About Rural Development Institute, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Rural Development Institute, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

The Rural Development Institute is a constituent research institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing, working in CASS's Academic Division of Economics. It is China's national academy institute for the study of agriculture, villages and farmers — the cluster of questions known in Chinese policy language as the "three rurals". Its directory remit covers agricultural economics, rural reform, land systems, rural poverty and revitalisation, farmers' organisations and food security, and it is associated with the journal Chinese Rural Economy (Zhongguo Nongcun Jingji). Together with its sister institutes in the economics division — the Institute of Economics, the Institute of Industrial Economics, the Institute of Finance and Banking and the Institute of Quantitative and Technical Economics — it forms part of the academy's core economic research capacity, but its subject is distinctively the countryside: the sector where several hundred million Chinese people still lived at the end of 2020, when rural residents numbered 510 million and accounted for 36.11 percent of China's total population, according to figures cited in research involving the institute's scholars.

Origins: from Agricultural Economics Institute to Rural Development Institute

CASS's official history records the institute among the new institutes created in the academy's first expansion of 1977–1981, after CASS itself was founded in May 1977 from the 14 research units of the former Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The institute's own early history is preserved in unusual detail in the biographies of its first generation of scholars published by CASS. Wang Guichen, a researcher and doctoral supervisor at the institute who graduated from the agriculture department of Renmin University of China in 1959, recalled that in May 1977 the Agricultural Economic Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences — later renamed the Rural Development Institute — was established, and that he served successively as research director, deputy director and director of the institute.

The renaming from an agricultural economics institute to a rural development institute captures the widening of the field itself. Agricultural economics asks how farming is organised and how farm output and incomes grow; rural development asks the larger question of how the whole countryside — its villages, industries, public services, ecology and governance — develops as a society. Wang Guichen's own career tracked that widening: he served as chief editor of Issues in Agricultural Economy from 1984, as chief editor of Chinese Rural Economy and of Rural Economy and Society from 1985 to 1990, and as director of the institute's Academic Committee from 1985 to 1994. Another honorary CASS member at the institute, Wang Gengjin, who graduated from Peking University's economics department in 1930 and specialised in agricultural and ecological economics, was transferred to CASS in April 1978 as deputy director and consultant of the Agricultural and Economic Institute. The institute, in short, was built by scholars whose work began in the first years of reform, when rural reform was the opening act of China's entire economic transformation.

The development group and the reform generation

The institute's place in China's reform history is documented in Wang Gengjin's CASS biography, which records how, at the beginning of reform, he gathered a group of young people from the Rural Development Institute — including Chen Xiwen, who later directed the Office of the Central Rural Work Leading Group; Du Ying, who later became a deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission; and the economists Zhou Qiren and Song Guoqing, later professors at Peking University — to form a strong research team. That team, drawn from the university graduating classes of 1977 and 1978, became known in Chinese economic history as a development research group working on rural questions at the moment when the household responsibility system and the dismantling of the people's communes were remaking the countryside.

This matters for understanding what kind of institute this is. From its first years, the Rural Development Institute was not only an academic body publishing papers about rural policy; it was a place where researchers who studied rural reform went on to administer it at national level, and where field investigation of villages fed directly into central decision-making. Wang Gengjin's biography likewise records village-level reporting to senior leaders in an earlier period, providing first-hand information for the adjustment of rural policy. The institute's later products — especially its annual Green Book, discussed below — continue that tradition of combining field knowledge with national analysis.

Research fields: agriculture, land, poverty and food security

The institute's recorded research fields are agricultural economics, rural reform, land systems, rural poverty and revitalisation, farmers' organisations and food security. Each field corresponds to a durable problem of Chinese development. Land systems determine how farmland — collectively owned, contracted to households — can be transferred, consolidated and protected. Farmers' organisations, including rural cooperatives, shape how smallholders reach markets; Wang Guichen's published books included an economic history of Chinese rural cooperation alongside a new discussion of Chinese rural economy reform, reflecting the institute's long engagement with cooperative organisation. Food security connects farm production to national strategy, and the institute's annual reporting consistently treats grain output and the ability to guarantee food security as headline indicators of the rural economy's performance.

Poverty research formed a major strand for decades, culminating in the period documented by the institute's 2020–2021 Green Book reporting, which recorded a complete victory in poverty alleviation, with absolute poverty eradicated in the countryside, alongside steadily rising farmers' incomes and a narrowing urban-rural income gap. With absolute poverty declared eliminated, the institute's poverty work has been reframed within the broader task that now dominates its agenda: rural revitalisation, the subject of the next section.

Rural revitalisation research

Rural revitalisation — the national strategy for the comprehensive development of the countryside after poverty alleviation — is the institute's defining current theme. Its director Wei Houkai, a PhD in economics, research fellow and doctoral supervisor at the institute and a member of the Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee of the National People's Congress, co-edited with Chen Xiwen and Song Yaping the volume Rural Revitalization in China: A Socialist Road with Chinese Characteristics. Drawing on a systematic summary of the significant achievements since China's rural reform, the book explains the theoretical basis, principles and strategies of rural revitalisation across nine aspects: the rural basic management system, deepening rural reform, food security, the modernisation of agriculture and rural areas, the integrated development of urban and rural areas, poverty alleviation, new rural construction, ecological civilisation construction and rural governance, and it sets out the development direction and strategic choices for rural revitalisation by the middle of this century.

