Zhou Li

College of Economics and Management, Zhaoqing University, Zhaoqing 526061, Guangdong, China

Chinese Comprehensive Rural Reform: Institutional Vicissitude, Theoretic Framework and Content Structure

Zhou Li

College of Economics and Management, Zhaoqing University, Zhaoqing 526061, Guangdong, China

The social and economic development level of rural areas, the productivity of agriculture and the life quality of farmers were always the greatest concerns of Chinese Central Government. Therefore, the research related to rural areas, agriculture and farmers had remained as the prominent parts for a long period and would continue to be prominent in the future to build China into a moderately prosperous nation in an all-round way. Chinese rural area had constantly experienced three significant system reforms since 1978, namely the reform of rural management system, the rural tax and fee reform and the rural comprehensive reform. This paper attempted to analyze the theoretic framework and the content structure of the comprehensive rural reform since it was the higher stage of rural institutional vicissitude, which had changed the governance and operation system and thus promoted the great changes to fundamental social and economic system in rural areas. The theoretic framework of comprehensive rural reform covered three aspects in its content, namely the rural governance theory, the government function theory and the public finance theory. The comprehensive rural reform was a complicated system engineering with multiple dimensions and targets mainly including rural political restructuring, rural economic restructuring and rural public products allocation restructuring. The reform had focused on enhancing the vitality of agricultural and rural development, breaking through the urban and rural binary system, and further reducing the disparity between cities and countrysides, so as to realize the urban-rural integration. It was necessary to clarify and understand the key mechanism and intrinsic logic of the rural comprehensive reform, which was helpful to establish the foundation constituted by scientific methodology to implement the reform and evaluation criterion to judge the reform performance.

comprehensive rural reform, institutional vicissitude, theoretic framework, content structure

Introduction

Among the "New Four Modernizations" (the new industrialization, the informationization, the new urbanization and the agricultural modernization), agricultural modernization is still "the shortest board". "Opinions on Enlarging Reform and Innovation to Speed up Agricultural Modernization" was the 12th document issued by the Central Government in 2015 since 2004, which demonstrated the great importance that the Central Government attached to countryside questions.

Chinese rural reform went from bottom to top, starting from farmers' autonomous self-reform in countrysides, which had experienced three significant stages, including the reform of household-based land contract system, the rural taxes and fees reform and the comprehensive rural reform. The system vicissitude always resulted in institutional equilibrium since each system had temporarily achieved the situation of "Pareto optimality" for the great merits, which hadbrought at a certain period. But not all these reforms were satisfying in their performance from the wholeprocess perspective. Some even became the handicaps in the progress of the rural development. For example, household-based land contract system reform was a compromise between the nation and the farmers as two main entities of economic interest, which caused the low benefit in land circulation and low level in farmers' income, while rural tax and fee reform reduced the ability of villages and towns to provide public goods and other social services within their range. The large scale dropped in village-level income also caused the weakness in village-level organizations. Each reform had its own limitation and there should be some new and deeper flaws as time went on.

Therefore, the deepening of the reform needed the carrying-on from top to bottom with top design innovation and the whole advancement. The comprehensive rural reform had become a significant transformation with broad coverage and clear policy orientation, touching upon the deep-seated contradictions and problems in countrysides, including the rural land system, the rural property system, the agricultural management mechanism, the reconstruction of rural organization system, the basiclevel social administration system, the rural public product supply system and other domains. The comprehensive rural reform should take the crucial system innovation as the breakthrough and consider the elements disposition system reform as the foundation, advancing the related system transformation with different characteristics and functions. Theoretical innovation and innovations in system and mechanism were conducive to the deepening of the comprehensive rural reform and solving the problems in the overall development of urban-rural integration. The practice of the rural comprehensive reform needed theoretic promotion, and the deepening of the reform needed the instruction of a clear theoretic framework. However, the current research had not proposed a clear theoretic framework and content structure yet, which made it difficult either for executors or supervisors in revealing the overall appearance of the progress and the essence of some concrete questions. A clear theoretic framework and content structure was required to provide theoretic reference with clear definition of the research boundary and leading direction to speed up the implementation of the rural comprehensive reform.

