Rural issues – agriculture, villages and farmers' issue – always have a bearing on the overall development for the cause of the Party and the state, and the three-generation central collective leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) has attached particular great importance to the three rural issues. Since China triggered its reform and opening to the outside world three full decades ago, the CPC Central Committee have called several plenary sessions to study agriculture and rural work.
Comparing the present with the past, we have much valuable experience that needs to be summed up assiduously and earnestly and a host of thorny topics to be analyzed and tackled, and rural reform and development need to be accelerated. Against this general backdrop, the Third Plenum of the 17th CPC Central Committee convened a four-day ad hoc conference from Oct. 9 to 12 in Beijing on the issue of pushing forward rural reform and development in the new situation.
The plenum summed up in an all-round way main achievements scored in rural reform and development and contributions made in establishing and improving the basic economic system and economic structure, materializing the overall, comparatively well-ff standards of living, advancing modernized construction, surmounting all kinds of difficulties and risks, maintaining an overall social stability, opening up the socialist road with Chinese characteristics and forming the country's socialist theoretical setup with Chinese salient features.
Meanwhile, it summarized the basic experience of the rural reform and development from five aspects, namely, in adherence to giving the three rural issues top priority in the CPC's work, to the basic position of agriculture, to the orientation of reforming the socialist market economy, to the road for building modern agriculture with Chinese characteristics, and to guaranteeing farmers' material interests and improving the rural democracy.
Following an objective analysis of both challenges and problems in China's rural development, the plenum notes that "rural infrastructure is still weak and needs improving, rural development is lagging behind and needs support, and farmers' income increases slowly and needs speeding up," according to a communiqué issued after the plenum.
China has on the whole entered into a critical juncture of speeding up the transfer of the traditional agriculture and developing modern agriculture with Chinese characteristics and into a vital, important period of eliminating the town-country binary divide and forming a new pattern or setup of integrating the urban and rural economic and social development.
In view of the present new situation, the plenum cited it as a strategic task to build a new socialist countryside, as the basic orientation to take the road of modern agriculture with Chinese characteristics and as the fundamental demand to accelerate the integrated, town-and-village economic and social development, and set forth basic objectives for the rural reform and development up to 2020 in six respects, namely, innovating an infrastructure mechanism, developing modern agriculture with Chinese characteristics, raising farmers'income, reinforcing CPC grassroots units, further improving utility service and protecting the ecological environment.
The plenum mapped out principal tasks in an all-round way to propel rural reform in the new situation. First, great efforts should be made to press ahead with reform and innovation and enhance the basic rural managerial system and land-use management, protect agriculture support, and advance rural banking business, an integrated town-and-country economic and social development, and rural democratic management, so as to vigorously push forward reform and innovation and step up rural setup development.
Second, dynamic efforts should made to expand modern agriculture and increase its overall production capacity in line with requirements of the high-yield, high-quality, high efficiency, benign ecology and safety of agriculture products and, thirdly, endeavors should be made to extend a public financial coverage and set forth new demands for hastening the development of utilities in rural culture, education, sanitation, social security, infrastructure and environment as well as for poverty alleviation, disaster prevention and relief, and improved social management.
To deepen the rural reform and improve rural economy, the plenum unequivocally acknowledges, the crux of the matter lies with the Party, and so comprehensive arrangements have to be made to enhance and improve Party leadership over rural work.
By People's Daily Online, and its author is Chen Xiwen, director-general of the Central Leading group on Rural Work under the CPC Central Committee
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