VI. Promoting Integrated Urban-Rural Development
Integrated urban and rural development is essential to Chinese modernization. We must pursue coordinated progress in new industrialization, new urbanization, and all-around rural revitalization, facilitate greater urban-rural integration in planning, development, and governance across the board, and promote equal exchanges and two-way flows of production factors between urban and rural areas, so as to narrow the disparities between the two and promote their shared prosperity and development.
(20) Improving the institutions and mechanisms for advancing new urbanization
We will put in place mechanisms to foster positive interactions between the processes of industrial upgrading, population concentration, and urban development. We will implement the systems for allowing people to obtain household registration and access basic public services in their place of permanent residence. We will push to see that eligible people who have moved to cities from rural areas enjoy the same rights as registered local residents with regard to social insurance, housing support, and access to compulsory education for their children living with them. The process of granting permanent urban residency to these people will also be accelerated. We will protect the lawful land rights and interests of former rural residents who now hold permanent urban residency, protect, in accordance with the law, their rights to contract rural land, to use their rural residential land, and to share in the proceeds from rural collective undertakings, and explore avenues to facilitate voluntary, paid transfers of these rights.
We will continue to follow the principle that cities should be built by the people and for the people. We will improve urban planning to see that cities of different sizes and small towns develop in coordination with each other to form efficient and closely knit layouts. We will deepen reform of the urban development, operation, and governance systems and step up efforts to change the development models of cities. We will work to create new systems for smart and efficient governance in super-large and mega cities and establish institutions and mechanisms for the highly-integrated development of cities in metropolitan areas. We will deepen reforms to grant super-large towns economic and social management rights that are commensurate with their populations and economic sizes. We will develop sustainable urban renewal models, along with relevant policies and regulations, and strengthen the building of underground utility tunnels and the upgrading of old pipelines. These efforts will help make our cities safer and more resilient.
(21) Consolidating and improving the basic rural operation system
We will move forward with well-organized trials to extend rural land contracts by another 30 years upon the expiration of the second-round contracts, deepen the reform to separate the ownership rights, contract rights, and management rights of contracted land, and develop appropriately scaled agricultural operations. We will improve the framework for agricultural operations and refine the pricing mechanism for the transfer of contracted land management rights. We will encourage farmers to engage in cooperative operations and see that our policies for supporting new types of agribusiness serve to increase rural incomes. We will develop a system of convenient and efficient commercial agricultural services. We will develop new types of rural collective economies, establish related operating mechanisms featuring clearly defined property rights and rational income distribution, and ensure that farmers enjoy more adequate property rights and interests.
(22) Improving supporting systems to strengthen agriculture, benefit farmers, and enrich rural areas
Continuing to prioritize agricultural and rural development, we will improve the investment mechanisms for rural revitalization. We will work to expand county industries that benefit local people, build a diversified food supply system, and foster new industries and new forms of business in rural areas. We will optimize the system of agricultural subsidy policies and develop multi-tiered agricultural insurance schemes. We will refine the regular mechanisms for preventing rural residents from lapsing or relapsing into poverty and establish a system of multi-tiered and categorized support for low-income rural residents and underdeveloped areas. We will improve the long-term mechanisms for managing assets formed with government inputs in the process of poverty alleviation. Applying the experience gained from the Green Rural Revival Program in Zhejiang Province, we will refine the long-term mechanisms for promoting all-around rural revitalization.
We will work faster to improve the mechanisms for ensuring the incomes of grain growers and see that the prices of grain and other major agricultural products remain at a reasonable level. We will coordinate efforts to establish an inter-provincial mechanism for major grain-purchasing areas to compensate major grain-producing areas so as to make substantive headway in incentivizing the latter. We will make coordinated progress in reforming the institutions and mechanisms related to the purchase and sale of grain and the management of grain reserves and develop new regulatory models in this regard. The long-term mechanisms for conserving grain and other types of food will be improved.
(23) Deepening reform of the land system
We will reform and refine the system for offsetting cultivated land that has been put to other uses, manage all types of arable land occupation in a unified manner, and improve the acceptance inspection mechanism to make sure that newly-added arable land is of an equivalent quantity and quality. We will improve the mechanisms for developing, verifying, managing, and protecting high-standard cropland. We will refine the management system for ensuring that arable land is used for planting basic crops. We will allow rural households to put houses under their legal ownership to good use by leasing them out, contributing them in the form of shares, and engaging in cooperative ventures. We will promote orderly reforms for market-based transfers of rural collective land designated for business construction and improve the mechanisms for distributing returns realized from the appreciation of land.
We will optimize land management, refining relevant systems so that they are efficiently aligned with macro policies and regional development needs. We will give priority to the reasonable land needs of leading industries and major projects, with a view to creating greater development space for regions with competitive edge. We will establish a coordination mechanism to link increases in urban construction land quotas for cities with the growth of their permanent residents. We will explore mechanisms for using contiguous land that has been reclaimed and upgraded by the government to offset arable land being used by specific projects and regions. We will optimize land use for urban industry and commerce and accelerate the development of the secondary market for construction land. We will promote mixed land development and use and allow for changes in land use purposes when appropriate, ensuring that idle and inefficiently used land can be put to better use. Targeted steps will be taken to address land use problems in various types of industrial parks. Policies will be formulated for extending land use rights for industrial and commercial purposes and for renewing them upon expiration.
