Rural develo-whaaa?

So this is kind of a big deal.

You would think that for a 9.6-million-square-kilometre country, more than half of whose 1.4-billion people are still registered as "peasants," rural development would be a no-brainer.

Not so much.

When Deng Xiaoping launched a raft of economic reforms when he came to power in 1978, he purposely planned for uneven development--the idea was to experiement with market liberalism in select pockets of the country (hello, Shenzhen) and, if that worked, to expand that elsewhere. Fair enough. But the economic development and investment incentives both central and local governments poured into urban areas like Shanghai never reached the rural and remote swaths of the country, where people farm more or less the same way they did hundreds of years ago. This wouldn't be an issue if post-reform social stratification didn't (for lack of a less crude, equally effective term) completely screw over rural peasants quite as much, on quite as many levels, as it has. China, in case you were wondering, has one of the most drastic urban-rural income gaps in the world. For a country that three decades ago was hard-core Communist, that's pretty huge.

In part this uneven economic development was a purposeful decision: When you have more than a billion mouths to feed, it makes sense (or it did at the time, anyway) to keep food prices low and deprive farmers of much power to change the way they do business--hence the restrictive hukou household registration system that endeavours to keep people in their region of origin. This neat little social-control device is supposed to keep Anhui farmers farming in Anhui, Shangdong farmers farming in Shangdong, and Beijing businessmen doing business in Beijing. Etcetera.

But despite the hardships breaking hukou imposes, 100-million migrant workers are leaving the country every year to work in the cities. Without urban hukou they don't get health care, social security or education for their kids, and unless they have a special work permit they're subject to arrest or at least losing their job if officials bother to check. But they go because no matter how crappy their living situation in the slums of Shanghai or Beijing, and no matter how far below the 8RMB/hour minimum wage they're paid, it's way better than what they would get living in the countryside.

Short story long, the past weekend's decisions should mean big things for China's rural population: In addition to promising to provide basic services that by law should be available to everyone already, the government will now allow peasants to sell their land rights. This is big news (the NYT explains why far better than I do) because until now, farming has been restricted to small plots of land controlled by local and regional governments. Under the proposed changes, peasants could sell--or at least transfer the rights to--their land to companies and other private entities, or at least pool their land resources so they could make better use of it and actually make enough money to support themselves and their families.

This seems kind of counter-intuitive to someone whose higher education consisted in large part of burning Milton Friedman in academic effigy, but at the very least the new measures should add new incentives to modernization of agriculture--something that has been an issue since Sun Yat-Sen's heyday--and hopefully address the problem of how to feed a nation whose farmers are booking it to the city for lack of cash.

At least, Hu Jintao certainly hopes so.