中國的城市化進程和農(nóng)業(yè)人口的轉(zhuǎn)型【外文翻譯】

本科畢業(yè)論文外文翻譯The Transformation of the Agricultural Population and the Urbanisation Process in ChinaZhang Wenxian Jiang XiaorongChina has a population of over one billion population, 800 million of whom are farmers. It is because of this that China needs to be built into a socialist country with its own characteristics. There is an old Chinese saying: "a festival will be better with fewer people, but farming better with more hands". Due to the present condition of more people but less farmland, however, more hands may not necessarily benefit farming. If five people farm land just enough for three, naturally, productivity decreases. In the course of the modernisation of agriculture, more and more labour will be increasingly replaced by machines. Great changes have taken place in the Second Brigade of the Fifth Branch of the National Friendship Farm in Heilongjiang Province since new agricultural machinery was adopted in 1978. Initially there were 236 farmers and 15,000 mu(one mu=0.067 hectare) of cultivated land. Since new machines were introduced, farmland has expanded to 19,400 mu, but only 20 farmers are needed. That is to say, the area of farmland per farmer has increased from 63 mu to 971 mu. As a result, nearly 300 labourers have been freed from farming, some of whom went to reclaim wasteland, and the others to work on water conservation projects.Faced with the need to modernise agriculture, we can neither use large numbers of machines to push aside labour, nor slow down the pace of modernisation because of the large population. This is the population problem associated with agricultural modernisation.In China, 80 per cent of new labourers are annually provided with jobs in the countryside. However, only in combination with the means of production can labourers realise their productive capacity. So the first contradiction we face is that of more people farming less land. Between 1952 and 1978, the agricultural labour force increased by 73 per cent, but the farmland in 1977 decreased by eight per cent. The average farmland per labourer is now only five mu. Therefore, it is difficult to increase productivity with more and more labourers working on less and less farmland.Another contradiction is that of the large population with the mechanisation of agriculture. Since liberation, China has introduced more farm machines, including more than 600,000 large and medium-sized tractors. The total power of agricultural machinery has increased from 1.65 million horsepower in 1957 to 180 million horsepower at present. Since agricultural machinery and the agricultural labour force increased simultaneously, the result has been that either the manpower or machines were then left unused; alternatively, neither machines nor manpower were efficiently used.The third contradiction is between population growth and the improvement of population quality. Since liberation, grain output has increased continuously as well as the income in the countryside. However, as most of the increased wealth was consumed by the new increases in population, the development of the agricultural economy and other undertakings has been seriously retarded. The state and the collective then have had no means, financial or otherwise, to develop culture and education in the countryside. Thus, labourers could not get enough education, and further training for farmers also became impossible. Moreover, there were not enough trained people to spread new agricultural technology and scientific methods of farming. This problem will certainly become more serious in the course of modernising Chinese agriculture.The essential way to develop Chinas agriculture is to carry out modernisation, which implies that the division of work be more specialised, the technology more advanced, and new branches of work more developed. All of these are prerequisites for increased employment and the transformation of agricultural labour. The aims of the modernisation are to equip agriculture with modern scientific technology and modern industry, to use modern economic management, and to raise the utilisation ratio and the productivity of land and labour.The modernisation of agriculture may basically be divided into two categories: one is the modernisation of the tools of production, i.e. mechanisation of agriculture; the other is advances in the field of biochemical technology, such as the improvement of conditions and techniques of production.Modernisation should be accomplished step by step. First, we should substitute agricultural machinery for heavy manual labour to free farmers from traditional modes practised for hundreds of years. This would mean transplanting rice shoots without bending over, and carrying loads without using shoulders. Second, we should use machinery to increase efficiency, especially in the busy seasons. Third, we should rely on machinery to promote the specialisation and socialisation of agricultural production. Therefore, we should not set agricultural mechanisation against rural employment, thus slowing down the pace of agricultural mechanisation. Rather, if we can settle the problem properly, mechanisation should not make things worse for surplus rural labour. Instead, it can promote the transformation of the latter, by developing agricultural industry and trades related to machinery maintenance. What counts is that neither workers nor machines lie idle.As regards agriculture, the progress of biochemical technology is of more importance than that of mechanisation. The process of the development of other countries falls roughly into three types: labour-intensive, capital-intensive and technology-intensive. Most of the developed countries are of the capital-intensive type. This is because the average area of farmland per farmer before agricultural mechanisation was larger than in China, and the development of large-scale industry in these countries demanded a large labour force. Consequently, these countries took the road of capital-intensive agriculture, which relied on mechanisation to save labour. It is evident that the aim of agricultural modernisation in China is not chiefly to save labour. At present, we should not invest in large quantities of machines to replace labour. We should adopt advanced technology to replace land, and fully develop biochemical techniques. Thus we can make the most of technical advances, absorb appropriate amounts of labour, and try to increase significantly the yield per unit area. In fact, even countries short of manpower also paid great attention to the application of biochemical technology in the