The Destiny and Watch of villages in the process of urbanization

Mencius said, "death does not leave the countryside, and the countryside is in the same well." If you go in and out of each other's friends, watch and help each other, and support each other with illness, the people will be close to each other. " This is an accurate portrayal of the production and life style of rural China for thousands of years. On the other hand, the village can be said to be the comprehensive carrier of carrying, recording and reproducing this traditional farming civilization. General Secretary Xi Jinping said that "remember homesickness", its roots and context come from the "village". However, since the beginning of the new century, the rapid urbanization of our country is attacking the ancient villages with unprecedented strength, and the number of natural villages is decreasing by nearly 200 every day. While a large number of "new villages" have sprung up, villages are neither villages nor cities. They not only lose the "watermelons" of excellent rural culture, but also fail to pick up the "sesame seeds" of modern urban civilization. In this context, what kind of village we need to build is indeed a major issue in front of us.

From March 31 to April 4, a group of four of us went to Chengdu, Ya'an and Meishan in Sichuan to conduct a special survey on village construction.

First, what kind of village is built?

What does it look like to build the countryside? What is the modern and upgraded version of the new countryside? Through the construction of "new rural complex" and "new village settlement", Sichuan has transformed and upgraded traditional villages and protected historical and cultural dwellings. At the same time, it has also actively and steadily explored the construction of new villages. Many of its ideas and practices are enlightening and worthy of summary.

On the morning of April 2, we investigated two villages in Pixian County, Chengdu, Zhanqi Village in Tangchang Town and Anlong Village in Ande Town, both of which are newly built villages formed by dismantling and merging courtyards. Now Zhanqi Village, as a pilot village for the construction of a new rural complex in Sichuan Province, is a new rural community formed by more than 400 scattered farmers. Into the village, a small farmhouse high and low scattered, the village road winding, clean and tidy, front courtyard and backyard melons and fruits and vegetables luxuriant, full of spring. Along the way, we chatted and learned that at the beginning of the new construction, Zhanqi Village also learned from the city, intended to build an urban community, and put forward the clear requirements of "community gardening, farmers' residency, recommendation not to grow vegetables, flowers not to grow melons." However, shortly after moving in, the villagers spontaneously turned the soil near their homes to grow vegetables, and at first the village committee organized people to stop or even pull out vegetables. However, when the villagers pulled up in the morning and the villagers planted again in the afternoon, the contradiction became more and more serious. After a heated discussion at the villagers' meeting, the village finally complied with public opinion and agreed to this practice, requiring only flowers and trees to be planted near the main road, while melons and vegetables were allowed to be planted in front and back of the house and in the courtyard and backyard. This makes us feel strongly that if village construction loses its rural characteristics and peasant interest, it will eventually be unpopular with farmers and will fail sooner or later.

Anlong Village in Ande Town, the level of village construction is not bad with Zhanqi Village, but the scale of the village is relatively small. Anlong Village is the result of Chengdu's "small-scale, group-style, ecological" characteristic residence project in western Sichuan in recent years. Small scale, that is, it is required to respect the law of village form, "gather when it is appropriate to gather, and disperse if appropriate", and do not seek perfection in the scale of the village. Anlong Village has planned 10 new peasant communities, with the number of people at each point ranging from 50 to 400, and the smallest is only 39 from 11 households. Group type, that is, it is surrounded by one or more courtyards of different sizes, showing a group layout, which is not only properly concentrated, but also relatively independent. Ecologicalization, that is, fully relying on forest plates, water systems, farmland and other ecological elements, residential houses are naturally scattered in the villages, preserving the natural and beautiful ecosystem and pastoral scenery. Although Anlong Village and Zhanqi Village are new rural communities, their courtyards depend on each other, melons and vegetables are green, old trees are surrounded by forests, and the local flavor is rich. Comrades of the Provincial Committee of Agriculture and Industry who accompanied us told us that when grasping the construction of new villages, Sichuan placed special emphasis on preserving the front and backyard of residential houses and striving to show the unique pastoral landscape of rural areas, the sound of chickens and dogs, the fragrance of flowers, melons and vegetables, and explicitly asked not to engage in reinforced concrete worship. The more green space in front and behind the house, the better, and the less hardening and blackening outside the village, the better. On the way, they also introduced to us the practice of "micro-garden", that is, to build small vegetable gardens, small orchards, small tea gardens and small fish ponds in the front and backyard to develop courtyard economy. These ideas and practices have touched us deeply, vaguely feeling that this may be a "return to nature" after the development of urbanization to a certain extent, and may be an "ideal appearance" for the construction of new villages in the future.

