Chapter 116 "Four rural issues" are more complicated than "three rural issues"

"Countryside", "agriculture" and "farmers" are topics related to "agriculture" that China's political and academic circles have been paying attention to for many years, and this is what people call the "three rural issues".In the practice of social development in Shanxi, we found that in addition to "agriculture, rural areas and farmers", we should add "agriculture", that is, migrant workers (miners).From the perspective of development, we believe that the "four rural issues" before us are far more complicated than the current "three rural issues" that Chinese people are concerned about.In other words, our understanding and research on the "four rural problems" are far from enough.

We know that China's reform and opening up started from the countryside, and migrant workers (miners) are a "new group" in the background of my country's reform and opening up. From today's perspective, they are a special group of Chinese society in a specific "transition period". product. To be sure, the existence of migrant workers (miners) cannot be ignored in the process of economic construction in our country, and they have become an indispensable force in social construction. However, with the rapid development of China's economy and the substantial improvement of people's living standards today, the living conditions of these migrant workers (miners) have not changed much.

In order to make a living, they took their wives and children across thousands of rivers and mountains, and went to other places to work tirelessly to earn money and support their families. There are their figures in the construction site full of crane towers, their faces in the workshop where the machines roar, and their sweat in the narrow underground coal mining tunnels. In the process of working, they always face endless pain of homesickness, wages are deducted, personal freedom is restricted and even ruthless personality insults. We believe that these issues should be concerned and valued by the relevant government departments. At the same time, we should organize forces to conduct in-depth research on the important status and role of migrant workers (miners) in my country's modernization drive and the protection of their rights and interests.In other words, the government should regard the problem of migrant workers (miners) as one of the "four rural issues" facing our country.

According to relevant information, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences established a research group on "Research on the Changes of Social Structure in Contemporary China" in early 1999 to conduct special research on "The Development and Change of my country's Social Structure Stratification in the New Era". According to the original project plan, they conducted a key inspection of Shanxi Province, and organized forces for many times to conduct large-scale in-depth investigations on Datong City, Linfen City and other cities within Shanxi Province, as well as a number of factories and mines in coal-producing areas. On this basis, a large amount of survey data such as more than 11,000 samples and nearly a thousand interviews of various members were obtained.

In this "Research Report", they summarized the social stratification structure formed in the new period of our country into a structural schema of "five social classes and ten social classes" - a "pyramid" type society. Hierarchical schema. From this "pyramid" type "schema of social stratification structure", we can see that: the "domestic industrial working class (state-owned coal mines)" lives in the eighth class (the third from the bottom), and the "migrant worker class (miners) "in the ninth stratum (the penultimate stratum), and the "urban and rural unemployed, unemployed, and semi-unemployed class" in the tenth stratum (the bottom).

That is to say, no matter in terms of their actual socioeconomic status or political status, they are undoubtedly in the class of disadvantaged social groups. Obviously, the class of migrant workers (miners) is in this social "pyramid" class The bottom layer of the structure schema. The "lowest bottom" position, to a certain extent, establishes the "lower position" complex of a person's "identity consciousness" in the social class. However, the low status of migrant workers leads to the loss of their own social rights and interests. For example, the labor rights and political rights of laborers are repeatedly violated in real life, or the social rights and interests of laborers are not guaranteed in practice. The loss of life leads to the loss of confidence in life, which will form an unstable social force.

Therefore, we say here that the "four rural issues" are more complicated than the "three rural issues", and this is the core essence.