Gao Fan: Coordinating the Integrated Promotion of New-type Urbanization and Comprehensive Rural Revitalization

Integrated urban-rural development is an inevitable requirement for Chinese-path modernization, and the transformation of the urban-rural structure is linked to the degree of progress in China’s overall modernization. The 2024 Central Economic Work Conference proposed to “proportionately and integrally promote new-type urbanization and comprehensive rural revitalization to facilitate integrated urban-rural development.” It clarified key tasks in areas such as arable land management, stable production of agricultural products, food security, increasing farmers' income, urban governance, and the development of county-level economies. This reflects a significant logic of promotion that emphasizes exertion at both the urban and rural ends while enhancing synergy between the two. The 2025 No. 1 Central Document ^[1] again emphasized "adhering to integrated urban-rural development." Proportionately and integrally promoting new-type urbanization and comprehensive rural revitalization is a systematic project. In practice, we must profoundly grasp the connotations and paths of "integrated promotion" from the levels of industrial layout, factor allocation, spatial planning, public goods provision, development evaluation methods, and institutional mechanism reforms.

First, integrate industrial layout to consolidate the economic base of integrated urban-rural development. For a long time, the basic pattern of China's urban-rural industrial distribution has been: the primary sector is mainly located in the countryside, while the secondary and tertiary sectors are mainly located in the cities, with clear boundaries between the two. On the New Journey ^[2], to promote integrated urban-rural development, we must re-understand the industrial distribution between urban and rural areas based on Chinese-path modernization and high-quality development, giving holistic consideration to urban-rural industrial linkages. This is concentrated in three aspects: First, achieving food security goals is paramount; ensuring the stable production and supply of grain and important agricultural products is a vital task of rural revitalization. Given the continuous non-agriculturalization of the rural labor force, the development of the primary sector must break through sectoral boundaries, emphasize urban-rural interaction, actively introduce modern urban factors, focus on technological progress, and strive to improve the comprehensive efficiency and competitiveness of agriculture. Second, the countryside possesses resource advantages in nature, ecology, culture, and history. To promote rural industrial development, we should base our efforts on the shifting consumption structures of urban and rural residents, converting rural resource advantages into market advantages as quickly as possible. We must continuously cultivate new rural industries and business formats that meet the new demands of urban and rural residents, achieving a diversification of rural industrial forms and a plurality of income sources for farmers. Finally, the vast countryside provides a huge market and broad application scenarios for urban-rural industrial development. To promote the integrated development of urban and rural industries, we must highlight the market contribution of the countryside, closely aligning urban industries with rural demand and guiding urban industries to boost the transformation of traditional rural industries and the development of emerging industries.

Second, integrate factor allocation to stimulate the market vitality of integrated urban-rural development. The equal exchange, two-way flow, and efficient allocation of various factors ^[3] between urban and rural areas are inherent requirements and key components of the integrated promotion of new-type urbanization and rural revitalization. To this end, we should accelerate market-oriented reforms of urban-rural factors, reduce institutional and technical transaction costs for factor mobility, allow the market to play the decisive role in resource allocation, and better leverage the role of the government to create abundant market vitality for rural-urban integration. In particular, we should focus on the full integration of migrant workers into cities to promote the non-agriculturalization of the rural labor force. We must deeply advance the reform of the "three-rights separation" ^[4] of rural land, improve the price formation mechanism for the transfer of contracted land management rights, steadily and cautiously advance the reform of the rural residential land (zhaijidi) system, and orderly promote the reform of moving rural collective commercial construction land into the market to improve the allocation efficiency of land factors between urban and rural areas. We should strengthen the construction of rural commercial networks, guide industrial and commercial capital to interface with rural resources, and empower rural industrial development through inclusive finance and green finance. We must make full use of digital technology to promote the development of rural business formats such as e-commerce entering the countryside, "Internet + Agriculture," and smart farms, continuously amplifying the positive role of digital technology in linking urban and rural factor markets.