On the afternoon of April 2, we visited several villages in Dujiangyan City, Chengdu, Heming Village and Huangjia Courtyard in Liujie Town, and Rongjiayuan (Natural Village) in Daqiao Village, Chongyi Town. Heming Village is a newly built village, while Huangjia Courtyard and Rongjiayuan Village are the transformation and upgrading of the original village. It is accidental to go to Huang's compound to investigate. After seeing several new village demonstration sites in succession, we wondered to ourselves whether this is just a "model opera" in Chengdu, and what about other general villages? We asked the comrades in Dujiangyan how much and what proportion could the newly built village have? Comrades in the city told us that it only accounts for about 1/10 of the total number of administrative villages in the city, which means that the vast majority of villages are still in the original form. After seeing Heming Village, we temporarily decided to take a look at the Huangjia compound, an old village nearby. The neatness of the Huang courtyard really surprised us. The house is still the old house and the road is still the old road, but it just feels a little different. There is no plastic film or scrap of paper on the road, and there is no smell of livestock and poultry manure and rotten leaves in the air. The renovation of the Rong courtyard is also very characteristic. One of the old houses has built a "thatched cottage style" gate with bamboo grass, which has now been transformed into a comprehensive activity hall, and tourists come here to drink tea and eat here in an endless stream during the holidays. After seeing these villages, we were extremely impressed by the cleanliness, cleanliness, freshness and elegance of Chengdu's rural areas. it can be said that it is not uncommon for villages to be built like this in all parts of the country, but to clean up the appearance of villages to this extent, many places are far from it.

On April 3, we also investigated Shangli Ancient Town, Yucheng District, Ya'an City, and Hongxing Village, Liujiang Town, Hongya County, Meishan City, which are two ancient villages with a history of thousands of years. Relying on the natural beauty of "misty Rain and Liujiang" and the cultural heritage of "Millennium Liujiang", Hongxing Village combines the construction of new countryside with the development of rural tourism, and pays special attention to the careful protection of ancient village style and traditional dwellings in the construction of new village. In Hongxing Village, a river runs through the village. a leisure sidewalk has been built in the village. the sidewalk is built along and across the stream. there are prominent tourist signs on both sides of the road and clean and sanitary public toilets are built by the roadside. A huge old banyan tree with numerous branches and leaves reflects an old house, and the golden sign of the "Ancient Banyan Inn" is looming, just like walking through time and space in a painting. When we got over it, we thought about what a sin it would be if such villages disappeared in our generation. Where can I find the memory of history? What does the cultural homesickness depend on?

After seeing these villages, we feel that it seems impossible to generalize how and how the villages are built. At present, villages can be classified into three categories: one is the "ancient village" with a long history and culture, the other is the original "old village" in the general sense, and the other is the "new village" that has been planned and built at the new site in recent years. Different types of villages, their construction ideas, priorities, practices should also be different. The construction of the new village focuses on "construction". First of all, in the basic concept, village construction can not simply copy the urban community to the countryside, can not build the countryside into a low-level replica of the city, we must do everything possible to preserve the rural pastoral scenery, farm taste, rural culture. Secondly, in terms of planning and design, village planning should not only conform to the natural characteristics such as the texture of landscapes, the mechanism of roads and the geography of forest fields, but also have the comfort and convenience of production and life enjoyed by modern urban civilization. Third, in the residential construction, we should fully reflect the national characteristics, regional characteristics, rural characteristics, not only to achieve the overall style of roughly unified, but also to avoid sameness, should achieve the appearance style, color style and other diverse, scattered. The construction of the old village focuses on "reform". We cannot tear down all the rural areas and rebuild them again. After all, the newly built rural areas are in the minority. It should be said that the main way of village construction is to take the road of transformation and upgrading. The transformation of the old village is not only to "wear boots and hats" and change the appearance of villagers' houses, but also to introduce some practices of building new villages in the aspects of concept, planning, and house construction, and pay attention to upgrading and transforming rural public infrastructure and optimizing and beautifying the appearance of the village. make life more convenient and the village more beautiful. The construction of the ancient village focuses on "protection". The ancient village is the precious heritage of our rural civilization. An ancient village is a historical museum and specimen collection that integrates landscape culture, architectural culture, garden culture, celebrity culture, food culture, folk culture and so on. In the future, old houses, forests, buildings and trees in rural areas should be carefully protected and strictly protected as wealth rather than a burden.

