Study On Promotion Of Rural Collective Mutual Assistance Mode Of Feixiang County

At present,China has been into aging society,especially in rural areas that are aging at a faster rate than urban areas.Meanwhile,family supporting function is gradually decreasing with the continuously deepening process of the miniaturization of family scale and centralization of family structure.Traditional concepts such as "Raising children for old age" and "parents,not far" have been impacted.In rural China,there are plenty of empty nesters,one of the most vulnerable elderly groups caused by the new urbanization development and labour migration.Most of them are suffered from serious physical and mental conditions,and without accompanies and care provided by their children or spouses.There have even been tragedies in which them die alone at homes without anyone knows.To address the increasing demand of empty nesters in villages,Qiantun villagers in Feixiang County,Hebei Province,built a collective mutual-aid nursing house for the aged from the bottom-up under the leadership of the Secretary of the village committee.This approach inherited the fine thought of mutual support in China,leading the development and renewal of the concept towards the aged in the countryside.The success of the Feixiang mode has attracted great attention from governments at all levels.In the practice of popularizing the "Feixiang" mode,the "Happiness Project" has been being constructed across the country,with a rapidly increasing coverage rate of mutual-aid nursing house,however,with a significantly low occupancy rate after completion.Many Mutual-aid nursing house even suspended operations,which can not really solve the aging problem in rural areas.In this content,this paper illustrates the background and operation mechanism of Feixiang mode,also highlights that the real motivations of the sustainable development are demand-oriented supply,flexible internal management,diversified supply subjects and the ideological basis of our excellent traditional culture after back to the original intention of the construction of Qiantun Village mutual-aid nursing house.The paper also identifies the unsustainable causes of the current practice of collective mutual assistance in rural areas,including the top-down supply channels,the lack of autonomous management,the political environment under the pressure-based system,the rigid promotion mode and the dislocated supervisors.Finally,according to the previous analysis,seven policy recommendations are proposed: firstly,adhering to the bottom-up,demand-oriented supply mode;secondly,returning the autonomous management rights to the courtyard residents and advocate self-adaptive management reform;thirdly,establishing and improving relevant laws and regulations;additionally,changing the role of the government and restructure the relevant performance appraisal elements;furthermore,designing diversified inferences of different standards in a realistic manner.moreover,mobilizing the enthusiasm of the young elderly,advocating local employment from young rural labour force;the last one is to strengthen publicity and promotion work to promote the concept of old-age renewal.Qiantun Village mutual-aid nursing house in Feixiang County is an innovative practice of collective mutual assistance for the aged in rural areas established by villagers from bottom-up.However,the governments at all levels only considered the external form-of practice,rather than the internal motivation of its sustainable development;they focused more on the construction of mutual-aid nursing house,instead of its follow-up operation of it.On the basis of the unsustainable origin of current practice and the sustainable development experience of Feixiang mode,this paper explored a multi-level and sustainable rural collective mutual assistance nursing mode.It provided a theoretical basis for the current practice of mutual assistance in rural areas to break the ice.