Chinese countryside reform was initiated by farmers' household contract responsibility system, in which farmers took the position as the main role in the system vicissitude, fully displaying their originality and creativity by opening the door to Chinese countryside reform. At the same time, the government was also the indispensable main entity in the vicissitude of Chinese rural system reform, whose support and guidance were keys to the success of the rural reform. The farmers' creativity and the government's support interacted to form join forces and transformed the overall system environment and system arrangement, and thus created the macroscopic conditions for the rural economic and social development. Generally speaking, comprehensive rural reform was the higher stage of rural institutional vicissitude, which changed the governance and operation system and thus promoted the great changes of fundamental social and economic system in rural areas.

Institutional Vicissitude

Household-based land contract system reform

Induced vicissitudes always originated from systematic inequality, causing a kind of new external interest which could not be obtained from the existing system arrangement, and the innovative entities could be individuals, groups, or private organizations. When studying the system vicissitude theory and the econometric theory, we could easily find out that it was the external interest factor that induced the system vicissitude. The creation of the household-based land contract system was also a typical kind of induced institutional vicissitude, which helped farmers obtain the extra profit by innovations in incentive system and supervisory system which former systems could notoffer (Lin and Hu, 1988).

The change of the economic system inevitably led to other aspects of institutional changes. Rural operating system innovation based on household land contract system also aroused other institutional changes in rural areas, including institutional changes in village governance, agricultural product distribution system, rural industrial structure, and so on. As the market entity, farmers had broken through the highly centralized planned economic system and developed a relatively independent family-owned business, which triggered a series of institutional changes in Chinese rural economic systems, economic running patterns and industrial structure, and thus became the basis for sustainable development of agriculture, rural areas and farmers' development.

The land system vicissitude started from calculating remuneration in relation to output in the beginning and resulted in establishing the household-based land contract system as a kind of contractor responsibility system. Although the rural household contract management system had wide adaptability and exuberant vitality in adapting to the development of agricultural modernization and agricultural socialization, there were some contradictions between the current development of agricultural modernization and the socialist new countryside construction. For example, household-based land contract system had not been combined with market mechanism to drive the agricultural modernization (Xu and Zhang, 2001). It was the path dependence in the evolution of land property right system once existed in historical period of feudalism that resulted in household-based land contract system at present time, which would continue to drive rural land system toward consolidated farmers' right of long-termed use and the secured right of land transfer (Lan and Feng, 2002). Therefore, household contract responsibility system showed some typical characteristics of class nature, experiment and transitivity (Wang, 2006). Anyway, household-based land contract system was a historical choice under the specific social and economic conditions, which changed the rural economic pattern and established the foundation for the following reforms.

After the reform of rural management system, the household-based land contract system replaced the collective production, the family became the independent management entity and the collective land started to be apportioned to each household by contract. In the early years of implementation on the household-based land contract system, the farmers could basically endure the taxes and fees burden. But the quick increase of the rural taxes and fees, especially the rapid occurrence of all kinds of administrative service "fees" combined with many kinds of apportions and fund-risings, had resulted in the conditions described as "one tax was light, two taxes were heavy, and the apportions were bottomless." The farmers' burden became overweight at that time and the demand for reform to rural tax and fee system became urgent.

Rural tax system reform

The national conditions of rural overpopulation, the unreasonable economic system, emphasizing industry while scorning agriculture, as well as low-level agricultural productivity caused the heavy burden to farmers. Therefore, the rural tax and fee reform aimed to change the disadvantageous system environment and reduce the heavy burden to farmers. In 1991, He raised a question, "What is the second step for China's rural reform?" which was the first time to appeal for the rural tax and fee reform theoretically, symbolizing that Chinese rural reform had entered the exploration stage in the rural tax and fee reform. The rural tax and fee reform was the second significant system transformation that China had experienced since the rural reform of the management system in 1978. The reform had undergone seven years' vicissitude process and had obtained positive results by reforming the tax and fee system. Many scholars thought that it was the farmers' overweight burden that directly led to the rural tax and fee reform. It put an end to the 2 600 years' royal grain taxes and the long-term mechanism on increasing the peasant's income was set up. Meanwhile, the rural tax and fee reform was the system background of rural comprehensive reform in the new time and had the path dependence influence on the development of comprehensive rural reform. But the current rural tax and fee reform could not solve the long-term financial problem between public products and service supplies in towns and villages.

