I. Historical Review of Contemporary China's Counter-urbanization
For a long period of time from 1949 to 1978, although China's industrialization has made a big breakthrough, the process of urbanization is relatively lagging behind. According to statistics, during this period, the proportion of industry in China's gross national product increased from less than 10% to 48.64%, but the level of urbanization in China developed from 10.6% to 17.9% only. [1] Some scholars believe that compared with the normal requirements of China's industrialization process, China's urbanization process has lagged behind by at least about 17%. [2] Contemporary China's urbanization and industrialization of the disconnect and urbanization process lagging behind for a long time is due to a variety of reasons, the state through the household registration system, food and oil supply system, labor system and a series of social systems to limit the flow of rural population to the city is of course lead to the process of urbanization is hampered by the reason, but in the 30 years, the population from the city to the countryside frequently migrate is also caused by the lagging behind the important reasons of urbanization. The main reason for this is that urbanization is lagging behind the pace of urbanization in China. Contemporary China's reverse urbanization is mainly manifested in the following aspects.
From the point of view of the composition of the population, the reverse urbanization in contemporary China, which began at the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and expanded rapidly after the 1960s, has continued for a long time and consists of four main components: First, the rural population who blindly flowed into the cities were repatriated to their places of origin. At the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China, a large number of rural people who had taken refuge in the cities were repatriated, and in 1950 alone, the People's Government mobilized and organized 165,000 unemployed people of rural origin to return to their hometowns to take part in agricultural production. [After 1960, the failure of the Great Leap Forward and the ensuing three years of natural disasters led to the streamlining of the rural population that had previously flowed into the cities to return to the countryside. According to statistics, of the more than 25 million urban residents who were streamlined in 1961-1964, more than 10 million were rural residents who had recently migrated to the cities. [4] The second was the urban unemployed and idle labor force. At the beginning of the Liberation. The withered urban economy could hardly accommodate the excessive urban population, so the people's government actively organized the urban unemployed and idle laborers to go to the countryside for employment. According to statistics, by August 1949, nearly 200,000 people had been dispersed to the surrounding countryside in Beijing, which was liberated earlier, and hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated from the cities to the countryside in other big cities in China. 1955-1956, the People's Government continued to organize a number of unemployed and unemployed people in the cities to go to the countryside to work in the community or go to the farms to open up the land for production. According to the statistics of Beijing and other six cities and two provinces, the unemployed went to the countryside to work in societies and farms, and together with their families there were 860,000 persons. [6] Thirdly, there were the young intellectuals in the cities. Since 1956, when the pilot project of mobilizing intellectual youths to go to the countryside began in a few cities, large-scale activities for urban intellectual youths to go to the countryside have been widely carried out since 1962. According to statistics, from 1962 to the end of 1979, a cumulative total of 17.76 million urban intellectual youths went to the countryside nationwide.[7] Fourth, there was an increase in the number of urban intellectual youths mobilized to the countryside. [7] Fourthly, there were the cadres, teachers, workers and their families in urban organizations. In the many large-scale political campaigns that took place after liberation, there were always cadres, teachers, workers and their families who were sent down to the countryside or to the "May 7" dry schools after each campaign. In the two anti-rightist campaigns of 1957 and 1959 alone, hundreds of thousands of rightists or right-leaning people, together with their families, were moved to remote and backward areas or to their places of origin for rehabilitation. It is estimated that the number of cadres, teachers, workers and their families who have gone to the countryside to labor and settle in the countryside is more than 20 million. [8]
Looking at the size of the urban population in the process of reverse urbanization, the tightening of the urban population scale, influenced by the massive out-migration of the population, is a phenomenon that has occurred in all major Chinese cities. In Shanghai, for example, during the 10 years from 1967 to 1977, the overall size of the urban population decreased by 168,800 people, despite the fact that the natural growth of the urban population has never stopped. [9] At the same time, small and medium-sized cities also experienced a general shrinkage. According to the criteria for the establishment of cities set in 1955, by the end of 1964, there were only 168 established cities in the country, 36 fewer cities than in 1961. [10] The shrinkage of towns was even more widespread; in the three years from 1961 to 1964 alone, the number of established towns nationwide dropped from 4,429 to 2,877. According to statistics, in 1954-1957, the ratio of non-agricultural population in cities and towns was 61.89:38.11, while by 1983, the ratio had dropped to 68.28:31.72.[11] In particular, during the four years from 1961 to 1964, China's towns and cities had a net out-migration of 43.69 million people, which directly resulted in the proportion of agricultural population in China decreasing from 73.9% in 1960 to 73.6% in 1964, and the proportion of agricultural population in China decreasing from 73.9% in 1960 to 73.7% in 1964. In particular, the net migration of 43.69 million people out of China's cities and towns in the four years from 1961 to 1964 led directly to an increase in the proportion of the agricultural population in China from 73.83% in 1960 to 80.15% in 1964. [12]
The large-scale and frequent phenomenon of reverse urbanization has led to a massive reduction of China's urban population, and at the same time inhibited China's urbanization process to a large extent. It is estimated that during the 30 years from 1949 to 1979, the natural growth of urban population accumulated more than 52 million, accounting for 66% of the total net increase of urban population [13], and natural growth played the most important role in the growth of urban population in the country, whereas the mechanical population growth, which should have played a decisive role in the process of urbanization along with the industrialization, has become a secondary factor instead.
