New Rural Reconstruction Movement - China

Description

"What is happening instead in many countries is the huge growth of urban slums as people migrate from the countryside into cities that contain insufficient employment opportunities. Around one-third of the world’s city dwellers now live in slums.81

In response to these realities a powerful New Rural Reconstruction Movement has emerged in China—associated in particular with the pioneering ecological thinking of Wen Tiejun—that rejects large-scale farming-agribusiness systems as a viable pattern of development in today’s circumstances. Instead agriculture is to be rooted in the village system of collective land rights (the product of the Chinese Revolution) and the utilization of traditional knowledge of some 240 million small household farmers—further informed by contemporary ecological science. This transformation of food production and socio-ecological relationships also involves expanding rural education, medical services, and infrastructure. This strategy is “committed to the Three Ps (the People’s Principles): people’s livelihood, people’s solidarity, and people’s cultural diversity.” (http://monthlyreview.org/2012/12/01/the-planetary-emergency)

More Information

• Wen Tiejun, et. al., “Ecological Civilization, Indigenous Culture, and Rural Reconstruction in China,” Monthly Review 63, no. 9 (February 2012): 29–35; Wen Tiejun, “Deconstructing Modernization,” Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 49, no. 4 (Summer 2007): 10–25.

URL = http://monthlyreview.org/2012/02/01/ecological-civilization-indigenous-culture-and-rural-reconstruction-in-china

• Addressing Rural Crisis in Developing Countries. Lessons from the New Rural Reconstruction Programme in China. By Wen Tiejun. South South Dispatch 2, 2014