According to the result of an investigation on the rural taxes and fees reform in Anhui Province, there were constant increase in rural collective deducts, lacking of official restraint method and mechanism, shortage in rural distribution system and some other reasons which caused the overweight burden to farmers (Zhou, 2001). Researchers pointed out some problems exiting in rural tax and fee reform, including unfairness in taxes, mismatch in land taxes account, high nominal tax rate and the discrepancy of land expropriation price. Besides, there were some contradictions between rural tax reform and grain circulation system as well as between farmers' alleviating burden and the simplification of government apparatus and so on. Therefore, the rural tax and fee reform should be planned with overall design, synchronous implementation, whole advancement and comprehensive supplementary reforms at the same time (Fan, 2001).

A longitudinal study on the experiment site of the rural taxes and fees reform showed that the rural taxes and fees reform had some problems during the process, such as the public financial contradictions between counties and towns were intensified; the basic education was lacking of efficient investment; the village-level public programs were in serious shortage; some new kinds of burden were caused by tax-uneven. And moreover, the reform was confronted with the challenges to settle the village debt, the legal loophole in agricultural taxes imposition and the difficulties to provide countryside social security etc (Jia and Zhao, 2002).

The rural tax and fee reform also brought some negative effects to the villages and towns' financial revenue, including that the total income reduced, the revenues lost balance, the means of getting income reduced as well as the stability and autonomy of income degraded. Therefore, scientific financial revenue of township should be constructed to focus on taxes category design, sturdy system of the government's transfer payment, standard rent system and reinforcement in debt management (Li and Zhu, 2005).

Researchers found some evidence in some southeast coastal areas of China, confirming that the farmers' burden had changed in form after the rural tax and fee reform (Su et al., 2007). Since there was an insufficiency in fund investment and lacking of reasonable shift payment system, the farmers' burden changed from policy-defined to non-policy-defined, from dominant to recessive, which turned into tuition fees, administrative fees, and fees for other social service issues.

The rural tax and fee reform emerged at the historic moment to reduce the heavy burden on farmers. Before the reform, rural tax and fee system displayed "chaos" in items, procedures, supervisions and so on. The essence of rural tax and fee reform was to improve the original countryside tax and fee system, eliminate the institutional factors which caused farmers' overweight burden, straighten out the assignment relations among nation, collectives and farmers, establish reasonable tax and fee system among the central committee, the basal government and farmers. Additionally, a persistent-effective mechanism was innovated to prevent chaotic charge, random fund raising and penalty, and a series of reform policies were set up to support the agricultural development and secure farmers' lawful benefit.

The system vicissitude of rural tax and fee reform had achieved some positive results in changing the village finance and taxation system, shifting the work center of township politics from "profit manager" to "service provider". But the vicissitude still had some problems concerning the system of administrative control in villages and towns, the financial system in counties and town, the village-level organizationalstructure, the rural commonweal undertakings, and the rural compulsory education and so on. All these problems led to the demand for a new system reform with latent anticipated income, and finally resulted in another new stage of induced system vicissitude.

Comprehensive rural reform

The rural tax and fee reform was firstly demanded by some grass roots. The unreasonable system of benefit allocation had caused farmers' demands for system reform, so farmers were the initial interest group of the institutional change. Later, the central government recognized the institutional demands and believed that such institutional changes could bring profits to more parties. So the reform was carried out for peasants and basal department organizations by combining the induced and gradual institutional changes. Therefore, the central government was the secondary acting group of these changes.

After the tripartite gambling, a new system had substituted the old one to arrange a new assignment way of benefits from which farmers and central government had obtained the latent anticipated income. But the basal department organizations lost the vested interest and then the financial inadequacy appeared. In another word, rural tax and fee reform could not solve the long-term financial problem in rural public products and service supplies (Feng et al., 2002). Therefore, a new coordinated reform must be carried out involving the construction of rural public financial system, the reform of villages and towns' organization, the old debt resolution, the finance system for rural compulsory education, the general finance and taxation management system, the general financial transfer payment system and so on.