Second, the causes and characteristics of contemporary China's reverse urbanization
The occurrence of large-scale and frequent reverse urbanization in contemporary Chinese society is the inevitable product of the socialist modernization path with planned economy as the main mode that the populous New China chose under the world's political and economic situation at that time, and thus the reverse urbanization in contemporary China has its historical basis and practical roots. The new Chinese government has also been working on the development of a new socialist economy, which is a new form of socialist modernization.
At the beginning of the founding of New China, China embarked on a Soviet-style socialist modernization path under the premise of being forced to adopt a "lopsided" international policy. The most important feature of the socialist economic development model modeled on the Soviet model is that it prioritizes the development of heavy industry. The heavy industry development strategy, which aimed at pursuing rapid economic growth, made China's industry detached from the basic national conditions of labor surplus and capital shortage, and developed in a capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive direction. From the First Five-Year Plan to the Fifth Five-Year Plan, the proportion of light industry in national construction investment has never exceeded 7%, while the proportion of heavy industry has been above 45% except for 36.1% during the First Five-Year Plan. During the "Second Five-Year Plan" period, the proportion of light industry in national construction investment never exceeded 7%, while the heavy industry, except for 36.1% during the "First Five-Year Plan" period, has been above 45%, and even up to 54% during the "Second Five-Year Plan. [14] According to another estimate, every million yuan of investment in fixed assets to accommodate the labor force, light industry for 257 people, while the heavy industry for 94 people, about 1 / 3 of the light industry. [15] Therefore, the excessive development of heavy industry is bound to produce "capital exclusion of labor" inherent mechanism, resulting in a shortage of capital in the formation of capital elements of excess labor exclusion, thus seriously restricting the development of heavy industry, and the development of heavy industry is the only way to achieve the goal of "capital exclusion of labor. The exclusion of labor, thus seriously restricting the potential of urban industrial development to absorb labor.
While vigorously promoting the development of heavy industry, the state also consciously restricted the development of urban tertiary industry in this period, which led to the slow development of urban tertiary industry in China since the founding of the People's Republic of China, and even tended to stagnate and shrink. According to statistics, in 1952, there were 95.7 retail commercial, catering and service outlets for every 10,000 people in the country, and in 1978, the number dropped to 13 outlets. Among all employees, the proportion of those engaged in the tertiary sector also dropped from 60.2% in 1952 to 36.7% in 1978.[16] This has led to a decline in the number of retail businesses, catering and service outlets per 10,000 people. [This greatly limited the increase in urban employment. The "excessive" development of urban heavy industry and the lagging behind of light industry and tertiary industry are the fundamental causes of the phenomenon of reverse urbanization in China after the founding of the People's Republic of China.
