Rural society in the People's Republic of China encompasses less than half of China's population (roughly 45%) and has a varied range of standard of living and means of living. Life in rural China differs from that of urban China. In southern and coastal China, rural areas are developing and, in some cases, statistically approaching urban economies. In northwest and western regions, rural society is still perceived as lowly and primitive. Basic needs such as running water and accessible transportation are a problem in these areas.

History

Republic of China During the Republic of China period, neither the Beiyang government or the later Nanjing government succeeded in consolidating governance in rural China. Traditional rural leaders continued to hold power through economic means, interpersonal relationships, and symbolic resources like lineage.

Founding of the People's Republic

One of the major avowed objectives of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during its rise to prominence between 1921 and 1949 was the improvement of the standard of living of the average Chinese citizen, the vast majority of whom were rural dwellers. During the pre-1936 period, the CCP played a major role in transforming rural life in areas it influenced or controlled. A major area was land reform, where control was taken from traditional land owners and wealthy peasants, and appropriated to the state, that is, collectivized. China in the early post-1949 period saw increases in mechanization of agriculture, the spread of electricity, running water, and modern technology to rural areas. However, by the late 1950s, much remained to be done.

Mao noted that most benefits were accruing not to the rural areas, where the vast majority of Chinese still lived, and who were the ostensible focus of the revolution, but to urban centers. Identity card systems channeled unequal degrees of resources, including food rations, to urbanites and rural dwellers.

In the 1950s, programs encouraged young people to extend new agricultural technology and methods in rural China.

Great Leap Forward

During the Great Leap Forward campaign of 1958 to 1961, China's leaders attempted to accelerate collectivization and dramatically increase the pace of industrial production throughout the country, particularly in rural areas. This mostly involved small-scale production, such as the smelting of "backyard" steel. It was thought that through collectivization and mass labour, China's steel production would surpass that of the United Kingdom within only 15 years from the start of the "leap."

An experimental commune was established in Henan early in 1958, and soon communes spread throughout the country. Tens of millions were mobilized to produce a single commodity that was symbolic of industrialization: steel. Approximately 25,000 communes were set up, each with around 5,000 households. The hope was to industrialize by making use of the massive supply of cheap labor and avoid having to import heavy machinery. Small backyard steel furnaces were built in every commune where peasants produced small nuggets of cast iron made from scrap metal. Simultaneously, peasant communities were collectivised.

The Great Leap Forward is now widely seen, both within and outside China, as a major economic disaster. Peasants often abandoned farming to produce steel or work in other industrial production. The three years between 1959 and 1962 were known as the "Three Bitter Years," the Three Years of Natural Disasters (although this name is now rarely used in China), and the Great Leap Famine, as the Chinese people suffered from extreme shortages of food. The period had a profound impact on the history of rural life in China.

Sent-down youth

Down to the countryside movement

1960s-1970s The "great revolutionary movement" of scientific experimentation was encouraged in rural China during the 1960s and 1970s. Millions of people in rural China, especially sent-down youth, participated in the scientific movement. In 1965, there were more than 400,000 rural scientific experimentation groups (nongcun kexue shiyan xiaozu 农村科学实验小组) nationwide to promote new agricultural technology and methods.

Post-Mao Zedong era Beginning in the mid-1970s, inexpensive mass-produced goods began to enter rural villages.

Under Deng Xiaoping, urbanization in China has expanded at an unprecedented speed since the declaration of "Reform and Open Policy". The increased market forces resulted in social changes, including those resulting from the end of the Household Responsibility System and the increase in non-agriculture entrepreneurship in the 1980s. According to sociologist Yanfei Sun, the opportunities and pressures of new market forces resulted in rural communities "becom[ing] much less cohesive. In the process, the individualist orientation and materialist pursuits of villagers were reinforced."

In the middle 1980s, labor migration from rural to urban areas became a national phenomenon. It accelerated particularly in the beginning of the 1990s as the expanding non-state economy, new industrial parks increased the demand for urban labor, and the state relaxed some controls on rural to urban migration.

Between 1978 and 1999, an estimated 174 million people migrated from China's rural areas to its urban areas.