Second, who does the village depend on?

Where is the house built? What does it look like? Who will build it? How do you supervise it? What about the old homestead? How to divide the new house and how to adjust the contracted land? The construction of a village, especially the newly-built village, involves very specific contradictions. If there is something wrong, it may bury the root of rural social governance, and even become the fuse of rural mass events. The practices of Sichuan, Chengdu and other places resonate with us, and the core principle they follow is to "really let farmers make the decisions."

While investigating in Heming Village, we suddenly saw a dilapidated house standing in the middle of a new house, which was very eye-catching. We asked: what's going on? The comrades accompanying us told us that at the beginning of the implementation of the project, the family thought that the village would take his family's homestead, and they also had a house in Chengdu, so they firmly did not agree to participate in the project. The village agreed to the family's request and did not touch their house. "now they regret it," added the accompanying comrade faintly. We feel that building a new countryside and respecting the wishes of farmers may affect the progress of the project in a short period of time, but allowing "flower arrangement" to exist can minimize the hidden dangers of contradictions, and the ultimate benefits are also obvious.

In the process of implementing the project, Anlong Village fully adheres to the dominant position of farmers and does not engage in "administrative orders and making decisions on behalf of the people." First of all, it is up to the villagers to decide whether to participate in the project; second, the specific implementation of the project is managed by the villagers themselves, and the planning and site selection, household design, construction team selection, quality and safety supervision and other issues are all decided by the farmers themselves; finally, the capital accounts are also calculated and managed by the villagers themselves.

Chengdu also introduced the working mechanism of the villagers' council and the villagers' council into the construction of the new village. On April 1, when we conducted a survey in Hefengshui Village, Alnquan Town, Chongzhou City, Chengdu, we learned that this village encourages farmers to establish "three associations and one society" by democratic election, and independently implement the collective land comprehensive consolidation project, so as to build a village-level governance mechanism. They set up a joint council, focusing on solving the problem of cross-group and cross-administrative village discussion in the construction of a new village; establishing an autonomous committee for safeguarding rights, and the masses hired legal advisers to focus on solving the problem of legitimate protection of rights; established an owners' committee, focusing on solving the daily supervision problems in the new village project; and established a land share cooperative, focusing on solving the problem of the main body of land consolidation. The practice of Hefengshui Village has really made the people live in peace of mind, have a clear account, and have a real sense of trust in the government. At the same time, Chengdu has widely promoted the construction concept of "small group students", adopting various ways such as unified construction, joint household construction, and unified self-construction, which has also given farmers full autonomy, choice and decision-making power.

Third, how to get the funds for village construction?

To do a good job in village construction, lack of funds is the key bottleneck. The construction of villages is a big project. Not only water, electricity, roads, gas and other infrastructure construction funds are in great demand, but also private housing construction is a large investment. Where does the money come from? Judging from the practices of Chengdu, Ya'an and Meishan, there are various channels for government subsidy, villagers' financing and market financing.

During the discussion in Wangjia Village, Baizhang Town, Mingshan District, Ya'an City, comrades in the district told us that Mingshan District is planning to carry out the construction of 89 new village sites, and it is initially estimated that the infrastructure investment will cost 300 million yuan, which does not include the housing construction costs of the villagers. Wangjia Village is a "new village". The types of households built in the village are 3-person households and 5-person households for villagers to choose from. The construction cost of 3-person households is about 160000 yuan, and that of 5-person households is about 200000 yuan. It can be seen that if we add the construction cost of farmers' houses, the construction of villages, especially the construction of "new villages", the demand for funds is huge.

