Tag Archives: rural development

Reform of the hukou: Not a liberalisation of the rural land market

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Captura de pantalla 2014-07-30 a las 16.32.49

This news piece concerns the  hukou reform announced on Wednesday (guowuyuan guanyu jinyibu tuijin huji zhidu gaige de yijian – 国务院关于进一步推进户籍制度改革的意见), which plans to eliminate the anachronistic distinction between agricultural  and non-agricultural registration. From now on, citizens will be classified simply as residents. The report explains that the reform won’t affect a liberalisation of rural land rights that would allow urban residents moving towards rural areas and acquire rural land-use rights, which is illegal up to now. The report explains that the reform won’t affect the “bidirectional flow of people” (shuangxiang liudong – 双向流动), in contrast to the existing legal framework that only permits the “one-way circulation of rural residents towards the city”.

Please click here to watch the report on chinanews.com: http://www.chinanews.com/shipin/2014/06-21/news447205.shtml

Miguel Elosua

Spanish qualified lawyer; PhD in Chinese Law. UrbaChina Research Officer. Has lived in China since 2006.

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Picture of spartan classroom in rural China awarded prize

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Zhou

Image © Fuyang Zhou

This photo, which was taken by Chinese amateur photographer Fuyang Zhou in Jiangxi province, won the first prize at the Hamdan International Photography Awards. It shows what seems to be an improvised classroom, with a dirt floor and mud walls, which serve as a blackboard.

In many villages of inland provinces with high rates of outflow migration, only children and old people remain. Remittances from parents working in the cities are usually the largest source of revenues for the village. The incentive for urbanisation from the government often means schools in remote villages are closed and schoolchildren are sent off to boarding schools located in larger towns. However, many local governments lack the resources to build enough boarding schools. Many of them have serious hygiene and safety issues1. Besides, the entry age at boarding schools is usually set at 6 years old. The most important problem is the shortage of good teachers. It is not only low salaries and heavy workload that deter teachers from moving to small villages, but especially isolation and the distance to urban areas. Thus, the teacher turnover rate is high. In spite of this, those willing to stay do not lack motivation and usually develop close bonds of friendship with the community.

For more information about the photo awards click here: http://www.hipa.ae/en/.

  1. http://www.clb.org.hk/en/files/share/File/research_reports/Children_of_Migrant_Workers.pdf, last accessed 20 March, 2014 [↩]

Miguel Elosua

Spanish qualified lawyer; PhD in Chinese Law. UrbaChina Research Officer. Has lived in China since 2006.

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Alternative model of rural development

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Mary-Francoise Renard and Huanxiu Guo (2013), Social activity and collective action for agricultural innovation: a case study of New Rural Reconstruction in China. Études et Documents n°3 Mars 2013 43 p.
Since 2003, a grass-roots movement of New Rural Reconstruction (NRR) has emerged in China to experience alternative model of rural development. The movement adopts a particular approach for rural development on basis of rural social and cultural re- construction. In order to understand this social approach, we investigate an original NRR experiment in a poor village of south China, where organic farming is promoted by means of basketball game. An in-depth household survey is conducted to qualitatively analyze this social approach and derive intuitive hypothesis of extended social network for empirical test. With a panel structure dataset collected by the survey, we quantitatively identify the causal e ect of social network by exploiting the endogeneity of social network formation. Our identi cation result provides micro evidence for a large social multiplier e ect in the di usion of organic farming, whereas it is negative for organic experts. Also, our results highlight the role of women, education and labor force for the development of organic farming. On basis of these results, we conclude that organic farming is suitable but challenging for small villages in China, while social activity is a good lever to achieve farmers’ collective action for its large di usion.

Full text of the article available on the French multidisciplinary openarchive HAL http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/80/21/19/PDF/2013.03.pdf

Jacqueline Nivard

Jacqueline Nivard, Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine

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