Building a New Countryside: a Long-term Task in China's Modernization Drive

This article discusses the achievements and major changes in China’s rural development, elaborates on the prominent problems related to agriculture, rural areas and farmers in China, and discusses some key policy issues concerning the building of a new socialist countryside, especially from the perspective of balancing urban and rural development. The underlying viewpoint of this article is that to promote the building of a new countryside, a system and mechanism of balancing urban and rural development must be gradually established and improved. The policies should focus on improving the social mobility mechanism to remove the institutional barriers to the social mobility of farmers; establishing public finances to cover both urban and rural areas to narrow the gap in basic public service provision between cities and the countryside; expediting the establishment of a social security network to protect the interests of rural disadvantaged groups; improving the mechanism of protecting land-use rights and interests of farmers; effectively organizing the mechanism of ensuring allocations for the building of a new countryside; improving the organizational structure of rural society to support self-organized farmers’ groups; and changing the concept of rural governance and the operation of social governance.