Minzi Su, China’s Rural Development Policy: Exploring the “New Socialist Countryside”

Excerpt

Su’s timely book is the first in English on the implementation of the “new socialist countryside” policies adopted in early 2006. Su argues that, while the new policies have the potential to significantly ameliorate rural poverty and the enormous wealth gap between rural and urban China, differences in “capacity” at the local level affect the ability of towns and villages to benefit from these policies. In high-capacity places, top-down and bottom-up efforts at economic development and poverty reduction are integrated. In low-capacity areas, however, linkages between state-led and community-led development efforts are weak, and community-led projects are often entirely absent. Su argues that China’s rural development efforts would be improved by following the examples of post-war Japan and South Korea, where farm cooperatives played an important role in disseminating information to farmers, improving rural education and human capital, and creating channels of communication between farmers and government. …