course of agricultural mechanisation. We can see, from the history of agricultural development around the world, that sharp increases in total agricultural output are almost always related to the advance of biochemical technology.Starting around 1850, the United States has gradually become semi-mechanised and then mechanised, and its farmland has expanded enormously. One hundred and ten years later, in 1960, the total grain output has increased by 35.2 times. However, the output per unit area decreased until the 1930s when the US began to popularise hybrid plant varieties and to use chemical fertiliser.Mexico serves as another example. Because Mexico successfully bred many short-stemmed, disease-resistant and high-yield wheat varieties, its output per unit area increased fourfold from 1949 to 1976. Thus, Mexico has turned into a grain exporting from a grain importing country over the last two to three decades. China presents a similar case. In the past three years, the production of rape has increased as a result of spreading early-ripening, high-yielding and diseaseresistant wild-cabbage type rape. The total output of rape in 1980 increased by 28 per cent over 1978, which put an end to Chinas imports of vegetable oil. From the above, it is predicted that the green revolution centred on improved varieties of seeds will have spread throughout the world by the year 2000. From then on, work on breeding seeds and controlling the bioenvironment will bring about another new agricultural revolution. It is clear that biochemical technology has a great effect on the modernisation of agriculture.We should not, however, ignore mechanisation in agricultural modernisation just because of biochemical technology. On the contrary, in certain sparsely populated areas, agricultural mechanisation should be carried out first. Although in general China is densely populated, even in the densely populated areas, machines should gradually be substituted for manual labour.To conclude, in accordance with the conditions of China, the modernisation of agriculture should rely mainly on the modernisation of biochemical technology, and secondarily on mechanisation. In addition, intensive and meticulous farming, and spreading scientific methods, are needed so as to change progressively from labour-intensive to technology-intensive production. In this way, we can achieve the transformation of farm labour, make full use of agricultural surplus labour and continuously raise agricultural labour productivity.The Inevitability of the Transformation of the Agricultural PopulationThe transformation of the agricultural population is defined as the shift of the agricultural population from agricultural to non-agricultural sectors. In all economic branches, the larger the agricultural population, the lower the agricultural labour productivity. Lenin pointed out, when analysing the development of the capitalist system in Russia, that the population in underdeveloped countries is almost all agricultural, which, of course, does not mean that those people only work on farming, since they can process their agricultural products by themselves. He also pointed out that the development of a commodity economy itself implies that more and more people leave agriculture. In other words, it means that the industrial population increases while the agricultural one decreases.The decrease of an agricultural population is a historical tendency. At present, in such countries as the United States, Canada, Britain and France, the agricultural population accounts for not more than five per cent of the total population of the country. The United States now has seven million farmers, making up 3.6 per cent of the total population. More than 100 years ago, one farmer in the United States could only support five people. By 1976, one farmer was able to support 56 people. In Canada, people directly engaged in farming and animal husbandry are less than 500,000, only accounting for 2.3 per cent of the total population. So, on average, each agricultural labourer farms 3,000 mu and produces 100,000 kg yield of wheat, which is 100 times as much as the yield of wheat per labourer in China. The progress of modernisation of agriculture in these countries was accompanied by the transfer of the agricultural population. From the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, most of the population in the United States lived in the country working as farmers. In 1780, 97.3 per cent of the total population was rural, which lasted until 1860, when the rural population still accounted for 83.9 per cent of the total. This is similar to Chinas present proportion of urban and rural populations. However, the size of the agricultural and nonagricultural populations were similar at that time. The former was six million, 58.9 per cent of the total labour force, while the latter was 4.33 million, 41.1 per cent. From 1910 to 1920 in the United States, with the rapid development of heavy industry and the transition from non-monopoly capitalism to monopoly capitalism, semi-mechanised agriculture began to change to mechanisation, and a large number of the agricultural population began to transfer to non-agricultural sectors both in urban and rural areas. It took less than 200 years for the United States to reduce its agricultural population to its present proportion.The transfer and decrease of the agricultural population is not a negative, spontaneous and passive process. The more quickly the process goes, the quicker the mechanisation and modernisation of agriculture will be. In addition, the transfer and decrease of the agricultural population is of importance to the gradual reduction of the distinctions between town and country, industry and agriculture, and mental and manual work. Therefore, we must study the inherent nature of the transfer of the agricultural population, and the various ways to deal with the situation so that we can speed up modernisation.The background and efficient causes of the modernisation of agriculture in China are totally different from those in developed countries. As the contradiction they faced then was between expanding farm land and a shortage of manpower, they found their way out in mechanisation which could save manpower. In contrast, the problem that China feces is dense population: consequently, surplus agricultural labour. For this reason, China has to determine its own major objectives for the modernisation of agriculture and to decide to mechanise to bring about the transfer of the agricultural population.First, in carrying out the modernisation of agriculture, what is the