Agricultural Modernization Should Be the Modernization of "Agriculture, Countryside and Farmers"

I. two basic social functions of agriculture in China

From a macro point of view, China's agriculture undertakes two basic social functions.

The first is the reproduction function of peasant families. This function is the most basic function. If this basic function remains stable, then our rural society can maintain a good order. The function of family reproduction can be simply summarized as relying on the village for production and life.

One is that the villagers rely on the village to live. With the development of agricultural society for thousands of years in history, villages have become the basic form and unit of rural society in our country. Even in modern times, this basic form of rural society has experienced the strong impact of various revolutionary movements. As a community, the village has a rich and complete political, economic, social and cultural system after a long period of historical precipitation. Politically, the village has formed its own authoritative identity, socially and culturally, geography, consanguinity and interest all constitute the villagers' social relationship network, and economically, land is generally distributed within the village. all kinds of production work is also completed within the village. In terms of these aspects, land is the core element of the integrity of the village. only when the farmer has his own land in the village can he live a complete life in the village and have a sense of existence and belonging in the village. In this respect, Chen Xiwen is keenly aware of this. He believes that China is a typical country that carries out agricultural production in a village way, so agricultural production has sociological significance. It is conceivable that if the connection between the village and the land is completely cut, then the lives of farmers are bound to be greatly affected.

The second is that the villagers rely on the land for production. Traditionally, land is the main source of income for farmers, so land is the most important means of production. At present, in most parts of the central and western regions of China, the income from land still occupies an important position. With the development of modern economy, similar to the experience of other countries in the world, China's agriculture has also shown an obvious trend of concurrently, so the income of farmers generally includes two pieces, one is the agricultural income of the middle-aged and elderly farming at home, the other is the income of young and middle-aged migrant workers, and the rural areas have formed a family income model of half-work and half-farming based on the intergenerational division of labor. Such a mode of half-work and half-ploughing will last for quite a long time. The reason for this is that China has a large rural labor force, and most of them lack basic skills training, and the young and middle-aged workers who are absorbed into the secondary and tertiary industries can only receive low remuneration, and their income level is not enough to maintain family reproduction. This forces them to rely on the agricultural income of middle-aged and elderly parents to increase the total income of the whole family, which Huang Zongzhi calls "institutionalized 'part-time farming' over-intensive agriculture". Therefore, as long as China's rural labor force has not been greatly reduced, as long as the elements of rural labor force can not be allocated to a higher level of secondary and tertiary industries, then villagers will have to rely on rural land for production.

The second is the supply function of agricultural products of the whole society.

Entering the modern society, the proportion of agriculture in the national economy is decreasing. At present, the agricultural output value of our country accounts for about 10% of the whole GDP. However, agriculture is not only a basic industry, but also a strategic industry. The foundation of agriculture is not solid, and the building of the whole national economy will be shaken. Especially for China, a country with a large population and extremely scarce land resources, the basic strategic position of agriculture is particularly prominent.

The main function of agriculture is to provide agricultural products to the society. The existing cultivated land in China is less than 1.9 billion mu, and it is decreasing every year with the advance of urbanization. In this extremely limited arable land, the first thing is to ensure the country's food security. In recent years, with the state's attention to agriculture, rural areas and farmers and the increase in investment, China's grain output has historically achieved ten consecutive increases, but with the continued economic and social development of our country and the change of grain demand structure, generally speaking, China's grain supply shows a tight and increasing trend. As China's huge grain consumption can not be solved through the international market, how to improve the output level of China's agriculture is extremely critical. From a national point of view, it wants to maintain a high rate of land output, thereby ensuring the level of total land output. However, in recent years, the phenomenon of part-time agriculture in China is becoming more and more obvious, especially more and more part-time households with non-agricultural income, which do not pay attention to agriculture because of the low proportion of agricultural income. as a result, the land multiple cropping index is reduced or even abandoned. It is obvious that the faculturalization of agriculture in China will continue to develop and deepen. If the country does not take effective measures, it will threaten the food security of our country. In addition, China's agriculture should not only ensure a higher self-sufficiency rate of grain, but also supply more adequate agricultural and sideline products, which also need a certain area of land for production. The total area of cultivated land in our country is so large. The proportion of non-grain crops and food crops in cultivated land also needs to be roughly controlled by the state. Therefore, from the perspective of the social attribute of agriculture, agriculture is not only the individual economic decision-making behavior of farmers, but also requires the state to control and regulate the production of farmers.

