Opinion: Enshrining Rural Income Growth Into Chinese Law

1. The draft revision of China’s Agriculture Law, recently submitted for first review and open for public consultation, expands from 99 to 110 articles and introduces a central mandate: "The state shall make increasing farmers' income the central task of agricultural and rural work," explicitly targeting narrowing the urban-rural income gap and advancing common prosperity.[para. 1][para. 2] Beijing aims to build an agricultural powerhouse, but boosting rural incomes remains a heavy lift amid headwinds such as flagging income growth momentum, despite past achievements in reform, poverty alleviation, and modernization.[para. 3][para. 4][para. 5] The revision elevates these goals into legal norms, critical for common prosperity, domestic demand, social stability, and systemic risk hedging.[para. 6]

2. The draft calls for a diversified, sustainable income-generation mechanism harmonizing industrial development, entrepreneurship, and policy safeguards.[para. 7] Recognizing farmers' livelihoods beyond traditional farming, it advocates workforce mobility and multi-channel employment, while mandating long-term stable land contracting relationships with separation of ownership, contracting, and management rights to enable scaled, mechanized farming.[para. 8][para. 9] State support for eco-tourism, folk culture, and leisure agriculture aims to fuse primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors, optimizing rural economic structure and eroding the urban-rural divide.[para. 10] The draft also adopts a "macro-agricultural perspective" and "comprehensive food perspective" to diversify food supply and expand wealth avenues.[para. 11]

3. To ensure food security, the draft refines compensation mechanisms for major grain-producing regions and safeguards grower returns, shifting from a rigid protective price system to a dynamic price support system to guarantee baseline profitability for staple farm products.[para. 12][para. 13] It establishes agricultural insurance frameworks against extreme weather and introduces a ban on forcibly destroying green crops or fruit trees, defending farmers' property rights.[para. 14][para. 15]

4. Elevating rural incomes requires synchronizing new industrialization and urbanization with rural revitalization to equalize basic public services.[para. 16] The draft replaces "township enterprises" with "rural enterprises" and removes "surplus" labor references, advocating a level playing field and unified urban-rural human resources market with equal pay, thereby safeguarding migrant workers’ wage, labor, and social security rights and dismantling institutional bottlenecks.[para. 17][para. 18]

5. Expanding rural property income is addressed through perfecting the rural collective property rights system and cultivating a new collective economy, guaranteeing members’ rights to revenue distribution.[para. 19] Drawing on the Third Plenum resolution, the revision requires clear property rights and equitable distribution, giving farmers fuller property entitlements.[para. 20] Social security is tied to rural wealth: the state must build the social insurance system and ensure farmers’ access to benefits, while a tiered social assistance framework with minimum living guarantees, extreme hardship support, and temporary relief, plus targeted aid for medical care, housing, education, and employment, secures a baseline for low-income populations.[para. 21][para. 22]

6. Crucially, the draft mandates that when expropriating collective land, the state must allocate social security funds alongside direct compensation, embodying common prosperity and preventing poverty relapse due to illness or disasters.[para. 23] It also calls for unified urban-rural funding for compulsory education as a long-term investment in human capital to break down the urban-rural dichotomy.[para. 24] Ultimately, inflating the farmer’s wallet remains the bottom line; with these pro-farmer initiatives, rural residents are poised to see rising incomes and living standards.[para. 25]