On the reform road to rural areas

By Wu Jiao (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-10-28 07:50

After almost a decade, the hard-working and desperate people who leave their villages for "greener pastures" have started enjoying better social security benefits in the cities. Some of them can even admit their children to city schools and depend on local governments to get their wages and guarantee their medical insurance.

But compared to the blistering urban economic growth, rural development still has a long way to go. The urban-rural gap has been widening, and rural production has begun to stagnate. Rural communities have been complaining about insufficient input, and a large number of laborers in rural areas don't have jobs.

That's why the administration has launched a full-fledged reform plan for rural areas with the funds acquired from three decades of fast-paced industrialization.

New countryside

To tackle the problem, the central government quintupled its spending from 2002 to 2007 to boost rural infrastructure. Under its "new countryside program", it abolished the centuries-old rural agriculture tax, made the nine-year compulsory education free for rural children and subsidized agriculture production. All these have lifted farmers' living standards and provided them better social security.

Thanks to such efforts, the country saw four successive years of good harvest, a rarity since the middle 1980s. This is a boon today when global food prices are rising rapidly and an increasing number of non-farm units are eating up into the country's arable land.

Millions of farmers have achieved breakthroughs in political life. Direct elections at the grassroots level to choose village leaders have become stronger since the early 1990s. Villagers today have a stronger desire to promote self-governance. The practice, legalized in 1998, has been adopted by more than 80 percent of China's villages, with villagers choosing more than 611,000 committee leaders.

Many rural areas have also joined the reform for household contract system of the collective ownership of forest land. Forest cover across the country has increased rapidly, after the State Council guaranteed people longer-term ownership and decision-making rights last year.

Added to these, the central leadership's new proposals to carry forward rural reforms is likely to make life more comfortable for farmers and lift their living standards.

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