ABSTRACT
The central government has consistently placed rural issues at the forefront of its economic work. Through speeding up the building of infrastructure in rural areas and increasing rural incomes, it has been able to accomplish notable results in recent years. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to note that reform in rural areas has not advanced all that much since the implementation of the contract responsibility system (cheng-bao), and particularly once the focus of national reform shifted to urban areas in 1984. Despite the fact that we have resolved basic subsistence problems for the rural population over a brief 20 or so years, something that China had never done in the past, the gap between economic levels in urban and rural areas has been greatly increased by a stagnant rural economy and a rapidly growing urban economy.