Wei Houkai's public statements give a concrete sense of the institute's analytical work on this strategy. In a 2023 keynote address on the role of youth in future rural construction, he set out the two-stage timetable discussed in revitalisation planning — basically realising the modernisation of agriculture and rural areas by 2035, with modern living conditions and equalised basic public services in the countryside, and achieving overall rural revitalisation by 2050, with strong agriculture, a beautiful countryside and rich farmers — and he cited the institute's own comprehensive survey on China's rural revitalisation conducted in 2020, including its findings on the share of migrant workers employed away from their villages. An institute that runs its own national surveys, as well as analysing official statistics, can test strategy against field evidence in a way that purely desk-based bodies cannot.

The Green Book of Rural Areas

The institute's best-known recurring product is the Green Book of Rural Areas: Analysis and Forecast of China's Rural Economy, an annual assessment published by the Social Sciences Academic Press (China). The 2024–2025 edition was jointly compiled by the Rural Development Institute and the Department of Rural Social and Economic Investigation at the National Bureau of Statistics, and was released at a seminar in Beijing on 30 April 2025. That edition is divided into three sections — a general report, special topics and hot topics — analysing the operating characteristics, market conditions and notable advances of China's agriculture and rural economy in 2024 and forecasting development trends and key indicators for 2025; it concluded that China's agriculture and rural economy maintained a steady growth trajectory in 2024, providing strong support for high-quality economic and social development, and projected continued stable development in 2025. Zhao Zhimin, secretary general of CASS, highlighted at the release that China's agricultural and rural development had made historic strides.

The earlier 2020–2021 edition shows the Green Book's method in a crisis year. Released in 2021, it assessed a rural economy marked by increased financial support for agriculture, rural areas and farmers, stable agricultural growth, record grain output and enhanced food-security capacity, and the completion of poverty alleviation. Wei Houkai cautioned at its release that rural economic development in 2020 was atypical because of the COVID-19 epidemic, so the Green Book's data had to be interpreted objectively and scientifically, and he identified two future trends: the unavoidable ageing and hollowing out of rural regions, with village numbers decreasing as population transformation and urbanisation proceed; and the modernisation of agriculture and rural areas together with the professionalisation of farmers. The 2020–2021 conference was co-organised by the institute, the Social Sciences Academic Press and CASS's Think Tank on Urban-Rural Integration — a reminder that the institute's rural work is inseparable from the urban-rural relationship, the subject of research by its fellows on the turning point of urban-rural relations in China, which found, using macro data, that the relationship began to change around 2010 towards urban-rural interaction.

The journal Chinese Rural Economy and scholarly lineage

The institute is associated with the journal Chinese Rural Economy (Zhongguo Nongcun Jingji), one of the leading Chinese journals in agricultural and rural economics; the journal's editorial offices regularly appear alongside those of Issues in Agricultural Economy and university journals in organising the field's academic forums, such as the China Rural Finance Development Forum. The association has deep roots in the institute: Wang Guichen, its early director, served as chief editor of Chinese Rural Economy from 1985 to 1990, in the journal's formative period, at the same time as he edited Rural Economy and Society. The institute's scholarly lineage also includes ecological economics: Wang Gengjin, its early deputy director, served as vice-president of the Agricultural Economic Association of China, the Ecological Economic Association of China and the Forestry Economic Association of China, and received a special allowance from the State Council from 1992. Fellows of the institute also publish in international venues — for example, a study of ageing and food consumption in rural China involving a scholar of the institute (rendered in that journal as the Institute of Rural Development, CASS) — applying the institute's rural household and consumption research to questions of dietary upgrading and health.

Leadership, people and public role

In the publications and reports cited above, the institute's director is Wei Houkai, identified consistently across the Green Book releases of 2021 and 2025, the Springer volume on rural revitalisation and his 2023 keynote as director and research fellow of the institute, a doctoral supervisor, and a leading talent in the national philosophy and social sciences programme. Readers should treat leadership descriptions as belonging to the dates of those sources. What they establish durably is the institute's public role: its director speaks for its annual national assessment of the rural economy, participates in the national legislature's agriculture and rural affairs work, and represents the institute in international-facing publications on China's rural strategy.

Identity and distinctions

The Rural Development Institute is the CASS institute for agriculture and the countryside: created in the academy's first expansion of 1977–1981 as an agricultural economics institute and later renamed for the wider task of rural development; home, in its first generation, to scholars such as Wang Guichen and Wang Gengjin and to the young development research team from which senior national rural policymakers emerged; producer, with the National Bureau of Statistics, of the annual Green Book of Rural Areas; and a leading research voice on land, cooperatives, food security, poverty and rural revitalisation, associated with the journal Chinese Rural Economy. It is distinct from its parent academy, CASS, which is profiled separately, and from China's agricultural universities, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the rural research centres of government ministries, none of which is the Beijing CASS institute described here.