From the above analysis, we can see that Chinese farmers need to rely on village life, rely on village land for production, it is precisely because of the existence of village and land, they are able to complete family reproduction. At the same time, farmers also assume the social responsibility of supplying agricultural products to the whole society through agricultural activities. although the right to the use of land belongs to farmers and can be used freely, from the point of view of being beneficial to the country as a whole, we must also accept the corresponding regulation and control of the state. These two basic social functions of agriculture in China are not only interrelated but also contradictory, in other words, agriculture, rural areas and farmers depend on each other and restrict each other. From the perspective of farmers, especially small farmers, they live in rural areas engaged in agricultural production to complete family reproduction, agriculture, farmers and rural areas are inseparable, while from the national point of view, the main consideration is how agriculture serves the development of the country and society, although there is tension between the two, but must not be neglected.

II. The tendency of agricultural emphasis in China's agricultural modernization at present

After the distribution of land to households in the 1980s, a two-tier management system based on the household contract responsibility system was established in China's rural areas. the design of this system tries to achieve two goals, one is to protect the dominant position of the family, to improve farmers' enthusiasm for agricultural production, and the other is to solve the problems that individual farmers can not do well or difficult to do through village collective economic organizations or internal cooperation. In other words, it is necessary to achieve a certain degree of "unification" on the basis of family management. It should be said that this system design took into account the dual requirements of the actual situation in rural areas and the long-term development of agriculture at that time. However, in the process of practice in most rural areas, the function of unification has been continuously weakened or even basically lost, and China's agriculture has, in a sense, returned to the era of traditional small-scale peasant economy. The decentralized management model of small farmers has brought a series of disadvantages to the agricultural production of our country. For example, small farmers are often divided but not well combined in the process of production, and the dilemma of collective action leads to a great increase in production costs; small farmers' demand for new technology and knowledge is limited, and it is very difficult for agricultural technology services in counties and townships to effectively dock with them. it is not conducive to the long-term progress and development of agriculture; in a market economy, small farmers are simply unable to dock with the market and lack the ability to negotiate, not only can not increase profits, but are often impacted by market risks.

Obviously, the fundamental way to solve these problems is to improve the scale of agricultural operation. And advocating moderate scale operation is precisely one of the core meanings of agricultural modernization. Only when agricultural management reaches a certain scale, then agricultural mechanization, new technology and new varieties can be popularized on this basis, and fine land management can not be achieved. To implement the policy formulation and implementation of the local government is to vigorously promote the industrialization of land transfer. In recent years, large farmers, family farms, agricultural companies and other new agricultural operators have appeared in various places, which can be regarded as the performance of this way of thinking. Judging from the practice in various places, the scale operation currently being promoted has indeed achieved some results, such as solving the problems of small farmers' production cooperation and how to connect with the market to a certain extent after scale operation. there is an obvious performance in popularizing new technologies and new varieties to control chemical fertilizers and pesticides, as well as relying on capital investment to replace labor, the over-dense agricultural model has been broken, and labor productivity has been greatly improved. For example, through policy subsidies, the government encourages new agricultural operators to improve the multiple cropping index, so that the total output of land can be increased, which is conducive to ensuring the country's food security.

However, there are many problems in the centralized management of land. First, local governments and new agricultural operators tend to have a tendency to operate on a larger scale. Once they exceed the appropriate scale of household management, the productivity of land is mostly declining, which undoubtedly runs counter to the national policy goal. The second is the resettlement of the surplus labor force, mainly the middle-aged and elderly labor force in the village. although they can get land rent, they have lost the opportunity of agricultural labor, and they are either forced to go out to work or can only be completely idle at home, which has actually broken the mode of part-time farming based on the intergenerational division of labor, and the family reproduction mode of farmers is facing challenges. The third is to break the integrity of the village structure, after the large-scale or even overall transfer of land, the village loses the function of production and only the function of residence, and the rhythm of life in the village is also thoroughly disrupted. the behavior pattern of farmers and the social order of rural areas are adjusted accordingly. Taking the author's investigation in Xiaogan, Hubei Province as an example, after the implementation of the whole group of land transfer in the village, farmers' sensitivity to land rent has been greatly enhanced. The big farmers in the village were forced to quit agriculture and choose to go out to work because they could not afford the rising land rent, while the elderly in the village had nothing to do all day. Although they had land rent, they could not compare with their income when they were farming. Most villagers feel that their welfare level is lower than before. The above problems can be seen in a large number of dominant or recessive resistance behaviors of many farmers in the process of land transfer.

