People's Daily
February 2, 2009

Every year after the Spring Festival, the central government issues a set of guidelines which are believed to show their priorities for the year.

Most of these guidelines, commonly called "number one documents" (一号文件), have focused on rural issues in recent years.

This year's document, titled "Several opinions on how to further the stabilize the development of agriculture and increase farmers' income in 2009", is no exception.

Today's People's Daily printed the "opinions" on the front page along with an op-ed headlined "The more difficulties we are facing, the more important agriculture is".

The article points out that in the current economic downturn, the rural areas hold the biggest hope for generating much needed domestic demand, though the task of improving the farmers' living conditions is still among the hardest.

The policies regarding rural issues in the "opinions" include:

● Increasing agriculture subsidies to cover more varieties of crops and investment in agricultural machines;

● Flattening the current four-layer government structure to three layers by enabling county level governments to report to provincial governments directly instead of having to go through prefecture or prefecture-level cities; Part of the plan revealed in the document is the abolition of prefecture and prefecture level cities;

● Forming a land use right market to facilitate trading of land rights;

● Improving the rural area election system and ensuring that each village administration has at least one college graduate.