“社会主义新农村”成本几何？

China's drive to close wealth gap leaves question of cost unanswered

The announcement yesterday of China's ambitious new rural policy, marketed in China under the politically correct banner of the "New Socialist Countryside", has been three years in the making.


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But even now, for all of the measures it contains, many of which are already being piloted in some of the country's remote, poorer counties, the details of how the policy will work on the ground are not yet clear.

In some respects, given the monumental task the government has set itself, of turning around a sprawling, diverse and often backward rural economy containing about 740m people, that is not surprising.

The government is torn between the dual and possibly conflicting imperatives of getting the policy right, but also ensuring that it produces quick results.

"It is both a long-term goal and an urgent immediate task," said Chen Xiwen, a senior official in the leading group on agriculture.

From the moment they came to office in late 2002 and early 2003, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, China's president and prime minister, have said that addressing China's rich-poor gap, symbolised by the urban-rural divide, is the most important priority of their administration.

In making their commitment, Mr Hu and Mr Wen had more than just the welfare of impoverished farmers in mind. The surge in protests in rural areas has also made the countryside a volatile political issue.

To that end, the "New Socialist Countryside" incorporates tax cuts, incentives to lift grain production, and massive infrastructure spending, mainly in the form of new roads and other transport links.

But lifting rural incomes, now about one-third of those in cities on average, is only half the challenge. The area of perhaps greatest neglect is health and education, which used to be free, but in recent years has become expensive and often not even accessible in rural areas.

"The divide is even more compelling for infrastructure and social undertakings such as education and health, which all greatly hinder improving the quality of farmers' lives," said Mr Chen.

What is not yet clear is how much all of this will cost.

The government will announce some initial spending figures next March, with the unveiling of the latest five-year plan at the annual National People's Congress.

But the finance ministry and other agencies, while supporting the aims of the policy, will be suspicious of making open-ended spending commitments in rural areas.

Yasheng Huang, at the MIT Sloan School of Management, said it was "vitally important" for Beijing to address problems in the countryside accumulated due to neglect in the nineties.

"I would prefer to see the new rural strategy incorporate more liberalisation and private sector development rather than just massive state investments," he said.

Mr Huang says the urban boom in the nineties was financed heavily by massive taxation on Chinese rural residents, including the high fees for basic education and healthcare.

"The most relevant question is not how China should or should not subsidise agriculture; the most relevant question is how China should cut its rural subsidies to the cities," he said.

Unlike the Common Agricultural Policy in Europe, which pays money to keep plots out of production, China's aim is to keep as much land in production to ensure basic food sufficiency. Liu Fuyuan, the head of the think-tank attached to the planning ministry in Beijing, thinks this is misguided, unless it is also combined with incentives to get more rural workers off the land. "We should make farmers move into the cities," he says. "That is the only way to get economies of scale in the countryside."
“社会主义新农村”成本几何？

经
过3年时间的酝酿，中国前天宣布了雄心勃勃的新农村政策。该政策打着“社会主义新农村”的旗帜，这在政治上是正确的。

但即便是现在，尽管该政策包含各项措施，但政策实施的具体效果如何尚不清楚。其中许多措施已在中国一些偏远地区较贫困的县试点。

在某些方面，考虑到政府给自己制定的这一任务十分繁重，这不足为奇。中国的农村有约7.4亿人口，地域广阔，情况复杂多样，而且通常都很落后，政府的任务则是扭转农村经济。


政府要制定出正确的政策，但也要确保快速见效，这种双重任务有可能互相冲突，政府为此左右为难。

“它既是一个长期目标，也是一项迫在眉睫的任务，”农业领导小组高级官员陈锡文表示。

中国国家主席胡锦涛和总理温家宝于2002年末和2003年初上台执政，从那时起他们就表示，解决以城乡差距为代表的中国贫富差距，是他们任内的重中之重。

在做出承诺时，胡锦涛和温家宝考虑的不光是贫困农民的福利问题。农村地区发生的抗议浪潮，也使农村成了不稳定的政治问题。

为此，“社会主义新农村”包括了减税和庞大的基础设施支出两大政策。前者是提高粮食生产的激励手段，后者的主要形式是新公路和其它交通设施。

农村收入目前平均约为城市收入的三分之一，而提高农村收入只是挑战的一半。卫生和教育或许是最受忽视的领域，它们过去都是免费的，但近年来变得昂贵，在农村地区甚至经常看不起病、读不起书。

“在教育和卫生等基础设施和社会事业方面，差距甚至更加触目惊心，这些都极大妨碍了农民生活质量的提高，”陈锡文表示。

所有这些措施将付出多大成本，目前尚不清楚。今年3月，政府将在一年一度的全国人大会议上公布最新的五年计划，同时宣布部分初步支出数字。虽然财政部和其它机构支持这一政策的目标，但对于向农村地区做出无限制的支出承诺，它们也持怀疑态度。

麻省理工斯隆管理学院的黄亚生表示，中国政府解决90年代由于疏忽而积累起来的农村问题“极为重要”。“我更希望看到新农村政策包括更多自由化和私营经济部门的发展，而不光是庞大的政府投资，”他表示。

黄先生表示，支持90年代城市迅速发展的资金，大量来源于中国农村居民的沉重赋税，包括高昂的基础教育和医疗保健费用。“最中肯的问题不是中国应不应该补贴农业，而是中国应如何停止农村对城市的补贴，”他表示。

欧洲的共同农业政策(Common Agricultural Policy)花钱让土地停产，中国则不同，中国的目标是保持尽可能多的土地用于农业生产，以确保有足够的粮食。国家发改委下属智囊机构负责人刘福垣（国家发改委宏观经济研究院副院长）认为，这是错误的，除非它也与激励措施相结合，鼓励更多农村劳动力离开土地。“我们应该让农民搬进城里，”他说，“这是在农村实现规模经济的唯一途径。”

中国推出三农“新政”
China launches ‘New Deal’ for farmers

Beijing has launched an ambitious “New Deal” for China’s farmers, aimed at lifting stagnant rural incomes through a combination of crop subsidies, tax cuts and infrastructure spending in inland areas far from the thriving coast.