Canceling the agricultural taxes was just the first step (Zhou, 2001). The problems exiting in legal system which made the farmers bear overweight burden had not been solved. Therefore, rural comprehensive reformation was needed and should focus on the institutional reform of villages and towns, funds guarantee on compulsory education and financial safeguard mechanism on the grassroots and so on.

Researchers made a comparative study on the supply conditions of public goods and the system in countryside before and after the tax and fee reform, and put forward that public supplies system based on public finance and rural community infrastructure had reduced the farmers' heavy burdens and strengthened farmers' independence (Fan, 2001). However, the lack of rural public goods was still serious because of the shortage of national financial resource and low level of community organizational ability.

The rural tax and fee reform didn't solve the system and mechanism problems which created farmers' burden, and some public products even relied on farmers' self-raised public investment (Huang, 2007). The rural system of administrative control and the working mechanism in rural areas had not been set up yet; the rural financial investment mechanism and the village-level operating mechanism in funds had not been established. Therefore, the rural comprehensive reform should be immediately initiated to consolidate the tax and fee reform and set up the persistent effect mechanism which helped to prevent the farmers' burden from rebounding.

The rural comprehensive reform was the third significant system vicissitude that Chinese countryside was experiencing, involving various aspects of rural transformation and innovation as a systematic engineering. The rural comprehensive reform focused on the following aspects: transforming the government function to advance the villages and towns' organization reform; carrying out the safeguard mechanism in educational expenditure and advancing the rural compulsory education reform; strengthening the basic finance supporting and advancing the reform of financial management system in counties and town. Besides, the reform also helped to improve the rural education, infrastructure construction and social commonweal understating which directly correlated the farmer' benefits.

As the entity of the system vicissitude, the central government had successively abolished the oldsystem and established a new one, including the basic village management structure, the rural public finance system, the rural management operation system, the construction mechanism of rural commonweal undertakings, the supply mechanism of rural public product and so on. However, no reform could be accomplished at one stroke. In the first stage, the rural comprehensive reform did not completely solve the disparity problems of economic and social development between cities and countries, and the situations of uneven disposition of rural public resource and service were also not changed completely. Meanwhile, because of lacking of farmers' participation and interaction, the governmental behaviors deviated from the farmers' wishes in the first stage of reform. Therefore, effective measures were required to deepen and expand the content of the rural comprehensive reform, improve the pattern of disposing public resource of city and country, construct the integrated public service system of cities and countries and so on.

The rural comprehensive reform involved some links and aspects on adjusting the rural relations between economic base and superstructure which did not adapt to the productive forces with the goal to gradually establish a highly effective rural administration system and operation mechanism, a public financial system covering cities and countries and a long-term mechanism to alleviate farmers' burden and promote comprehensive coordinated development in rural economy and society. The reform in household register system, the land system and the agriculture management system must be the direction of rural comprehensive reform no matter in current time or in the future.

Theoretic Framework

Rural governance theory

The rural government stood in the farmers' point with a good governance aspiration to make majority farmers benefited from the Chinese modernization and new system arrangement. Moreover, farmers' daily life, even their spiritual life, had become another important aspect, when deepening the reform of rural governance. The modern system reform became more comprehensive under the impetus of strong state power and market factors, and thus became the regular system and governmental logic in current rural society. Zhang Hou'an, Professor of the Rural Problem Research Center of Central China Normal University, proposed the concept "rural governance" for the first time in 1988, suggesting that rural public authority regulated villagers' behavior in all kinds of relations and systems, aiming to organize and manage the public affairs of rural community, which helped farmers pursue the maximized public interest of rural community and promote the development level of rural society.

The rural governance mainly focused on organizing, governing and regulating the rural community by using public authority, so as to establish the rural order and promote the village development (Wu, 2006), which should be regarded as a kind of comprehensive administration, covering the rural politics, economy, society and culture etc. This administration observed the village life through a more broad perspective, not constrained by pure democratized villagers' autonomy (Yuan, 2009).

