BEIJING, Feb. 23 -- China unveiled its "No. 1 central document" for 2025 on Sunday, outlining priorities to deepen rural reforms further and solid steps to advance all-around rural revitalization.
As the first policy statement released by China's central authorities each year, the document is seen as an indicator of policy priorities.
The document consists of six parts covering six areas: ensuring the supply of grain and other important agricultural products, consolidating the achievements of poverty elimination, developing local industries, advancing rural construction, improving the rural governance system, and optimizing the rural resource allocation system.
The document calls for enhanced efforts in work related to agriculture, rural areas and farmers in 2025 and beyond, and sets the goals of advancing all-around rural revitalization and consolidating the country's agricultural foundations further.
With reform, opening-up, and scientific and technological innovation as driving forces, the country will safeguard its grain security and ensure that no large-scale lapse or relapse into poverty occurs, the document says.
The country will make every effort to enhance agricultural efficiency, invigorate rural areas and increase farming incomes, thereby laying a solid foundation for the advancement of Chinese modernization, the document stresses.
It emphasizes the importance of developing new quality productive forces in agriculture in light of local conditions. It also calls for the cultivation of leading high-tech agricultural enterprises, and the acceleration of breakthroughs in crop varieties.
China will support the development of smart agriculture and expand the application scenarios of technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, and low-altitude systems, according to the document.
It outlines plans to expand cold-chain logistics and instant retail services to townships, and encourages regions with suitable conditions to establish public charging and battery-swap facilities for electric vehicles.
To promote the effective management and utilization of rural resources and assets, the document calls for the exploration of feasible ways to make good use of legally owned rural housing through methods such as leasing, equity participation and cooperation.
The document urges innovation efforts related to the financing mechanisms for rural revitalization. Steps will be taken to strengthen support from central budget investments, ultra-long special government bonds, and special local government bonds for major projects in agriculture and rural areas. Monetary policy tools will be utilized to encourage financial institutions to increase funding for rural revitalization.
Reforms related to forestry, state farms, and supply and marketing cooperatives will be advanced in a coordinated manner. The document stresses the importance of deepening the reform of the collective forest tenure, of enhancing comprehensive reforms of water pricing and water rights in the agricultural sector, of strengthening water usage management, and of promoting water-saving irrigation technologies.
Eligible cities are encouraged to include their agricultural migrant populations with stable employment into the scope of local urban housing security policies gradually, the document notes.
