Rural Policy Implementation in Contemporary China

At the turn of the millennium, the disparities between rural and urban livelihoods, underdevelopment and administrative shortcomings in the Chinese countryside were increasingly seen as posing a manifest threat to social harmony and economic and political stability. At that time the term "three rural problems" ( sannong wenti ) was coined which defined the main issues of rural life that needed to be targeted by government action: agriculture ( nongye ), villages ( nongcun ) and farmers ( nongmin