solution to the large amount of labour freed by the increase in productivity, migrating to the cities or remaining in the country? This problem should be analysed in the light of Chinas present situation. Currently, city employment capacity in China is beyond saturation point. There are still millions of people in cities waiting for employment. If the surplus labour in the country pours into the cities, then many problems will appear. So the only solution for this surplus labour is to allow it to remain in the country and be absorbed on the spot, that is to say, leaving agriculture to work in local, rural factories, and allowing farmers to become workers. Recent practice has proved that such village and small town enterprises have supported farm mechanisation, processed agricultural products, mined on a small scale, produced building materials, served big industry and the export trade, and produced various small commodities to supply urban and rural markets. These enterprises can recruit large numbers of rural surplus labour and have broad prospects. So in the light of Chinas actual conditions, our way is to move many kinds of trades in industry, commerce, the transport service, and the building industry to the country rather than move the agricultural population to cities, which is the commonest way the rest of the world transfers agricultural populations to nonagricultural sectors.Second, in the transfer of the agricultural population, we should persist in using local materials and giving full play to local advantages. The industrial products which can be made individually in the country should be spread to the country as much as possible. As long as there are raw materials, markets and production conditions, processing can be done in the country. For example, in cotton-growing areas, we can gradually expand cotton mills; in sugarcane growing areas, sugar mills. In this way, we can avoid long-distance transport of raw materials and products back and forth. France has run sugar mills in the beet growing areas with each mill serving a radius of 17 km. Australia has connected the sugarcane harvesting, transporting and pressing to a whole process. Only eight hours after harvesting, sugarcane can be transported to the factory. But in China at present, the distribution of productive forces is irrational. For example, beet growing areas are far from sugar mills; the harvest is gathered by hand; beets are carried to mills by carriages after their leaves are removed. As a result, much is damaged by frost, the wastage is great, and the rate of sugar production is low. If we have more enterprises run jointly by agriculture, industry and business, not only can surplus agricultural labour be drawn on, but also we can greatly raise productivity and develop commodity production.Third, we should develop labour-intensive industries in the country, such as textiles, weaving, clothing, metal products, common machinery, building and transportation services. These medium or small enterprises can absorb surplus agricultural labour, especially female. We can also bring the advantage of more labour into full play to export both inexpensive and high-quality products to gain foreign exchange. According to their own specific conditions, villages and towns in the country can engage in planting, breeding, processing, mining, and so on. Developing the production of fuel, power and raw materials is particularly important. Thus we can work small iron mines, small coal mines, small electric power stations, small cement works, and make full use of wind power and marsh gas.Finally, the transformation of the agricultural population should include interval diversification. We should make full use of agricultural workers to develop a diversified economy including farming, forestry, stockraising, fisheries and sidelines. Moreover, we can engage in intensive and meticulous farming to raise the output per unit area, develop the agricultural chemical industry, spread improved plant varieties, open up wasteland, grow more economic plants, build irrigation works, increase trade service items, and so on.In order to facilitate the transfer of the agricultural population, we must create conditions to enhance its quality. Education and training are needed to prevent "structural unemployment", i.e. on the one hand, there is a surplus unskilled farming population, while on the other, there is a shortage of skilled technicians. The Cause of Surplus Agricultural LabourSurplus agricultural labour generally takes two forms. One is long-term or absolute surplus. In other words, the supply of labour surpasses the capacity of land and other means of production. The other is seasonal or relative surplus. The character of agricultural production is that the period of production is long and seasons are very important. There is a big difference in the demand for labour between busy and slack farming seasons. Generally speaking, there are two or three months per year of peak demand for labour. The other months are slack seasons. Consequently, a very flexible labour force is required. In slack seasons, there are remarkably large numbers of surplus workers.The following points are the major causes of surplus agricultural labour.（1）The root cause is the small-scale farming mode of production and the low level of productive technology formed through Chinas long history. Chinas agriculture has been in a backward state for so many hundreds of years that natural economy has occupied a dominant position. In order to withstand natural calamities, people always relied on more workers, instead of on the improvement of the tools of production. Heavy manual work was the chief mode of production in the old society, so the development of agricultural production was linked to massive employment of manpower. In this mode of production, people naturally did not know the exact economic ratio between the result of work and the consumption of labour. They did not grudge putting in large amounts of labour. In this way, more and more labourers were wanted, and in turn, more and more population was required. This is the tradition of Chinese agriculture. As early as the Western Zhou dynasty, more than 3,000 years ago, there existed large-scale collective labour. The old tradition of farming, as recorded in Shijing (The Book of Songs), "ten thousand people make a group, and a thousand groups can do farming", was passed on up to the present. It still influences modern agricultural production. This, then, is the historical cause. (2) The quantity and quality of workers directly affect family incomes and standard of li