Urbanization is not the fundamental way to solve the problems of agriculture, rural areas and farmers

The reality in China is that although more than 100m of the 940 million farmers work in cities, there are still about 800m farmers living in scattered rural areas. No matter how the big cities of this country change, most of the 3 million rural Chinese village communities are still village communes. The small rural community system inherited from thousands of years of traditional culture, as the general economic foundation of the countryside, has remained basically unchanged so far. Moreover, there are great local differences in rural areas, can we simply connect the economic basis of this traditional small rural co-operative system directly with the so-called modern rule of law society or modern superstructure that even urban people have not fully adapted to? Is it possible to copy the current system of developed countries today, so that the modern rule of law can be realized?

If this is really the case, please compare horizontally which big developing country with a population of more than 100 million has not copied it before doing so. But which one has completed its full industrialization like China? Which is not more than 30% of the poverty rate, serious or even more than 50%? And no matter how high the per capita income is, most of them are still urban-rural dual structure, and the so-called urbanization mainly depends on large slums to concentrate a large number of poor people. The benefits of copying the system are obtained by a small number of elites, while the cost of the system can only be borne by the majority of ordinary people!

For example, in the other four large developing countries in Asia with a population of more than 100 million, free elections in the superstructure, multi-party parliamentary democracy, and privatization and marketization of the economic base have long been implemented; scholars, as part of the elite group, are also able to share the benefits of the system as "intellectuals"; however, as a whole, the development of industrialization and urbanization in which they participate in global competition as nation-states is not as good as China.

The question raised is, what do we want as a developing country? What on earth does our farmers want for their survival in rural China? Today, the mainstream of academic circles is privatization, marketization, liberalization, and globalization, which is in fact the so-called "Western-style four modernizations" that have replaced the "official four modernizations," or, more neutral, industrialization, urbanization, monetization, and capitalization. However, even if these changes are completed, they may not be able to solve the problems of agriculture, rural areas and farmers in China.

Everyone knows that the "Western-style four modernizations" can be established logically-it can only be marketed after privatization; with market-oriented free trade, "commodities are natural egalitarists". The new middle class will inevitably demand political liberalization, and finally lead to global integration. Otherwise, there would not be so many "officials and people" who take these claims for granted.

However, the trouble is that the institutional costs inevitably formed in the process of logical realization will be habitually "path dependent" transferred to rural areas, so the differences between urban and rural areas will inevitably widen, and the elements of productive forces will inevitably flow out of "agriculture, rural areas and farmers" by a large margin; of course, there will be increasingly serious problems of "agriculture, rural areas and farmers". In recent years, some people even think that everything will be all right as long as China simply copies the American system. But they ignore the common sense that "China has no farms, America has no farmers"-90 per cent of China's land is run by more than 200m farmers and 90 per cent of America's land is run by 170000 farmers. The reality of China is that the plain area accounts for only 1% of the land area, while the plain area of the four resources suitable for agriculture, namely, water, soil, light and heat, accounts for less than 10% of the land area. Deserts, mountains and plateaus are certainly not the first choice for entrepreneurs to run factories, so industry must be concentrated in plains and coastal areas, and cities must also be concentrated in plains and coastal areas. Agriculture, industry, cities and population are mainly concentrated in plains and coastal areas. Therefore, the widening of regional differences in China is the result of the restriction of China's economic and geographical conditions of "cascade distribution", rather than the result of man-made or institutional disaster.

Twenty years ago, like many people, the author also regarded urbanization as the fundamental way to solve the problems of agriculture, rural areas and farmers, and believed that as long as we speed up urbanization, open up the hukou, and let farmers go to cities, the problems of agriculture, rural areas and farmers will be easily solved. But later, through the investigation of many developing countries, as long as the population is more than 100 million, it is not found that which country's urbanization is successful. If China also uses large slums to urbanize, it is nothing more than a kind of "spatial translation and concentrated poverty"-the scattered poor population in rural areas becomes a relatively concentrated slum population-and the result is often the concentrated outbreak of social conflicts.