On the other hand, the agricultural economy, which had lagged behind for 30 years after the founding of the PRC, was unable to absorb the excessive urban population. In order to develop heavy industry, China's investment in agriculture has been insufficient for a long time, except for 1963-1965, when the investment in agricultural infrastructure reached 17% of the country's infrastructure investment, and the rest of the time it was around 10%.[17] At the same time, the investment in agriculture is not enough for the development of the country's urbanization. [17] At the same time, from 1952-1986 more than 30 years, the state through the system of unified purchasing and marketing and the price of industrial and agricultural products "scissors difference" from the agriculture of the huge amount of money secretly siphoned off 582,374,000,000 yuan, plus agriculture for the country's tax payments 104.438 billion yuan, a total of 686.812 billion yuan, accounting for about 18.5% of the value of output generated by agriculture. [18] Investing too little in agriculture and extracting too much from it directly led to the difficulty in achieving greater development due to the loss of the ability of agriculture to accumulate itself. It is estimated that in 1978, the total output value of agriculture (calculated at constant 1970 prices) was 145.88 billion yuan, an increase of only 1.3 times that of 1952.[19] The total output value of agriculture in 1978 was 145.88 billion yuan, an increase of only 1.3 times that of 1952. [19] The backwardness of agricultural production made it difficult for the limited food production to feed the excessive urban population, and thus once the urban population increased to the point where commercial food was difficult to meet the demand, a wave of counter-urbanization would occur in China. This was particularly evident in the 1960-1964 downsizing after the 1959 food crunch and the 1973 mass downsizing after the 1972 "three breakthroughs," when young people were sent to the countryside. Therefore, the phases of reverse urbanization in contemporary China are very obvious.
The staged character of contemporary China's counter-urbanization not only depends on the structural contradiction between food production and the needs of the urban population, but is also inextricably linked to the ups and downs of China's economy after the founding of the country. The new socialist China, which was established against the backdrop of an extremely backward economy, had an urgent mentality of development from the leaders to the general public in order to rapidly change the status quo of poverty and backwardness. Driven by the mentality of "catching up", the 1950s and onwards saw many campaigns of economic development on Chinese soil, with the 1958 "Great Leap Forward" being the most typical. In the "Great Leap Forward", in order to "turn over the iron and steel" and "gallop ten thousand horses", industries were organized all over the country. Among them, investment in infrastructure and the number of factories in cities increased exponentially, thus creating the illusion of a shortage of urban labor. As a result, in 1959 and 1960, the urban industrial and mining enterprises added about 20 million people to their labor force, about half of whom came from the countryside. However, detached from the reality of the blind development ultimately failed to last, from 1960 onwards, China entered the national economic adjustment period, stopped building, slowed down the construction of a large number of construction projects, many enterprises were forced to dismantle, and had to streamline the new transfer of more than 10 million laborers back to the countryside, thus forming a 20 million people in three years, urban and rural back and forth big flow.
The continued out-migration of the urban population is also one of the key features of contemporary China's counter-urbanization, which is caused by the structural contradiction between excessive population growth and the limited labor force that economic growth can accommodate. After liberation, the state adopted a policy of encouraging population production, and improved living and sanitary conditions provided the necessary conditions for rapid population growth; thus, after 1950, China saw its first peak in births. By 1958, 187 million people had been born in China***, an average of 20.8 million per year. The newborn population in this period reached working age from 1966 to 1974 respectively. [20] During the employment peak that occurred after 1966, the urban population, mainly intellectual youths, had to move to the countryside in large numbers because of the difficulty of realizing full employment for the new population of working age in the cities. This is why during the 12-year period from 1965-1976 there was a net migration of hundreds of thousands of people out of China's cities almost every year.
In addition to the above two points, contemporary China's reverse urbanization also has the obvious characteristics of coercion. after 1949, the state to ensure the development of heavy industrialization to take a series of measures, including industrial and agricultural product price "scissors" and household registration system, food and oil system, social security system and so on, have made the urban-rural standard of living gap The gap between the living standards of urban and rural areas has become wider and wider. According to statistics, in 1952 the consumption level of the agricultural population was 62 yuan, while that of the non-agricultural population was 148 yuan, the latter being 2.39 times that of the former. And by 1978, the gap had widened again to 2.9 times (132 yuan and 383 yuan, respectively). [21] In addition to the strong temptation for the rural population, this widening gap also made the urban population or the rural population that had already entered the city extremely reluctant to leave the city. For this reason, the state, in order to evacuate the urban population to the countryside, in addition to extensive publicity and mobilization, also adopted a series of mandatory measures. For example, the Nine Measures on Reducing the Urban Population and Compressing Food Sales in Cities and Towns issued by the Central Committee of the People's Republic of China (C.P.R.C.) on June 16, 1961, stipulated that "the central government and local governments should verify the population of cities and towns, first of all large and medium-sized cities, and check the black households of blacks, so as to ensure that they are in line with each other, and to prohibit false declarations, false claims, and fraudulent practices". [22] The subsequent decentralization of cadres, teachers and workers from the "rightists" was even more obviously coercive. The movement of intellectuals to the countryside was also forced under the state's program, even though "the force was hidden behind the scenes. [Of course, counter-urbanization reflects only one aspect of contemporary China's population migration, because as a rapidly industrializing country, urbanization is inevitably a dominant trend in China's population migration in the 30 years after the founding of the PRC. Indeed, just as counter-urbanization was taking place with great fanfare, urbanization continued to take place, and counter-urbanization in contemporary China has always gone hand in hand with urbanization. For example, during the 10 years from 1966 to 1976, while a cumulative total of about 30 million urban intellectual youths, workers and their families, and politically "problematic" people were forcibly relocated to the countryside, urban enterprises and institutions recruited large numbers of workers from the countryside. Of the more than 17 million people who have gone to the countryside since 1962, about 10 million have been transferred out of the countryside through recruitment, enrollment and conscription. In all, more than 20 million people returned to or entered the cities during the same period. After offsetting the inflows and outflows, the net outflow of urban population was only about 5 million people. [24] This intertwining of urbanization and counter-urbanization constitutes the unique experience of China's urbanization before 1978.