On the bulletin board of construction funds in Anlong Village, we can see that a total of 244 million yuan has been invested in the construction of Anlong Village, and there are three sources of funds: increase or decrease of linked target transaction fees, project funds, and farmers' self-financing. After the collective construction land saved by dismantling and merging institutions has been restored, 426 mu are used to increase or decrease the link, which is close to 150 million according to the government's collection and storage price of 350000 yuan per mu, accounting for more than 60% of the whole source of construction funds. In addition, the government subsidized 48 million yuan for infrastructure construction, and the villagers raised some of it by themselves, with a per capita self-financing of about 14000 yuan. It can be seen that in the new village construction, although there are many ways, such as government subsidies and villagers' self-financing, obtaining the land value premium through the increase or decrease is the main source of funds for the current new village construction. In the use of funds, Anlong village residential construction cost 176 million yuan, accounting for more than 70%. This also shows that the capital demand for the construction of new villages is mainly in the construction of new dwellings. We have learned that not only Anlong Village, Zhanqi Village, Heming Village and other newly built villages are generally the same as the sources and use of funds.

However, the policy of linking increase to subtraction is not in Turin everywhere. Mingshan is a mountain county and agricultural county, "industry is weak, tea is good", the primary market demand for land is not exuberant, and the price of land is not high. The land index saved by the increase and decrease hook is only more than 30,000 yuan per mu, but the cost of land reclamation is more than 60,000 yuan per mu. Therefore, there is little room for the implementation of the linked policy. During the discussion on Shuxin Farm in Bifengxia Town, Yucheng District, Ya'an City, comrades in the district also told us that due to the inability to link the increase and decrease of land, there is a lack of funds for the construction of new villages in the district. We feel that once we cannot "increase or subtract", it will be very difficult to afford a large-scale project such as the construction of a new village. this situation is common not only in Ya'an, but also throughout the country.

In addition to the three types of funding sources in Anlong Village, there are also some social funds invested in rural construction. But generally speaking, this kind of funds is relatively small, and it is often aimed at villages with special advantages, such as places with great potential for the development of rural tourism, especially some villages with ancient village development resources. We know that Hongxing Village has attracted 300 million yuan of social capital to participate in the new rural construction with the model of BT, BOT or BOO, and completed the public infrastructure construction of the village mainly with enterprise investment. The financing method of Hefengshui Village is also a new exploration, and this village is also a settlement of a new village. they use rural collective construction land to invest in shares to form land joint-stock cooperatives. the cooperative then mortgaged 36 million yuan from the collective construction land saved by its members to the bank, which solved the problem of where the money came from in the construction of the new village.

The village needs money not only for construction but also for maintenance. To build a beautiful and livable village, it seems more important to keep it clean and tidy. We learned in Heming Village that last year, 2.5 million yuan was spent on the management and protection of the village's infrastructure and the maintenance of the village's environmental sanitation, of which 800000 yuan was paid by the villagers themselves, and Chengdu gave each village 400000 yuan for social construction every year. Chengdu has relatively strong financial resources, and there is plenty of money to invest in social undertakings in rural areas, but in mountainous cities like Ya'an, the situation is much worse. During the discussion in Mingshan District, the comrades in the village reflected to us that up to now, although Ya'an has a plan to give 100000 yuan to each village and city and 200000 yuan to the district, it has not yet been allocated and implemented.

IV. Some preliminary thoughts and judgments

Like urban construction, village construction is an important theoretical and practical problem that must be faced in the process of modernization. Through the field investigation of many villages in three cities in Sichuan over the past few days, and through discussion with many grass-roots cadres and farmers, we have formed some basic judgments and preliminary considerations on the issue of village construction.

