Studies On The Integrative Development Of Hunan New Rural Construction And Urbanization

In the Third Session of the Sixteenth Central Committee of the CPC (Communist Party of China), the balance of urban and rural development is proposed. So far, the construction of new socialist countryside of 14 cities and towns has been constantly advancing under the national instruction. In order to promote the new rural construction in Hunan successfully, we need to have a clear understanding of the degree of balancing the rural construction and urbanization. Only in this way, we can successfully find out the specific problems in the process of new rural construction and modernization in Hunan and propose practical solutions to these problems, which are the starting point and the way of thinking of this research. First, we briefly discuss the concept, characteristics, significance, and aim of new rural construction and modernization. Meanwhile, we analyze the inevitability and necessity of balancing the new rural construction and modernization in Hunan. The measurement of the degree of Hunan new rural construction and urbanization requires the help of a large number of indicators. In scientific, operational, systematic and comparable principle, we build a descriptive index system with the economic subsystem, social subsystem, life subsystems and ecological subsystems and extract the evaluation index system. The basic principles and steps of the two methods of index weighing (network-level analysis and principal components analysis) is introduced in the dissertation, proposing that the degree of urban and rural integration is the comprehensive indicator of the Hunan new rural construction and urbanization. In order to measure the integration of urban and rural areas in Hunan, we have access to a large amount of statistics materials and conduct field surveys to obtain the data of a variety of evaluation indexes. After the investigation of experts, the roles of evaluation indexes are determined by using network-level analysis. The result of the linear weighing of index weighing and index data of cities and towns is the horizontal measure value of the absolute level of the integration of urban and rural areas in 2008, which indicates the obvious unbalanced development of 14 cities and towns in Hunan, i.e., the integration degree of the eastern region is higher than the middle and western region. The difference of integration degree among cities and towns provide us with the direct and important data for reference with which we can judge the stages of the economic development of each city or state. To verify that the result from the network-level analysis is relatively scientific, we analyze the situation of new rural construction and urbanization in 14 cities and states in Hunan with principal components analysis, which shows that the two results are the same. Moreover, we further get the result of cluster analysis by analyzing the factor composite scores with the principal component analysis. The result also supports the conclusion of the network-level analysis. The above analysis is conducted from the horizontal level. We still need to do longitudinal analysis to have a overall understanding of Hunan new rural construction and urbanization. With the request of data accessibility, we only choose five indicators to have a maximized representation of the original evaluative index system., namely, the Engel coefficient of urban residents, rural income difference coefficient, urban binary labor productivity ratio, residents living area ratio, and the proportion of agriculture expending in general budget expenditure. After selecting the indicators, we first analyze the historical evolution of each indicator, then make the evolutionary trends and analyze the result briefly. The evolution results of the indicators suggest that the overall trend of the difference between urban and rural areas is enlarging, even though some of the indicators in certain years indicate the difference continue to shrink. Obviously, this longitudinal analysis of multiple indicators cannot make us know the overall situation of the evolution of the difference between urban and rural areas in Hunan. Accordingly, by using the network-level analysis and principal components analysis, we continue to do the longitudinal analysis of a single index of the integration of urban and rural areas in Hunan from 1978 to 2008. The empirical results show that the integration of urban and rural areas in Hunan from 1978 to 2008 is not so optimistic in terms of relative or absolute synthesis rates. Hunan is still at the stage of the dual structure. The long-term presence of the dual structure is clearly not conducive to the social and economic development of Hunan. It becomes the tough task in the process of the social and economic development of Hunan to eliminate the dual structure. The new village campaign in South Korean is a good example of eliminating the dual structure, which is worth learning. We should learn lessons from the failure of the over-urbanized Latin America. Based on the positive and negative aspects, we examined the process of both the new village campaign in South Korean and over-urbanization in Latin America, thus summing up the successful experience and analyzing the reasons of the failure. However, this is not enough. The more important is that we should recognize not only the advantages and disadvantages of the integration of new rural construction and urbanization in Hunan, but also the opportunities and challenges. By learning from experience and recognizing the reality, we should take measures from the multiple perspectives of economic development, social enterprise, living conditions and ecological environment. Apart from the specific measures, it is essential to build such integration mechanism as a long-term mechanism of promoting agriculture through industries, a mechanism of the free movement of production factors between urban and rural areas, the even distribution mechanism of public facilities between urban and rural areas, a unified mechanism of the formation of urban agglomeration and a mechanism for unifying the urban and rural household registration system. In short, the promotion of the integration of Hunan new rural construction and urbanization requires the initiative spirit of farmers and the leading role of government to eliminate the dual structure of urban and rural areas, making the grand goal of the integration of urban and rural areas come true early.