It is said that there is something of the future in history, and when it is found, it becomes an eternal thought. From the history of more than 40 years of great changes and nine years of magnificent strides forward, what kind of eternity can we touch? Let’s find the code to China’s reform and opening-up in the practice of hundreds of millions of people.

Chongzhou, adjacent to the provincial capital Chengdu, is a county-level city in Sichuan Province. Like most places in the country, Chongzhou’s rural land has been seriously abandoned as a large number of rural laborers have moved to the cities.

Cheng Guoqiang: That’s why some people call the rural laborers today the “703861 Force”. “70” refers to the aging population. Now the situation is basically that the post-1980 generation does not know how to farm, the post-1990 generation does not want to farm, and the post-2000 generation does not talk about farming, so it is about who to farm. “Who to farm?” “Who to manage?” “Who to serve?” Those are questions urgent to be answered.

Cheng Guoqiang: The key lies in agriculture operation by three entities, namely land shareholding cooperatives controlled by agricultural households, agricultural professional managers, and agricultural commercial service organizations.

The “agricultural co-operation system” of concentrating the land of each household for large-scale production is a bold step in innovation of Chongzhou to advance agricultural operation at an appropriate scale. However, it was very difficult at the beginning. When the first cooperative was established in 2010, only 30 agricultural households joined it, and more were on the sidelines, fearing that the land contracting policy would change and that the cooperative would lack funds for development and have no future. Innovate the land as an important factor of production is crucial to deepen the rural reform.

The No. 1 Central Document in January 2014 explicitly proposed that, based on implementing the collective ownership of rural land, the contract rights of rural households shall be stabilized and the control over land management rights shall be loosened to form the parallel separation of land ownership rights, rural households’ contract rights, and land management rights. This new system design, called the “separation of rural land ownership rights, contract rights and land management rights”, is another major institutional innovation in rural reform. Innovation is the life of reform and opening-up.

“What is a road? It is something trampled out of a place where once there was no road; it is made from a place where once there were only brambles and thickets.”

General Secretary Xi Jinping quoted this passage from Mr. Lu Xun to emphasize that in advancing reform and development in a large country like China with a civilization history of more than 5,000 years and a population of more than 1.4 billion, “there is no textbook or golden rule to follow”, and we must keep our future in our own hands and unswervingly follow our own path.

We should hold high the banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics, stay true to our original aspiration and founding mission, stay committed to the reform and opening-up, see that our people realize their aspirations for a better life, and in this way, create new and even greater miracles of the Chinese nation in the new era, miracles that will truly impress the world!

Source: People.cn, January 14, 2022