Research On The Development Of Rural Middle - Income Group In China During The Period Of Reform

Accelerating the development of China’s rural middle-income groups are of great significance to reinforce the mass base of the party in power under the new situation, advance all the practice activities of socialist construction, such as smooth advancing our current conduct of expanding domestic demand, building a socialist harmonious society, building a moderately prosperous society, socialist modernization construction, and realizing the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and explore effective ways of crossing the middle-income trap.The holding of the third plenary session of the eighteenth Committee of C.P.C in November in 2013 marked that China formally entered a new stage of comprehensive reform and opening, and the meeting adopted a new policy agenda, “CPC Central Committee’s Decision on Several Major Issues of Comprehensive Deepening Reform”, which has far-reaching implications. This not only provides a rare major historical opportunity for the development of the rural middle-income groups, but also provides new materials, new ideas and new perspectives for the theorists to do research on the development problems of rural middle-income groups. In view of this, I chose cultivating rural middle-income groups as a subject of study exploratory in the hope of enriching the theoretical study on China’s rural middle-income groups and providing some reference for the practice of cultivating China’s rural middle-income groups.The full text is divided into seven parts, and the specific content of each part is as follows.The first part is the introduction of the dissertation. This part firstly expounds the research background and significance of the topic issues raised, secondly, summarizes and review s foreign existing research about rural middle class and domestic existing research about rural middle-income groups, and then in turn expounds the research ideas and framework of the dissertation, research priorities as well difficulty, research methods and potential innovations and shortcomings of the research.The second part is the definition of basic concepts and the elaboration of basic theories associated with the study. This part successively makes a distinction on the concept among classes and strata and groups, defines the criteria for the classification of rural middle-income groups and its concept, discriminates a number of concepts that are similar to rural middle-income groups, overviews Comrade Deng Xiaoping’s thought of “early-common prosperity”, the Chinese Communist Party’s policy of the expansion of middle-income earners since the Sixteenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping’s thought of “benefiting the agriculture kulak”, olive social structure theory,and introduces the basic analytical tools required for the study, which include classification of middle-class adopted by Li Peilin and Zhang Yi, human capital theory of Schultz, the SWOT analysis tools of Management Science and comprehensive deepening reform theory of Communist Party of China.The third part examines respectively the mechanisms and processes that Chinese rural middle-income groups emerge since the reform and opening up, the status quo and basic features of Chinese rural middle-income groups and the development problems of Chinese rural middle-income groups. To be specific, the total mechanism that Chinese rural middle-income groups emerge since the reform and opening up is the system transition from planned economy system to socialist market economic system and the improvement to the new system, and the specific mechanisms include the reform and improvement of rural economic and social system, Deng Xiaoping’s “first rich policy” proposed, the loosing of rural and urban barriers and Land Transfer’s pushing. The processe that Chinese rural middle-income groups emerge since the reform and opening up has gone through four stages of the process from smallholders’ return, homogenization of the peasant class’ s beginning,rural middle-income groups’ s emergency to the size of rural middle-income groups’ gradual growing.And the Status quo of Chinese rural middle-income groups include: group size accounts for three percent of the rural labor force, it is mainly made of semi marginal rural middle-income groups and core rural middle-income groups at present; there is still large room to improve for group quality, sense of happiness and feeling of pressure in life coexist, mentality of the group members are more active and healthy, the backbone role of group begin to show. The basic characteristics of China’s rural middle-income groups are as follows: judging from quantitative characteristics, although the base number of group is great, the proportion is smaller; judging from members’ occupational constitute, it presents a variety of features; judging from group distribution, the regional distribution of group is roughly balanced; judging from economic and social status, there are differences between the group members; judging from consumption level, it lies in the middle level in rural areas; judging from group identity, the degree of subjective recognition of group members is higher; judging from political identity, the degree of political identity towards the party and country is also higher.Besdes, the major problems that Chinese rural middle-income groups exist are as follows: the size of group is still small; the overall quality of group is not high; there is still mining space for the role that land plays in promoting famer’s income; the role that science and technology plays in promoting famer’s income is not enough;income levels are relatively low; the income disparities among members are greater; their economic status is still unstable; the facing life stress is greater.The fourth part is a SWOT Analysis about the growth environment of China’s rural middle-income groups in the era of comprehensive deepening reform. To be specific, in this part author makes a comprehensive and in-depth analysis on the environmental factors which include existing strengths and weaknesses as well as the facing opportunities and challenges that China’s rural middle-income groups seek to achieve further development in the era of comprehensive deepening reform.The fifth part outlines the international and regional experience in promoting farmers’ income and enhancing their quality and its implications for China mainland, taking the experience of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and France as reference.The sixth part elaborates the basic principles, methodology and strategies of nurturing China’s rural middle-income groups in the era of comprehensive deepening reform. This part expounds firstly the basic principles and methodology of nurturing China’s rural middle-income groups, and then proposes a series of countermeasures that state should take to nurture favorable environment for the development of rural middle-income groups in terms of ideology, politics, economic, culture, society, ecological civilization and legislation, moreover, also discusses the measures that farmers self-cultivate and rise up to rural middle-income groups.The seventh part concludes the paper and makes prospects. This part firstly overviews the basic conclusions of the dissertation, and then simply prospects on the development trend of China’s rural middle-income groups.The research methods used in this study mainly include method of literature research, research method of qualitative combined with quantitative and interdisciplinary research method. Furthermore, interdisciplinary research method also includes dialectical thinking methodology of philosophy, the basic stance viewpoints and methods of scientific socialism, stratum analysis method of sociology, method of class theory combined with stratum theory,SWOT analysis methods in management studies and other research methods.Conclusions of the study of this paper include the following five aspects, namely, fostering rural middle-income groups is the objective requirements of economic and social development, the size of rural middle-income groups is still small and its development is not yet complete at present, the growing environment that rural middle-income groups face is more good than harm, cultivating rural middle-income groups is a systematic project and it requires leveraging the comprehensive deepening reform, state’s assistance is the external reason while farmers’ self-cultivation is internal reason.