed, the private economy of the Republic of China failed, and finally turned to the four families. The excessive cost of industrialization and urbanization is transferred to the local society, which destroys the local society. The gentry in the traditional rural society can no longer play the role of protective brokers, which leads to the inferior gentry, so there are many rural construction movements based on the idea of rural autonomy. During the period of the Republic of China, there were more than 600 groups and more than 1000 experimental areas in rural construction, which is a large-scale figure.

In the early period of the Republic of China, a group of government officials realized that they had to save the people from water and fire, so they resigned and went back to their hometown to do rural construction. One of the more famous is that the first is Sun Faxu, secretary of interim President Li Yuanhong, who discovered the model of Zhaicheng Village in Dingxian County and promoted it throughout Dingxian County. In the third year of the Republic of China, Dingxian became a model county for village governance. In 1904, Zhaicheng Village was already a village of 2000 people, and now it is a large village of 5000 people. 2000 people are already the size of a city in the West, so what he has achieved is localized autonomy within a certain range.

Sun Yat-sen's secretary was Huang Zhanyun, secretary of the Kuomintang Fujian Provincial CPC Committee. He resigned and went to Yingqian Village of Changle in Fujian Province to merge two surrounding villages and use all the proceeds locally for rural autonomy. Feng Yuxiang's adjutant also achieved village-level autonomy in Xinyang, Henan Province, which can be regarded as a success in this three-regardless area, but he was assassinated because he offended the influence of the local military family.

The Nantong experimental area in Zhang Jian's early years can be called "the success of county governance". Similarly, Lu Zuofu's Beibei experimental area can be called "the success of town governance", which is a completely localized process. All the so-called industrial benefits formed in all areas are used for local social welfare construction, educational construction, capital construction, and so on. Liang Shuming's experiment in Zouping is the success of village governance, which is a governance experiment at the county-town-village level.

The shopping street that Huang Zhanyun did on Changle is also very similar to what we do today, except that his income is kept locally and is not occupied by capital. Today, many of our local governments set up office halls with multi-functions integrated into one. Liang Shuming did this a long time ago in the 1930s. He worked in the joint office of the township government, and all the departments were concentrated in one office, so don't let the common people run so many Yamen.

Mr. Mizoguchi has a famous analysis explaining the rural construction during the Republic of China and the system construction after the founding of New China. He said that although Mao and Liang were opposed to each other on the fundamental question of whether there was a class revolution in China. However, in the situation of the establishment of a new China, the two roads showed coordination because two straws were twisted into a rope. Liang Shuming later clashed with Mao Zedong on how much residual contribution the cooperative organization made to the city, but before that, they agreed on the issue of land reform in Yan'an. Liang Shuming had a long talk with Mao Zedong in Yan'an on how to maintain a social existence different from that of the western class society.

There was a very important background in the background of rural construction at that time, that is, the golden decade of the national government left two problems: one is that the primitive accumulation of capital can not be deprived of the outside, but can only be deprived of the countryside. Industrial and commercial capital and financial capital destroyed the local society. On the other hand, after the outbreak of the great crisis, there was an outflow of silver from China, which led to the silver crisis. the government of the Republic of China had to give up the silver standard and switch to the legal currency system, which made the economy from deflation to inflation. Coupled with the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, China traded all its limited precious metals with the United States for military assistance, China's inflation continued until the Golden Voucher reform failed again, the whole Chinese finance collapsed, and the modernization in the sense of the government completely failed in 1948. The army, without pay, was ruined and destroyed, and was seized of power by the Communist Party in the guerrilla way.

Most developing countries are faced with an economic crisis after gaining power, and the regimes resulting from revolutions are often short-lived. How did China solve the problem? What do the peasants want in the peasant war? Divide the land. So 88% of the peasant population went home to farm, eating and drinking; the new regime only needed 10% of the 12% of city dwellers. If a car carries a load, it will be able to use the surplus of agricultural products to feed the urban population. what is it that nine people can't support one person? It is precisely not the modernization that saved China, but the return of the traditional local society to the small-scale peasant economy and saved China, which was in crisis in 1949.