The rural governance could be regarded as a kind of comprehensive administration, in which the entity (often referred to the village committee) conducted independent management by a certain method, either self-management or village-committee-management. Usually there were three basic conditions for rural governance, namely human resource conditions, infrastructure conditions, social and cultural conditions. The human resource conditions mainly referred to village people's capabilities either in production or operation, including their creativity, knowledge, skills and so on; the infrastructure conditions referred to the material base to launch the village governance, including geographic position, public facilities, planter structure, economic development level, economic type, and so on; and the social and cultural conditionsreferred to the constitution of specific village culture and the local common recognition, including representative village people, village public opinions, intensity of communities, village habits, customs and common laws etc.

The rural governance could also be defined as Chinese villagers' making self-management in order to realize the orderly development of the rural society (He, 2007). After the government organization reform, the villages and towns took the role of authorized agency to concentrate on the public management and service. At the same time, the villagers' autonomous organizations started to fully display their functions in establishing social medium organizations (either profit or non-profit), promoting rural industrial cooperation, settling civil disputes and maintaining social orders etc. All these raised the independent management level of the countryside, and laid a sound system foundation for providing overall public products.

Government function theory

In the development of rural areas, agriculture and farmers, the grass-root governments were the direct organizational supplier of rural public products and with an important function to improve the entire rural social benefit. Therefore, grass-root governments should not only be clear about their role and function but also their responsibility as the most important behavior entity (Zhu, 2004).

The essential target of the reform was to transform the government's function, strengthen the countryside public management and public service, provide the public service in urgent need of farmers, improve farmers' production and living conditions, and create good environment for rural economy and social development. The present situation of Chinese rural township organizations suggested that the tentative plan for the reform of township institutions would be accomplished by two steps: first, take 3-5 years to transform the functions of township institutions, and then another 3-5 years to cancel the township government and set up country government (Ma and Wu, 2005).

The connotation of modern public finance in the trinity framework of "market-finance-government" suggested that the public finance was a kind of financial system to adapt to the market economy, which got mature with the evolution of the market economic system, and reflected the distinctiveness of public finance (Lv, 2006).

The concept of "equalization" and "average" should be distinguished by studying their definitions, and the equalization of basic public service did not mean the average basic public service (Qiu, 2010). Equalization was based on the equitable principle and the average social level to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor, and the urban and the rural. It was the government's responsibility to provide roughly equal basic public products and services to adapt to the development stage of economic society.

The rural government function reform had its key domains and links with primary and subordinate relations within it. In rural governance practice, the first function of the rural government was to enhance the investment in constructing agricultural infrastructure, including country road network, irrigation and water conservancy facility, countryside electrical network, medical and health care facility, communication network, and professional market facility for agricultural products and so on. Secondly, it was arranged to implement compulsory education and develop farmers' vocational education to improve the farmers' culture and technology quality. Thirdly, it was required to increase the scientific research investment in agriculture, reform the management system of science and technology to support the development of modern agriculture. The public finance was the key resource limited for the grass-root governments to carry out the above functions.

Public finance theory

The key role of public finance in securing the realization of government's functions was displayed from two aspects: first, the government's function hadtransferred from focusing on economic development to public service. Second, in the process of deepening public finance reform, safeguarding social stability and providing public products had become the most important functions in financial reform.

After countryside tax and fee reform, the rural financial revenue was reduced at large scale. The phenomenon that villages and towns revenue were in bad conditions did generally exist in most rural areas, even before the reform. Some villages and towns were even in heavily debt. Chinese county and township's financial problem was the result of accumulative contradictions on basic-level government's financing, owing to lacking of enough support during the process of social structural transformation, which was closely related to the existing problems of the governmental fiscal system and also the lagging in constructing market system for rural productive elements (Jia and Bai, 2002).

The Research Team of the Scientific Research Institution of the National Treasury Department discovered that the village debt in the transitional period had become a heavy burden to influence the safety of China's finance and stability in the rural society. Since the debt structure and creditors were complicated and had great societal influence, it was necessary to adopt the means of comprehensive demonstration and classify problems by categories. Solutions might include the settling of debts, the transferring of rural government function, and the reforming of administrative system and so on.