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The plan, called the “New Socialist Countryside”, is the centrepiece of the commitment by president Hu Jintao and premier Wen Jiabao to reduce gaping income inequalities split largely along an urban-rural divide.

The government also hopes to use the plan to rein in the widespread and often illegal confiscation of rural land for development, a trend it believes imperils China’s ability to be self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs.

Chen Xiwen, a senior official overseeing agricultural policy, said on Wednesday that China had the “strictest” rules in the world to prevent the conversion of farmland for industrial use, but their implementation would take “a long time.”

“The issue is whether land for construction and development should be monopolised by the state,” he said.

China has a thriving private property market in cities but does not permit rural residents to buy and sell farming plots, even though many see it as an essential step to aggregating rural land to make it more productive.

Mr Chen said this issue, a highly-sensitive and much-debated one in policymaking circles, was “still in the process of being considered.”

One major obstacle to reform of rural land is the government’s fear that many farmers would immediately sell their plots and become part of a huge landless peasant class.

About 940m of China’s 1.3bn population are registered as living on farms or rural villages but about 200m of these people have left their homes to seek higher-paid jobs in work in towns or cities.

Even with mass migration to cities over coming decades, Mr Chen said China would have to manage 600m rural residents by the time the population peaked at about 1.5bn by about 2030.

The government is already committed to spending about Rmb100bn in the next financial year in transfer payments from central to county-level governments and below to make up for the abolition of the much-hated agriculture tax.

But Mr Chen offered no other figures for the cost of spending on infrastructure and direct subsidies to farmers, which he said would be released with the unveiling of the latest five-year economic plan at next month’s National People Congress.

The potentially open-ended cost to the budget of subsidising unproductive farm communities is one of the most controversial aspects of the policy.

“There is a danger that faster poverty reduction could probably be achieved through faster urbanisation and that aid dependency is nurtured on the farm,” said Stephen Green, of Standard Chartered, in Shanghai.

The government also hopes a richer rural sector will help tackle the huge mountain of debt built up by rural governments in the past decade, as they borrowed money to try to develop their communities.

Rural government debts reached Rmb360bn by the late ‘90s, and are likely to be much larger now.

Mr Chen said many rural governments had “misunderstood their role in the economy” by borrowing money from local banks to invest in property projects or by acting as guarantors for others.

Some governments had simply borrowed money from local banks to spend on overseas trips, he said.

Mr Chen acknowledged the policy was not an instant remedy, saying “it will take a long time in history for the new socialist countryside to materialise in China.”
中国推出三农“新政”


中国政府对农民推出“新政”，旨在结合农作物补贴、减税和内陆地区基础设施投资等手段，提高农村地区的收入。

这个称为“社会主义新农村”的计划，是中国国家主席胡锦涛和总理温家宝一项承诺的中心内容，即缩小城乡人口的收入不平等。

征占农民耕地用于开发，这种做法在中国很普遍且常常违反法律。中国政府希望通过这个计划对此现象加以抑制。政府相信，这一趋势损害了中国保证粮食基本自给自足的能力。


主管农业政策的高级官员陈锡文昨天表示，中国有世界上“最严格的”耕地保护制度，以防止农村耕地转为城市工业建设用地，但这些制度的实施需要时间。


“问题是建设开发用地是否应由中央政府垄断，”他说。

中国城市的私营房地产市场十分繁荣，但国家不允许农村居民买卖耕地，尽管许多人认为这是扩大农场规模、提高土地生产效率不可缺少的条件。

陈先生表示，这一问题“仍在考虑中”。

土地改革面临的一个主要障碍是，政府担心许多农民会立即出售耕地，成为庞大的无地农民阶层的一部分。

中国人口达13亿，约9.4亿是农村户口，但其中有约2亿已离开农村，进入城镇寻找收入更高的工作。

陈先生表示，中国的人口将在2030年左右达到15亿的峰值。尽管有大量农村人口迁往城市，中国仍将管理6亿农村居民。


中国政府承诺在下一财政年度支出约1000亿元人民币(合120亿美元)，用于中央政府向县级以及县级以下政府的转移支付，作为对废除农业税的补偿。

有关这份新农村政策的开支，陈先生没有提供其它数据。他表示，这些数字将在下月召开的全国人大上与最新的五年计划一起公布。

对非生产性农村社区的补贴是该政策中最有争议的方面之一。

渣打银行(Standard Chartered)驻上海的王志浩(Stephen Green)说：“危险在于，加快减少贫困可能会通过加快城市化速度来实现，而这会滋长农村对农业援助的依赖性。”

政府希望，农村地区的富裕，将有助于解决农村地方政府累积的债务。过去10年中，农村的地方政府通过贷款来开发它们的社区。

到90年代末，农村地区政府的负债已达3600亿元人民币，而现在这个数字可能更大。