China View: China’s Rural Rethink, The Chinese Rural Revitalization Program
wang binghua
Since the 1990s, China has been one of the fastest-growing nations in the world. Yet, beneath the surface, these economic gains have been highly concentrated in its eastern coastal regions. As China’s rise to an export superpower has relied on international markets and a global commitment to free trade, its agricultural heartlands have not seen the rapid growth typical of the now famous megacities like Shanghai, Beijing, or Hong Kong.
The newest generations of Chinese citizens have migrated to these large cities in search of a higher quality of life, leaving the rural areas increasingly populated by older generations. In 2017, PRC leadership began a long-term project to reinvest the nation’s newfound wealth into its traditional and cultural motherlands. The question remains: are these investment plans enough to stem the migratory tide? Or is the trend of depopulating rural regions only set to increase as the lure of bright lights and urban comforts draws more youth to their interiors?
Reform By the numbers
The 2017 rural revitalization plan has set out concrete goals for rural regions to achieve. The goals included stabilizing land use for food production, increasing grain production, raising rural per capita income, and implementing ecological regulations such as fishing bans or reforestation initiatives. As of 2025, the progress of these goals is not clear-cut. China’s grain production achieved a 1.6 percent increase in 2023, bouncing back from a 2018 low caused by Donald Trump’s first-term trade war. According to the China National Bureau of Statistics, the annual per capita income of rural residents was less than half that of their urban counterparts in 2024, at $3,190 USD compared to $7,451 USD for urban residents.
A study conducted by Xiong et al. quantitatively analyzed various factors of rural revitalization: industrial exports and number of laborers, ecological conditions such as soil acidity and forest coverage, levels of investment in cultural preservation and tourism income, per capita income levels for rural citizens, and infrastructure investments such as new road construction and the rate of medical insurance per citizen. Combining this data, Xiong et al. created a numerical value for each province to represent its mean development. Using Sichuan and Henan provinces as examples, the rural development rating from 2017 to 2021 varied: 0.326, 0.342, 0.31, 0.354, and 0.328 each respective year for Sichuan province, while Henan scored 0.31, 0.306, 0.306, 0.340, 0.351, and 0.319. From the data standpoint, it appears these rural revitalization efforts have an uncertain impact. The data showed that barely any gains were made in a five-year period. As a whole, the regions surveyed showed a 1.73% increase from 2011 to 2021. Growth is certainly occuring, but at a relatively low rate compared to the level of investment and the pronounced importance of the initiative. One could argue that the COVID-19 pandemic had a negative impact on this campaign; however, many provinces showed an increase in their revitalization score in 2020.
Legal & land rights reform
Alongside discrete increases in agricultural production and rural land utilization, there is an effort to modernize rural land rights for increased agency of rural communities and citizens. The basis for land rights and the nucleus of the family unit is the household registration (Hukou) system. Established in 1958, the Hukou system was developed to control population movement and facilitate central planning. It registered each person as agricultural or nonagricultural within a specific city, town, or region, and internal migration required official approval. Urban citizens received noticeably more state benefits, such as housing, healthcare, and food allotments. This was due to the Chinese modernization program, which sought to rapidly urbanize the country by offering incentives for rural-to-urban migration.
Hukou reforms targeting an ease of legal transition from rural status to urban status were part of the broader market-driven reforms of the early 1990s. These reforms allow a rural citizen to purchase an urban status for themselves and be eligible for various public goods such as healthcare and housing. However, it remains difficult to transition entire family units into urban areas. The result is that single family members will leave their rural village to work in an urban area while sending remittances back to their families and hometowns. While this phenomenon can improve the income of rural communities, it also has a secondary effect of separating families and creating atomized citizens without a firm cultural or regional identity.
Is it working?
Part of the Rural Revitalization program is addressing the compounding issues associated with rural-urban migration. Several policies have been enacted to improve the balance of development between rural and urban regions, such as an incentive structure for return migrants to start new businesses in their home villages. Several studies of these programs have shown that, while marginally effective, the impact is not evenly distributed and often becomes focused on the already developed eastern regions. While the largely rural western provinces still struggle with longstanding issues that several existing policies seek to address. It seems that the Chinese government is struggling to use its existing levers of power to make needed reforms in its western regions. With minor reforms made in land ownership rights being hamstrung by ideological commitments to land being controlled by the local Communist party leadership. To achieve the changes necessary to meet its stated goals, the Chinese state appears to be at a crossroads between ideological consistency and pragmatic frontline reforms to its wider economic system.
For the last 30 years, China has been a rising world power. Now that it has seemingly emerged from a long period of economic stagnation and internal chaos, can it maintain its rapid growth? Every developed nation has begun to struggle with declining demographics, diminishing returns on traditional industry, and uneven distribution of wealth or investments. Rural areas are increasingly left behind, with the United Nations recently declaring that more than 50% of human settlements are within urban areas. With China’s long history of food insecurity and ecological decline, can it chart a new course away from where many industrial nations have gone before it?
The Chinese Communist Party has acknowledged the rising inequality of development between rural and urban regions. The state has made several pronouncements and reform programs in the last decade, but all of them have used a continuation of the same policy mechanisms. Empirical data from external social scientists show these efforts are not making the progress one would expect from the level of resources and rhetoric applied to them. As seen in many developed nations across the world today, there are growing signs that the political status quo cannot address contemporary economic and social maladies. A revolution in political thought and the exercise of power appears to be needed to prevent economic backsliding in the mid-21st century.