With regard to the current practice of actively promoting agricultural modernization throughout the country, the government, especially the local government, attaches importance to the positive effects brought about by large-scale operation of agriculture, but does not pay due attention to the above-mentioned problems caused by it. Either it is simply that a small number of farmers do not have high consciousness, or even if there are problems, they are also small problems in development. The author believes that, as implied by the slogan "Agricultural Modernization" itself, it obviously looks at the problem from the perspective of agriculture, talking more about agriculture but less about farmers and rural areas, and has an obvious tendency to pay more attention to agriculture. From the government's point of view, agriculture is first of all to ensure the country's food security, and agricultural modernization is an inevitable trend, so it is understandable in a sense that it is biased towards agriculture. However, we need to clearly understand that China's agricultural modernization is not only impossible to bypass farmers and rural areas, but also depends on them to a large extent. If it is an one-sided pursuit of agricultural modernization and then a single soldier rashly advance, then the effect is likely to be counterproductive, in this respect, both history and reality provide enough lessons.

Third, we must comprehensively consider the issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers in China's agricultural modernization.

Most of the farmers are the biggest national conditions of our country, and our country will maintain a large rural population in the next few decades. Since the reform and opening up, with the rapid economic and social development, China has experienced a rapid process of urbanization, and the urbanization rate has been greatly improved. According to the survey data of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China's urbanization rate in 2011 has exceeded 50%, which is the first time in thousands of years in China's history that the urban population has exceeded the agricultural population. However, when the urbanization rate reaches an all-time high, we have to see that the level of urbanization in our country is far from enough. On the one hand, from a horizontal comparison, the urbanization rate of our country is not only much lower than that of developed countries, but also lower than that of many developing countries; on the other hand, from an internal point of view, the quality of urbanization in China is still in the primary stage. This is mainly reflected in that although China counts more than 200 million rural migrant workers as the urban population, only a very small number of these people can really gain a foothold in the city. They live an "urban-rural" amphibious life, and their parents, wives and children still live in the countryside and do not go to the city. Assuming that these people are removed from the urban population statistics, then China's urban population still accounts for only about 35% of the national population.

Some people say that the fundamental reason why a large number of migrant workers can not be transformed into real urban people lies in the urban-rural dual structure left over from the planning system of our country. According to this view, farmers participate in urban construction to serve urban residents through their own labor force, but because of their non-urban hukou status, they can not enjoy the same treatment as urban residents (for example, different pay for equal work, lack of social security, etc.). Therefore, in order to improve the level of urbanization in our country, the key is to crack the dual structure of urban and rural areas. Objectively speaking, the dual structure of urban and rural areas has indeed hindered the development of urbanization in China to a great extent, and it is becoming more and more unjust in this increasingly open society. However, the removal of all kinds of welfare discrimination tied to household registration does not mean the rapid reduction of China's rural population. what should be faced squarely is that because of China's huge population base and large rural population, coupled with all kinds of uncertainties in the process of economic development and urbanization, China's urbanization will be an extremely long process, and it is even likely to face challenges that countries in the world have never had before, even optimistic predictions. After a period of time, the real urbanization rate of our country has reached 70%, and our country still has a rural population of five or six billion. And this figure far exceeds the population of most countries in the world. Therefore, it can be said that the large rural population will be the long-term national conditions of our country, which also constitutes the basic point for us to think about China's agricultural modernization.

Agricultural modernization is not only the universal development law of all countries in the world, but also the only way of agricultural development in our country. The biggest national condition of our country is that there are a large number of people and little land, and ensuring food security is related to the national economy and people's livelihood, which is a major event of great concern to the whole society. The rural reform in the past three decades has made great progress in China's agricultural development and successfully solved the problem of food and clothing for the whole people. However, the weak position of farmers has not been fundamentally solved, and with the economic and social development, put forward new requirements for China's agriculture, agricultural modernization is facing unprecedented opportunities for development. However, it must also be noted that it will be a long process for Chinese farmers to go to cities, which determines that agricultural modernization will also be a long process, which requires that the speed of agricultural modernization should be coordinated with the urbanization speed of China's rural population, that is to say, the situation and feelings of farmers must be taken into account in promoting agricultural modernization. Similarly, China's rural villages are the result of long-term historical development, and land is the core element of the village. If land is mainly managed by capital outside the village or even the city, then the structural integrity of the village and even the lives of farmers will be greatly affected. At present, the various problems brought about by agricultural modernization measures in various parts of our country are already reminding us that China's agricultural modernization, to be exact, should be the modernization of agriculture, rural areas and farmers, and the three are an organic whole. only by coordinating the relationship between them can we find a way of agricultural modernization in line with China's actual situation.