Opinion | China must look beyond subsidies to improve the lot of its farmers
Hu Shuli says China can unleash the creativity of its agricultural sector by modernising it - through market development and rights protection
After the publication last week of China's preliminary economic data for 2014, much fuss was made over the greater contribution of the services sector to overall growth. However, one equally important statistic was overlooked.
According to the figures, agriculture's share of gross domestic product fell to 9.2 per cent from 9.4 per cent in 2013 (this figure was itself revised down from an initial estimate of 10 per cent), and the downward trend is likely to continue.
This is an indisputable outcome of China's economic restructuring. At the same time, the numbers accentuate the unfair treatment of rural and urban areas in official policy, and the so-called " problem" - the three rural issues of agricultural industry, farmers' livelihood and countryside concerns.
This is because the cheap farm labour that has given Chinese growth such a boost has by now been exhausted, absorbed by its industries. China has reached the famed Lewis Turning Point.
How Beijing deals with its problem will determine whether the country can escape the middle-income trap that awaits it. Thus, we eagerly await the release of the "No 1 central document", the leadership's annual policy document which is expected this year to focus on the problem, as it has for the past 11 years.
China's problem is unusually complicated. It's partly inevitable, given the current stage of China's development, and partly the result of its peculiar administrative system. Since registration was introduced in 1958, China has adopted a clearly demarcated, dual system of administering its rural and urban areas. Notwithstanding the changes made over the past three decades, the system has survived largely intact for 60 years.
The problems are numerous: a huge and widening income gap between city and village; outdated rural management; lack of basic infrastructure in the farming industry; the inadequate provision of public goods in the villages; and so on. Meanwhile, the slow pace of land and reform has also held back overall reform and urban development.
