Ensuring More Balanced Urban-Rural and Regional Development Through Reform

Integrated urban and rural development is essential to Chinese modernization. It is therefore imperative to promote integrated urban-rural development and coordinated regional development and ensure more balanced development through reform.

The Resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Further Deepening Reform Comprehensively to Advance Chinese Modernization was adopted at the third plenary session of the 20th CPC Central Committee.

It states, “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.”

We need to improve the institutional mechanisms for integrated urban-rural development. With an emphasis on both urban and rural areas, we will foster a new pattern of urban-rural integrated development.

From an urban perspective, we will improve the institutions and mechanisms for advancing new urbanization and put in place mechanisms for fostering positive interactions between industrial upgrading, population concentration, and urban development.

We will accelerate the process of granting permanent urban residency to people who have moved to cities from rural areas. We will see that eligible people moving from rural areas enjoy the same rights as registered local residents.

We will protect the lawful rights and interests of rural residents applying for permanent urban residency to alleviate any concerns they have.

From a rural perspective, we will consolidate and improve 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 and deepen the reform to separate the ownership rights, contract rights, and management rights of contracted land.

The supporting systems to strengthen agriculture, benefit farmers, and enrich rural areas will be improved, and the investment mechanisms for rural revitalization will be refined, in order to boost rural incomes through a combination of measures.

We will improve the mechanisms for implementing the coordinated regional development strategy.

We will refine the policy frameworks for promoting coordinated development between the western, northeastern, central, and eastern regions. In line with major regional strategies such as the coordinated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta, and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, we will give full play to the comparative advantages of each region to promote the rational flow and efficient concentration of production factors of all types. We will improve integrated regional development mechanisms and build new mechanisms for cooperative development across administrative divisions.

These steps will see us developing a regional economic layout and a territorial space system characterized by complementarity between different regions and territorial spaces.

Editor: Zhang Xian