Integrating Urban-Rural Development (IURD) Through Governance Programmes in China’s Megacities: The Suzhou Model

According to the experiences of U.S. Japan and Korea, it is necessary to offer considerable subsidies to the rural residents and agriculture for ensuring agricultural production when the income in agriculture is much lower than that in secondary and tertiary sectors. Although the subsides for each person is quite high, the total amount is acceptable for the government, because the total amount of rural residents is small.

China has five levels of local government: the provincial, prefecture, district/county, township, and village levels. Suzhou is a prefectural city, and there are six districts and 4 counties under its jurisdiction.

Recognition of a city or region as a pilot or demonstration city for some purposes is important in China. It often leads, directly or indirectly, to additional funding or authority. Suzhou has been designated special by different levels of government a number of times since 2008. In September 2008, the Jiangsu Provincial Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) and the provincial government designated Suzhou the only Pilot City for Comprehensive Supplementary Reform of IURD in the province. In August 2010, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) designated Suzhou a Pilot City for Comprehensive Supplementary Reform. In December 2011, the Ministry of Agriculture designated Suzhou a National Demonstration Site of Agricultural Reform with the theme of IURD reform. In August 2013 and July 2015, the Ministry of Agriculture twice entrusted a third party to conduct mid-term evaluations of the pilot work of agricultural reform in Suzhou. The expert panels’ evaluations were both very positive. In March 2014, China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) designated Suzhou China’s first Pilot City of Comprehensive Reform, whose main mission is to implement the pilot IURD programme.

Suzhou’s GDP of secondary industry ranks 2nd in China in 2017.

Data source: documents from Suzhou government.

The chapter by Haiyan Zou, Feng Luan, Hui Xi, and Ben Yang in this book describes Guizhou Province’s Six Point Beautiful Countryside Action Plan (see Zou et al. 2019).

The village level is not a level in the Chinese administrative system.

Smart Shrinkage is a theory propounded by Zhao et al. (2016) which aims at dealing with the problem that the construction land in the rural area keeps increasing while the population in the rural area decreases during the urbanization in China. The Smart Shrinkage theory suggests that the allocation of land in the rural area should be optimized during urbanization, by policies such as demolishing redundant housing, reclaiming homestead land for arable land, and pooling scattered arable land.