Third, the role and impact of contemporary China's counter-urbanization
Contemporary China's counter-urbanization occurred in the context of the prioritization of the development of heavy industry and the shrinkage of light industry and the tertiary sector, the serious lagging behind of agricultural production, the rapid growth of the national population, as well as the long-term fluctuation of the country's economic development, and so on, and therefore, it was a matter of necessity that the state implemented the policy of reverse urban-rural population migration. choice. This choice has had a series of positive and negative effects and impacts not only on the cities but also on the countryside, and has continued as a historical legacy until the late 1970s and early 1980s.
For the cities, in the long run, such effects and impacts were mainly manifested in the fact that the departure of a large number of people from the cities reduced the pressure of employment and the economic burdens of the cities, including the supply of food, oil and social security, so that the urban economy could continue to develop through high investment and accumulation, and even in the period of the "Cultural Revolution", China's urban economy still gained a considerable advantage. Even during the "Cultural Revolution" period, China's urban economy still achieved considerable success. At the same time, it has avoided the high unemployment rate, over-expansion of the tertiary sector and the proliferation of urban slums, which are social problems in other developing countries caused by "over-urbanization". In terms of specific impact, the massive streamlining of urban workers corrected to a certain extent the momentum of overwork and declining labor productivity after 1958, for example, in 1966, the labor productivity of nationally owned industrial enterprises reached 10,156 yuan, an increase of 60% compared with 1957, and 88.6% compared with 1959.[25] At the same time, it also avoided the social problems caused by "over-urbanization" in other developing countries, such as high unemployment, over-expansion of the tertiary sector and the proliferation of slums. [25] At the same time, the streamlining of the urban population and the reduction of workers' wages and sales of commercial foodstuffs were also conducive to raising the standard of living and welfare benefits of those who remained in the cities. As noted in the Report on the Continued Completion of the Streamlining Tasks and the Adjustment of Wages issued by the Central Streamlining Group, the State Planning Commission, and the Ministry of Labor on March 3, 1963: after reducing the number of workers by a large amount, the state was able to take out some of the money for adjusting the wages of the workers, and expanding the scope of the piece-rate wage, and reorganizing and improving the system of incentives and allowances. [26]
However, this large-scale out-migration has also had a significant negative impact on the cities. In addition to the aging of the urban workforce and the series of family problems caused by the long-term separation of families after a large number of young laborers moved to the countryside, it was more centrally manifested in the fact that, after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the return of a large number of people to the cities led to a large number of urban unemployed people, who had been forced to work for a long time. After the end of the "Cultural Revolution", the return of a large number of people to the cities led to an "explosive accumulation" of unemployed urban workers in 1979. According to statistics, at that time, there were a total of 15 million unemployed people in the cities*** who needed to be employed. [Because of the difficulty of providing new employment opportunities within a very short period of time, rallies, marches, petitions and disturbances at government offices by young intellectuals who had left the countryside to work in the mountains and by young people who were unemployed in cities and towns occurred one after another in 21 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions throughout the country, and became an important social problem related to the stability of the country. It was not until the late 1980s that this historical problem was gradually resolved.