New policies in China's economy shifted the approach from collective farming to household-based production quotas, in many ways reversing decades of collectivization efforts. In many areas of China, especially southern and coastal China, the standard of living improved dramatically after Deng's reforms. Township and Village Enterprises brought industrial production to rural areas—predominantly along the southern coasts, helping open these rural communities to greater economic prosperity. (The idea of industrial production in rural areas had been attempted under Mao but with much more limited success; for instance, industrial plants in highly remote areas found their ultimate production efforts hampered.) Soon, however, an imbalance appeared where northern, interior, and western China remained at a far lower degree of economic development, a situation which persists to the twenty-first century. However, there are multiple, complex factors contributing to this state of affairs. For instance, distances are much greater, and geography often more challenging in western and interior regions. Population is more spread out; social structures may also play a role, in that the demographics and social structures of these regions often differ significantly from those of coastal China.

Deng Xiaoping's reforms included the introduction of planned, centralized management of the macro-economy by technically proficient bureaucrats, abandoning Mao's mass campaign style of economic construction. Deng sustained Mao's legacy to the extent that he stressed the primacy of agricultural output and encouraged a significant decentralization of decision making in the rural economy teams and individual peasant households. At the local level, material incentives, rather than political appeals, were to be used to motivate the labor force, including allowing peasants to earn extra income by selling the produce of their private plots at free market.

Rural markets selling peasants' homegrown products and the surplus products of communes were revived under the more free-market economic approach of Deng. Not only did rural markets increase agricultural output, they stimulated industrial development as well. With peasants able to sell surplus agricultural yields on the open market, domestic consumption stimulated industrialization as well and also created political support for more difficult economic reforms.

Development remains uneven, with many highly prosperous areas far outpacing deeply impoverished regions where parents have great difficulty attaining enough income to ensure their children can be sent to school, despite the already-low education fees. Indeed, educational and social imbalances are a salient feature of this uneven development.

Lack of employment opportunities has increasingly made life in many rural regions difficult, hence the apparent enticement to resettle in urban areas. Of course, jobs are still limited, so many do relocate in cities only to find prospects much more meager than they had expected. Statistics suggest a very high proportion of residents of rural areas are unemployed or underemployed.

The development of Special Economic Zones also spurred rural growth in some parts of China.

An important policy document of the Xi Jinping era, 2013's Decision on Major Issues Concerning Comprehensively Deepening Reforms, described the urban-rural divide as a main obstacle to China's continued modernization and stated that efforts should be made to further integrate development. A series of projects designed to decrease the urban-rural divide followed.

In 2013, China announced a new plan to reduce poverty and develop impoverished rural regions by raising rural farmers' income growth and reducing obstacles in agricultural development. The plan includes the promotion of new types of agricultural businesses, such as family farms and organized cooperatives, and encouraging industrial and commercial enterprises to invest in agriculture.

Collectivization and class status

The first major action to alter village society was the land reform of the late 1940s and early 1950s, in which the party sent work teams to every village to carry out its land reform policy. This in itself was an unprecedented display of administrative and political power. The land reform had several related goals. The work teams were to redistribute some (though not all) land from the wealthier families or land-owning trusts to the poorest segments of the population and so to effect a more equitable distribution of the basic means of production; to overthrow the village elites, who might be expected to oppose the party and its programs; to recruit new village leaders from among those who demonstrated the most commitment to the party's goals; and to teach everyone to think in terms of class status rather than kinship group or patron-client ties.

In pursuit of the last goal, the party work teams convened extensive series of meetings, and they classified all the village families either as landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, or poor peasants. These labels, based on family landholdings and overall economic position roughly between 1945 and 1950, became a permanent and hereditary part of every family's identity and, as late as 1980, still affected, for example, such things as chances for admission to the armed forces, colleges, universities, and local administrative posts and even marriage prospects.

The collectivization of agriculture was essentially completed with the establishment of the people's communes in 1958. Communes were large, embracing scores of villages. They were intended to be multipurpose organizations, combining economic and local administrative functions. Under the commune system the household remained the basic unit of consumption, and some differences in standards of living remained, although they were not as marked as they had been before land reform. Under such a system, however, upward mobility required becoming a team or commune cadre or obtaining a scarce technical position such as a being a truck driver.

Decollectivization