A folk artist is working on a grain painting at Shoudong Village, Guantao County, in Hebei Province. Workshops have been built in the village to provide free training for more people to learn this craft, which has helped increase the villagers’ income. Photo: HINEWS.CN

WUHAN—When constructing rural society, it is necessary to build a sense of community among rural residents, reconnect disconnected individuals and cultivate the society’s ability to govern itself, thereby facilitating interaction among governance, social regulation and rural people’s autonomy, said experts at the 3rd Forum on China’s County-Level Governance at Central China Normal University on Dec. 1st.

“Individualization has become one of the most profound aspects of China’s rural transformation today,” said Wu Licai, a professor from Central China Normal University, who continued that the key to rural social construction is to reconnect disconnected individuals and re-embed them into society.

“When constructing rural society, we must build rural communities and create a sense of community among rural people,” Wu said, adding that the village in rural vitalization is a social concept. In the process of implementing the strategy of rural vitalization, we must always stress society as the subject and social construction as the theme. It is necessary to restore and enhance the capacity for cooperation and the local production of rural public goods, cultivating the rural society’s ability to govern itself.

Wang Xiaoyi, a research fellow from the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), said that improving the governance structure of rural areas can start from the governance of rural public affairs, reshaping the role of the state, the community and the individual in rural society.

Yu Jianrong, a research fellow from the Rural Development Institute at CASS, said that China should continue to reform the rural governance system and make village-governance organizations more willing to and capable of responding to the actual needs of rural people to meet their increasingly diverse demand for public services.

At the same time, Yu suggested speeding up the development of rural people’s cooperative organizations and carrying out the reproduction of public services through exchanges and cooperation among rural people, making up for the absence of rural organizations at the primary level in the supply of public services.

 “We should focus on establishing a new type of relationship between the government and rural society and activating the initiative and creativity of rural people,” said Zhao Shukai, director of the Information Center at the Development Research Center of the State Council. A new governance paradigm is needed to straighten out the relationships within rural areas and beyond, which is to say “multi-center governance.” This is a management process that interacts up and down, mainly through cooperation and consultation to build partnerships and manage public affairs.

(edited by YANG LANLAN)