If this kind of counter-urbanization has both advantages and disadvantages for the cities, then the impact of the massive evacuation of the population into the countryside has both positive and negative effects on the countryside. In terms of the original purpose of counter-urbanization, the migration of people from the cities to the countryside had the obvious purpose of solving the employment difficulties in the cities and towns, and this purpose remained unchanged until the intellectual youths went to the countryside in the later years. However, it was not without practical needs in the countryside, and the mobilization of young intellectuals to go to the countryside and the mountains in the 1950s had its social background in the cooperative movement in the countryside. In September 1955, Mao Zedong also pointed out in the introduction to his book The Socialist Climax in Rural China that: "The national cooperative system requires millions of people to work as accountants. millions of people to be accountants, where can we find them? In fact, there are people, and a large number of high school and middle school graduates can be mobilized to do this work." He called, "An intellectual like this who can go to work in the countryside should be happy to go there. The countryside is a vast field where great things can be done." [28]
In addition to this, the migration of a large number of people has also had a great impetus to the development of the agricultural economy: on the one hand, for the lack of capital and technological inputs, mainly relying on the increase in manpower to promote the development of agriculture, tens of millions of people engaged in agricultural production, in addition to helping to realize the realization of large-scale farmland water conservancy construction, but also conducive to the unit of labor inputs to increase the production of agricultural products. In addition to contributing to the realization of large-scale farmland water conservancy construction, it also helps increase the output of agricultural products through the input of labor per unit. On the other hand, the influx of urban population has also brought a certain amount of capital to the countryside. According to statistics, from 1962 to the end of 1979, the state treasury allocated a cumulative total of 7.54 billion yuan, including resettlement fees such as insertion subsidies, to young people with knowledge who went to the countryside.[29] And the state treasury also allocated a certain amount of money to the rural areas. [The resettlement funds for young intellectuals often became an important source of funding for grassroots units to purchase agricultural machinery and fertilizers, pesticides, or for other investments,[30] which did have a positive effect on rural areas that lacked capital investment. At the same time, the decentralized authorities cadres, teachers, technicians and urban knowledge of young people also brought knowledge and technology for the countryside, for example, in the 1960s there are a lot of Shanghai back to the countryside with their knowledge, technology and was elected to the brigade, the production team cadres, their arrival to change the backwardness of many production teams, was praised by the members of the production team, "to a good home! "[31]. This is an important role in improving the technical level of rural production and the development of community enterprises.
Of course, the migration of large numbers of people into the countryside also brought greater negative impacts. Due to the increase in China's population, since the Ming and Qing Dynasties, China's rural areas began to fall into the "high level of equilibrium trap"[32], which is brought about by the diminishing marginal productivity of agricultural labor inputs[33], and the prosperity of agricultural production at the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China along with the land reform and the transformation of agricultural production relations is actually only a result of the release of traditional productive forces in China's agriculture. The boom in agricultural production at the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China with the land reform and the transformation of agricultural production relations was in fact only the result of the release of traditional productivity in Chinese agriculture. Therefore, the lack of financial and technological inputs in agriculture did not break the "high-level equilibrium trap" due to liberation, and the crisis of rural overpopulation was further accentuated by the rapid natural population growth brought about by the uncontrolled births after the founding of the People's Republic of China. Against this background, "the 'decentralization' movement, which sent urban residents to the countryside, only complicated the problem of underemployment in rural areas" [33]. On the one hand, the new urban population crowded out the rural population's land and means of production (because after the initial resettlement funds were used up, they depended entirely on agricultural production for all their livelihoods), especially in areas that had been reclaimed earlier and where the traditional agricultural economy had already been well established, thus intensifying the conflict between the peasants and the foreign population. On the other hand, the influx of large numbers of people from urban areas has intensified the accumulation of surplus labor in rural areas. With limited output, rural grassroots units are forced to distribute the means of subsistence according to the population, which results in a lack of incentives for labor inputs, and the widespread phenomenon of the "big pot rice" further reduces the marginal productivity of agriculture.
The backwardness of agricultural production and the widespread poverty of the peasantry, while constraining the country's determination to industrialize, further exacerbated the imbalance between the urban and rural dichotomies, so that both urban migrants and peasants had excessive expectations of urban life. Such expectations eventually led to three waves of urbanization with obvious compensatory effects, namely the collective return of the urban population without hesitation after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the rapid development of small towns in the early 1980s, and the emergence of the surging "migrant worker tide" that has continued from the late 1980s to the present day. urbanization.
Source: Social Science Bulletin, Issue 3, 2006 Article by Qiu Guosheng