This nation has the world's largest number of rural citizens and its economic growth has benefited immensely from collective farm reforms nearly 30 years ago. The reforms resulted in higher productivity and released abundant rural labour to help urban development.

Despite the changes, country areas still remain synonymous with poor and backward conditions. The overall quality of life has remained low. For years, there had not been any new or inspiring programmes to rejuvenate rural areas until the New Countryside plan was released earlier this year.

However, in a country plagued by an almost unstoppable building frenzy in the cities, news from the countryside always tends to appear in the newspapers' inside pages. Little has been reported about the implementation of the new countryside programme since its celebrated release.

However there are some people, including journalists, who are doing significant work to promote these new changes in rural China.

Last week, in Guangzhou, a joint conference was held by the rural development institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Southern Press Group (owner of a number of key media operations based in Guangdong, a southern province of China), and some other institutions.

The conference urged for greater scope to allow for the spontaneously developed co-operative efforts of rural citizens', in economic and in community management.

More specifically, participants called for the early enactment of the national law on the rural professional co-ops, which is still being made by lawmakers of National People's Congress (NPC). In August, the draft law changed its name from one on the "rural professional co-operative organizations" to a more straightforward "rural professional co-ops."

In a revision made at the same time, government agencies from the county-level above are required to provide direction and service to the rural co-ops. In the NPC Standing Committee's August review of the draft law, some lawmakers even suggested, although not accepted by the rest of them, that the word professional be also dropped. Being professional is neither the main feature nor the main purpose of those co-ops.

While law-makers may continue to debate over the wording of the legal document, speakers at the Guangzhou conference presented refreshing views of the changes developing in the everyday life of rural people.

Zhao Chaoying, a county official from Hebei Province, said it was only wishful thinking to move all rural villagers into urban apartment buildings, and turn all green farms into grey factories. Farm production-based co-operation and specialization can continue to help the countryside produce more and raise living standards.

In Zhao's home base of Qingxian County, farmers' co-ops were reportedly already beginning to evolve from simple mutual help to a more integrated level, including democratically elected councils and their own articles of association.

In daily operation, those co-ops are practising unified procurement of farm materials and management of farm machinery, while having independent plot attendance and harvesting.

Plans are already made for unifying family plots, unified investment and plot attendance, and unified management in harvesting and sales of the harvests. The plans are based on all members' clearly defined property rights. In other words, the future co-ops will be more like joint-stock companies rather than the traditional ad-hoc mutual help arrangements.

At the same time, participants of the Guangzhou conference all stressed that the new co-ops will be totally different from the People's Communes that were administratively set up in the era of the planned economy, in disregard of local interests and conditions.

Email: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 09/25/2006 page4)