The Urban-Rural Relationships in China in the Context of COVID-19: From Urban-Rural Integration to Rural Rebuilding

Abstract

Rural villages are the foundations of Chinese Society. City and the countryside, associating with the concept of social organic cycle “falling tree leaves return to the ground,”1 have supported each other for thousands of years. However, Chinese history in modern times has not developed as it was imagined theoretically. While the city is advancing, the countryside is declining. The duality of urban and rural areas has eroded the countryside, and their relationship has undergone a fundamental transformation. This deformed social structure must be corrected. Therefore, since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the work to reconcile the contradictions between urban-rural relationships runs through the entire process of China’s socialist modernization. This provides the logical main line of the urban-rural integration. City is a consumption group,2 and it does not have a production function, and the raw materials needed for urban development are all obtained from the countryside. Unlike cities, rural areas have always been production bases.3 However, limited by the scarce economical structure of self-sufficiency, if a rural village wants to prosper, it must rely on the urban market. As a result, the dual nature of the interaction between urban and rural economic development has conditioned that the urban-rural relationship is an interdependent, mutually restrictive and inseparable balanced one. This also means that the fundamental essence of urban-rural integration lies in the rebuilding of the rural social pattern from a modern perspective. In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 disconnected the rural and urban areas in China, which caused a major blow to both cities and rural areas. When the organic cycle of the society is broken, the city will suffer first, and the countryside also cannot avoid economic losses. The cities and the countryside seem to have truly fallen into what Fei Xiaotong calls “the tragedy of urban bankruptcy and rural primitivization”. Examining the urban-rural relationship under the epidemic, we see that the countryside has become a buffer for social distress and a refuge for urban crises. In the post-epidemic phase, rebuilding a more flexible and resilient organic cycle is the theme of urban-rural relations.