1. About the trend of village change. Under the background of rapid industrialization and urbanization, with the large-scale transfer of rural population, more and more farmers enter the city and become citizens, which indicates that the village layout structure and rural social form of our country are undergoing profound changes and drastic changes. Now, we can see the following trends: first, the "hollowing out" of traditional villages will continue to develop, and the countryside on the outskirts of the city will be quickly incorporated into the urban territory. the rural population in rural areas and mountainous areas will gradually gather to new rural communities and central villages, and it is an inevitable trend that some villages gradually disappear and the number of villages is decreasing day by day. Second, after a period of synchronous and rapid expansion of urban and rural construction land, with the implementation of the urbanization strategy with population urbanization as the core, it may now be entering a turning point, which indicates that the future urban space expansion will be accompanied by the compression of village space, and the growth rate of the total construction land occupation will gradually slow down until it is basically stable. Third, the process of integration of urban and rural development will be accelerated, rural infrastructure and public services will gradually look like cities, and large-scale village construction, village transformation and village renovation will be carried out step by step.

2. About the planning of village construction. In village planning, we cannot simply copy the urban community model and turn the countryside into a scaled-down version of the city. To carry out village planning, we should take cities and counties as units, according to the concept of the positioning of the main functional areas and the unified planning of the whole region, around the regional leading industries, formulate an overall plan for the construction of county villages, and combine the specific functional positioning of each village. draw up a village construction plan, build when it is appropriate to build, change if it is appropriate, and protect it if it is appropriate, so as to take measures according to local conditions and treat it differently. In village planning, we should take the convenience of farmers' production and life as the basic basis, respect the traditional rural structure, farmers' way of life, and local ethnic habits. Village construction should be large, small, small, gathering, scattered, and not forced to live in concentration, still less can farmers be forced to "go upstairs." The government plays a leading role in village planning, and it should contribute money and efforts, but it is the farmers who live in the village after all, and farmers must be fully consulted in village planning.

3. About the construction and transformation of the village. Now we can see that some places have the conditions for village demolition and reconstruction, and farmers are willing to take advantage of the situation to guide and promote it. But for most areas, village transformation and village environmental renovation are still the top priorities. In the words of farmers, "so that the wives in the city can stay in the village and stay for a few days." In the final analysis, village construction and village transformation are still the peasants' own business. it is up to the peasants to decide whether to build them or not, how to build them, and what they will build. When the government does good deeds, it must also satisfy the peasants, and it must not be offside, be thankless and spend money to complain.

4. About the funds for village construction. Village construction requires a lot of investment, infrastructure and public service facilities, the government should invest, the government should make up, but mostly to build houses, but also rely on farmers to get their own money. According to the investigation in Sichuan, the construction of new villages includes post-disaster reconstruction, poverty alleviation and relocation, and bundling various funds for rural construction, but the most important thing is the "land ticket" (the transfer of funds linked to the increase or decrease of urban and rural areas). For example, a village can save more than 300 mu of construction land through village demolition and land reclamation and consolidation, and more than 100 million funds can be obtained after the index is transferred, which depends on government investment and farmers' financing, which is very difficult to achieve. There are many disputes and different understandings about the policy of linking the increase and decrease of land. We believe that, objectively speaking, "increasing or decreasing" has some advantages, especially for the rural areas of most rural areas and remote mountainous areas, they may never be expropriated or urbanized. By linking the increase and decrease, we can share part of the land value-added benefits brought about by urbanization and obtain construction funds in advance. At the same time, through the reclamation of old villages, we can increase a part of cultivated land and improve the level of intensive and economical utilization of rural collective construction land to a certain extent. The problem now is that the management of "increase, decrease and pegging" is somewhat out of control, the implementation scale is blindly expanded after approval, and those without approval are also promoted without approval, and the consequence is that the national annual index of construction land exceeds the macro-control target. And no one can tell how much it has exceeded. What is more, some local governments engage in "increase or decrease" under the banner of new rural construction. In fact, they want the target of land for urban construction, forcibly demolish villages and merge villages, and force farmers to go upstairs, thus giving rise to a series of social problems. Instead of doing so, it is better to increase the annual index of construction land in a practical and realistic manner, and correspondingly expand the index of increasing or decreasing the turnover of construction land, so that all construction land will be included in the annual construction land index management, so that the dark box operation under the table will become the sunshine behavior on the table, and the "increase or decrease hanging" will be promoted in a standardized and orderly manner. If the major policy is temporarily difficult, we should at least pay attention to a few points: first, we cannot transfer the indicators out of the county; second, we cannot engage in real estate; and third, the money sold by the indicators must be basically used for the construction of new villages.