A farmer works in her rice field in China's eastern Zhejiang province. (PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images)
Summary
In a public display of commitment to its roots as a mobilizer of peasant interests, China's Communist Party has once again identified reforming the countryside as its core policy prerogative in 2014. However, for the first time in the past decade, Party leaders have tempered their reform goals with cautionary statements on protecting the nation's food security, reflecting Beijing's deep-seated fear of the unintended consequences of reforming too rapidly.
Analysis
On Jan. 19, China's State Council released its annual No. 1 Central Document, a brief that typically contains no detailed policy prescriptions but nonetheless is important symbolically. Previous documents have been used to announce and solidify broad shifts in the government's policy orientation. For example, the 2004 No. 1 Central Document, published by the newly-installed administration of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, marked a turning point in Beijing's focus from developing coastal urban regions to improving living conditions in China's severely underdeveloped countryside.
This year's No. 1 Document, which like the past 10 focused on agricultural reform, urged the acceleration of efforts to modernize and industrialize Chinese agricultural production and called for deeper rural land reform. However, it also warned of the need to safeguard food security in the face of reform -- a subtle reminder of the geopolitical constraints for reorganizing China's countryside and reshaping the rural-urban relationship.
The Pillars of Reform
Reforming the Chinese countryside is a complex process, but it rests on two main pillars. The first pillar, rural land reform, is meant to facilitate the steady movement of rural populations to cities by gradually opening farmers' access to rural commercial land markets. (Currently land designated as "rural" cannot be sold for commercial development.) Rural land reform also strengthens farmers' property rights to ensure that farmers get a fair deal for their land and to prevent urban property developers from exploiting them. The long-term goal of these reforms -- to unify rural and urban land markets -- coincides with the reform of China's household registration, or hukou, system, which divides the country's population into rural/agricultural and urban/non-agricultural segments and bars rural residents from accessing urban social services.
Hukou system reform and rural land reform ultimately seek to bridge the gap between town and countryside and to create a framework for future urban development that is more equitable than it has been in the past, when a few top-tier cities received the vast majority of resources and migrants while other cities, especially in the interior, languished by comparison. In this sense, rural land reform is a critical component of Beijing's broader scheme to rebalance the economy away from overreliance on coastal export-oriented manufacturing and toward greater national economic integration and reliance on domestic consumption.
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The second pillar of reforming China's countryside is agricultural modernization. As more farmers leave home in search of work in cities over the next decade, they will need to be replaced by someone or something. For Beijing, the clear answer is to expand industrial-scale agriculture. This means replacing China's traditional model of agricultural production, in which hundreds of millions of farmers work tiny family-owned plots and sell their surplus to urban produce markets, with a model akin to that of the United States and other developed countries, in which relatively few farming conglomerates account for the majority of agricultural output.
So far, agricultural modernization has proceeded slowly -- especially in heavily populated traditional farming powerhouses like Henan province -- though it has made swifter progress in regions like Heilongjiang, where fewer people are directly tied to farming. But China's leaders hope that as rural land reforms (and complementary fiscal reforms aimed at reducing local governments' reliance on land sales) proceed, the conditions for large-scale industrial agriculture will ripen.
Food Security
Many factors constrain these reforms, but perhaps none is more significant than the government's deeply ingrained fear of the unintended consequences for China's national food security that are tied to overly rapid reform. The objective of rural land reform and agricultural modernization may be clear enough, but knowing how to achieve that objective without disrupting the delicate balance between China's food demand and supply is not. That lack of clarity is intolerable for the Communist Party, which itself came to power on the backs of peasants and is undoubtedly aware that, in China, sovereignty is most often decided by the ability to manage the countryside, not the cities.
The political risk of any move that could even temporarily disrupt food supply, especially for staple grains like rice and wheat, is aggravated by the scale of Chinese consumption. A minor rise in Chinese rice or wheat imports would radically reshape global markets for those commodities, much as Chinese imports of soy (and more recently, corn) have. China's soybean imports now dominate the global market, and recently increasing corn imports have the potential to do the same -- especially as more Chinese citizens consume meat products, for which both soy and corn are key inputs.
Against this backdrop, Chinese authorities' mounting concerns over the long-term consequences of soil deterioration, water pollution, declining arable land and the persistent threats of droughts and floods is understandable. In December 2013, China's Ministry of Land and Resources released its first public report since 1996 on national land and soil conditions; during the 2000s, information about soil conditions was considered a state secret. The report disclosed that up to 2.5 percent of China's soil (some 8.24 million acres, an area slightly larger than the state of Maryland) is now too polluted for agricultural use. It also noted that between 2006 and 2009, China's total arable land declined by 0.2 percent, or about 0.7 million acres.
Such declines are unsurprising, given the scale of China's recent urban and industrial development. But they do not necessarily portend food insecurity for China's most important staple grains in the next few years. For example, Chinese direct consumption of rice and wheat declined throughout the 2000s, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. However, Chinese demand for corn and soy is expected to continue to increase as demand for meat products rises. The impact of declining arable land, at least in the near future, may be psychological rather than practical. But the greater the Party's -- and the public's -- awareness of the political risk in reforming the countryside, the less likely the reforms will proceed quickly.
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