Third, integrate spatial planning to improve the geographical pattern of integrated urban-rural development. Cities and villages are regional complexes with multiple functions. Based on new trends in industrial distribution and factor allocation, we should consider urban-rural spatial planning holistically, promoting the shift of the geographical pattern from a dual structure of "either city or village, as distinct as the Jing and Wei Rivers" ^[5] to a fused state of "both city and village, intertwined and embedded." Therefore, in the process of promoting new-type urbanization, it is necessary to clarify that urbanization is a structural transformation process involving different types of towns and cities. Regarding specific regions, layout should be based on the concepts of city clusters and metropolitan areas—that is, the functional division of labor and synergistic combination of large, medium, and small cities and small towns. For specific cities, the radiation and linkage characteristics of central urban areas, sub-centers, new towns, and central townships need to be more prominent. In the process of promoting comprehensive rural revitalization, a trend is emerging where rural populations are clustering toward county seats and central townships, with the "off-site urbanization" (migration to distant cities) and "local urbanization" (moving to nearby towns) of farmers occurring simultaneously. Consequently, we must improve the level of integration in urban-rural planning, construction, and governance, highlighting the pivotal role of county seats and central townships in county-level development within spatial planning. We should view county seats and central townships as the primary "continuum" from city to countryside, allocating public resources according to population concentration trends and geospatial evolution, and better leveraging the radiation and driving functions of county seats and central townships for villages.

Fourth, integrate the allocation of public goods to leverage the common prosperity effect of integrated urban-rural development. The imbalance in urban-rural development is manifested in many aspects, including the unbalanced allocation of urban-rural public goods, especially basic public goods. To promote new-type urbanization and comprehensive rural revitalization in an integrated manner, we must harmonize the allocation of public goods, targeting goals such as universality and integration to advance relevant institutional reforms. We must continuously narrow the gap between urban and rural residents in accessing public goods, enabling them to share development fruits more equitably. Following the principle of prioritizing the development of agriculture and rural areas, we should further increase support for productive and living public goods in the countryside, particularly by continuously raising the level of fiscal expenditure on rural education, healthcare, and elderly care. On the basis of popularizing compulsory education, we should increase fiscal investment in rural vocational education to continuously improve the human capital level of the various rural labor forces. Guided by the objective of accelerating the narrowing of the urban-rural social security gap, we should increase fiscal protection for the healthcare and elderly care of rural residents year by year. We must accelerate the process of granting urban residency to people moving out of agriculture, highlighting the people-centered value orientation of new-type urbanization.

Fifth, integrate development evaluation methods to enhance the incentive levels for integrated urban-rural development. In promoting integrated urban-rural development, we should view the value of the countryside in the New Era completely and accurately, highlighting its functions in production, daily life, ecology, and culture; we must not ignore the development of agriculture and rural areas simply because the primary sector's share of GDP is declining. Rural revitalization is vital to China's food security. We must strictly implement the system for protecting arable land, improve the protection of agricultural product prices and the fiscal subsidy system, and provide sufficient incentives for grain-growing farmers and major grain-producing areas. We should improve the incentive and restraint mechanisms for promoting high-quality development, giving greater weight to indicators related to agricultural and rural modernization and integrated urban-rural development in the performance appraisal systems of local governments. Furthermore, since the movement of the rural population across the urban-rural divide often involves trans-regional migration, we should establish a mechanism for coordinating the allocation of new urban construction land quotas with the increase in the permanent resident population, thereby increasing the enthusiasm and initiative of local governments in the integrated promotion of new-type urbanization and comprehensive rural revitalization.

Sixth, integrate institutional mechanism reforms to strengthen the institutional safeguards for integrated urban-rural development. To integrally promote new-type urbanization and comprehensive rural revitalization, we must focus on the combination and coordination of different institutional reforms. This includes emphasizing the two-way opening of cities and villages and paying attention to the synergy between reforms of the household registration (hukou) system, the land system, and the social security system to provide more solid institutional safeguards for integrated urban-rural development. It is evident that in China’s integrated promotion of new-type urbanization and comprehensive rural revitalization, the effect of a single institutional reform is limited. We must leverage the synergistic effect of reform, relying on the mutual coordination and systematic integration of multiple institutional reforms to gather abundant momentum for bringing integrated urban-rural development to a new level. In promoting comprehensive rural revitalization, we must advance the reform of the rural land property rights system according to the principle of safeguarding farmers' interests and expanding their rights. By deepening the "three-rights separation" of rural land, we can achieve the reallocation of rural residents' labor and land, incentivizing modern factors such as urban capital, technology, management, and data to enter the countryside, thereby realizing a broader opening of the countryside to the city. We must improve the job creation capacity of urban sectors to promote a deeper level of opening of the city to the countryside.

(Author: Gao Fan, Distinguished Researcher at the Shanghai Xi Jinping Academy of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era and Professor at the School of Economics, Fudan University) Source: Guangming Daily (February 25, 2025, Page 11) Online Editor: Hui Hui