Counties' finance and township's finance and tax system were not canonical since all kinds of them required public expenditure lacked normative source of tax revenue (Chen et al., 2005). This was not only the reason why peasants bored heavy burdens, but also the main systematic factors that prevented peasants from increasing household income and caused the inadequacy in of sustainable driving force in rural economic development. Because of the uncertainty of the governmental function range, the capital input and beneficiary in the transitional period, there were always disputes on the publicity of the specific articles. Therefore, it must confirm the specific targets be guaranteed by public finance through political procedure or referendum (Wu and Li, 2010).

The key point of the financial system reform was to diminish the rural finance inadequacy and distortion, explore the system arrangement to adapt to the rural financial demand of the peasants, the rural cooperative organizations, and the small and mediumsized enterprises' development. The function of rural financial system could be strengthened by increasing the rural credit and improving the rural financial service. Rural financial system reform was designed to meet the multi-level and pluralistic financial needs. A totally new rural finance system with multiple functions should be built up by deepening the rural credit cooperative reform, strengthening agricultural banks and other commercial banks' responsibilities to support agricultural development, transforming the rural policy-based finance from policy-oriented to market-oriented and business-sustainable, and establishing new rural finance system to provide safeguard for stable and sustainable investment in agricultural development.

The theoretic framework of the comprehensive rural reform could be summarized in Table 1.

Content Structure

Rural political restructuring

As a system supplier and coordinator, the governments' system restructuring and consummation decided the efficiency of the whole reform. Rural political restructuring was mainly composed of rural administrative system reform and rural public finance system reform with the aim to establish the decentralization system and focus on the function of public service, and finally form an effective and coordinative function division among government, market and social organizations.

Rural administrative system reform took the township regime as an irreplaceable part of the nationaladministrative system. It not only adjusted the basiclevel organization framework of counties, towns and villages, but also consolidated the power restriction and supervision to extend the rural democracy range. Moreover, reasonably planning town scale, defining township function and ascertaining responsibilities were also required. The property of town's public institutions was also required to change from administration-adherent to community-independent. Furthermore, towns's public institutions had to reform the leading system and strengthen the basic-level democratic construction so as to ensure the positive effect of autonomous management mechanism on rural governance.

Table 1 Theoretic framework of comprehensive rural reform

Rural public finance system reform was a gradual progress to finally cover the whole rural areas. At the initial stage, it should first arrange investment in the rural public products and services which were urgently needed, widely beneficial and with strong publicity for peasants. In system arrangement, the government needed to design the rural public finance policy systematically, integrate and optimize the resource allocation, including increasing the financial support for agriculture, opening up the channel of raising funds for agricultural development and rural infrastructure, setting up a sound protection system for rural self-determination system and communities' public products supplying mechanism.

Rural economical restructuring

Rural economical restructuring covered rural management system reform, the reform of the peasants' organization, rural resources and essential productive elements market reform, and rural financial system reform.

The practice and development of the modern property right theory indicated that the property right was a kind of right restraint with divisibility, which meant that the property right was just one form of a system arrangement. In the advancement of the countryside reform, the property right system was the safeguard of peasants' basic rights and interests for livelihood. Therefore, the property right system reform was crucial in the whole countryside comprehensive reforms with the aim to enhance the efficiency of the system itself with clarity and tradability.

Rural management system reform focused on policies optimization to ensure the peasants' right of the contractual operation including the right of possession, usufruct, benefit and disposition. The content of the disposition right should cover the right to transfer, rent, invest and lease. It was necessary to promote the land circulation through separation of the property right, the contract right and themanagement right, and thus to nurture the new type of management entity, construct the new type of agricultural management system and develop new type of scale operation, aiming to realize the intensification, specialization, systematization and socialization of agricultural production.

Generally speaking, there were two ways to enhance the peasants' organizational degree: one was market orientation, and the other was policy orientation. The market orientation depended upon the benefit-sharing mechanism under which peasants spontaneously cooperated with each other in different aspects such as technology, information and distribution channels, while the policy orientation aimed to encourage peasants to develop all kinds of cooperative economic organizations and provide better environment for agricultural development.

