Chinese Comprehensive Rural Reform: Institutional Vicissitude, Theoretic Framework and Content Structure

Abstract

The social and economic development level of rural areas, the productivity of agriculture and the life quality of farmers were always the greatest concerns of Chinese Central Government. Therefore, the research related to rural areas, agriculture and farmers had remained as the prominent parts for a long period and would continue to be prominent in the future to build China into a moderately prosperous nation in an all-round way. Chinese rural area had constantly experienced three significant system reforms since 1978, namely the reform of rural management system, the rural tax and fee reform and the rural comprehensive reform. This paper attempted to analyze the theoretic framework and the content structure of the comprehensive rural reform since it was the higher stage of rural institutional vicissitude, which had changed the governance and operation system and thus promoted the great changes to fundamental social and economic system in rural areas. The theoretic framework of comprehensive rural reform covered three aspects in its content, namely the rural governance theory, the government function theory and the public finance theory. The comprehensive rural reform was a complicated system engineering with multiple dimensions and targets mainly including rural political restructuring, rural economic restructuring and rural public products allocation restructuring. The reform had focused on enhancing the vitality of agricultural and rural development, breaking through the urban and rural binary system, and further reducing the disparity between cities and countrysides, so as to realize the urban-rural integration. It was necessary to clarify and understand the key mechanism and intrinsic logic of the rural comprehensive reform, which was helpful to establish the foundation constituted by scientific methodology to implement the reform and evaluation criterion to judge the reform performance.