The current market system of resources (i.e. land resource) and other essential productive elements still maintained the urban-rural dualistic structure in China. Farmers' rights to dominate the land resources and other essential elements were relatively weak. Therefore, the rural resources and essential productive elements market reform needed to take steady steps to integrate the urban and rural market with the general principle that urban and rural resources were treated equal in value.

Reform of rural public product supply

The reform of rural public product supply included the reform of public product supply in rural communities, rural labor market reform and the reform of household register system.

The rural property right system, the rural governance system and the household register system were the crucial systems decided the progress and the degree of the whole system reform, in which property right system was the foundation, the government organization reform was the goal, and the reform of countryside property right system and the household register system were the path dependence.

The reform of rural public products supplying system focused on equalization in rural-urban public education, basic medical service, infrastructure and social security etc. To deepen the rural education reform, the government should promote an equal resource allocation system for a balanced rural-urban education. The reform of rural public products supply meant to optimize the public service system, improve the public service pattern, enhance the public service quality and gradually establish a stable and diversified public service supply. Furthermore, it was necessary to enhance the community's decision-making ability, consolidate the democratic decision-making mechanism and improve the supervision system.

To accelerate the transfer of surplus rural labor forces and realize full employment of peasants were the two important objectives for the rural labor market reform. To solve the farmers' problem fundamentally, the government should make full use of the comparative superiority of labor force, develop laborintensive industry and encourage the rural labor to move to cities (Lin, 2015). Rural labor market reform aimed to establish a unified employment service system to integrate rural and urban labor market and eliminate the system barrier in free shift and employment of rural labor force. Rural labor market reform also meant to make an overall employment plan, eliminate the unreasonable limits and discrimination for peasant workers, and establish a unified, standard and well-ordered labor market which was equal for urban-rural laborers in employment competition.

The household register system reform was the key to break the duality social structure of the city and the country with the primary purpose to ensure the freedom of living and migration and eliminate the influence of unequal system on urban and rural residents' rights attached to the registered permanent address. The reform of the household register system did not aim to cancel the household registration management, but to eliminate the inequality in urban-rural systems including labor employment system, housing system and education system etc. In addition, both of the new urban citizens and originalurban residents should be given the equal rights and obligations in order to establish an integrated urbanrural household register system.

The comprehensive rural reform should take the crucial system innovation as the breakthrough and consider the elements disposition system reform as its foundation, advancing the related system transformation with different focuses and functions. The household register system reform and the design must be coordinated with correlated system reform like public system, the land system, the employment system and so on with the hypothesis of rural-urban unification to obtain the substantive breakthrough in equal inhabitant and employment right.

The content structure of the comprehensive rural reform can be summarized in Table 2.

Table 2 Content structure of comprehensive rural reform

Conclusions

The primary purpose of the comprehensive rural reform was to guarantee the peasants' benefits, defend peasants' democratic rights, emancipate and develop the rural productive forces, and finally realize the urban-rural integration. Practice had proved that the reform had been a significant system innovation and social transformation, which explored three-rightseparation system (separation of ownership, right to contract, and managerial right) to speed up the land circulation, which laid a solid foundation to the intensified production and industrialized development. Moreover, it pressed ahead free flowing of the ruralurban productive elements, free migration of rural populace, and equal rights to share the achievements of Chinese reform and opening-up. The external environment was the macroscopic constitutive conditions which decided the space and resource limit of the reform. While the intrinsic foundation was the society nature and the farmers' desire for a happy life, the joint force constituted the strongest impetus propelling the reform. By establishing the highly effective rural administrative system and operation mechanism, the rural public finance system was expected to fully cover the supply of rural public products, especially the rural compulsoryeducation and basic medical insurance. The political restructuring, the economical restructuring and the public product allocation restructuring were designed to enhance the healthy development of rural public welfare and promote all-round social progress in rural areas, so as to finally realize the urban-rural integration.

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F30

A

1006-8104(2015)-03-0079-12

Received 27 January 2015

Supported by the Funding from the Doctoral Research Foundation of Zhaoqing University (2013)

Zhou Li (1968-), female, vice professor, Ph. D, engaged in the research of industrial innovation and system reform. E-mail: brzhouli@163.com