China begins long march to reform land use
By Richard McGregor
news.ft.com
Published: November 13 2002 4:00 | Last Updated: November 13 2002 4:00
In Feidong, in the hinterland of Anhui province, far from the capital, Beijing, farmers staged a small demonstration last year when the local government confiscated their land to build a new factory.
The protest, says Wang Zhao, who tended small crops of peanuts, rice and vegetables nearby for more than a decade, was provoked by the kind of high-handed decision that typically benefits officials but leaves farmers destitute.
"To expand the city, local officials often take away land and sell it at a very high price, but offer very little compensation to the farmers themselves, even though it's their livelihood," he said.
If Jiang Zemin's speech to the opening of the five-yearly Communist party congress last Friday is any guide, China may be getting serious about attempting to address its unruly regions and their multifaceted problems with land.
Mr Jiang, the outgoing general secretary of the party, indicated that farmers should be able to sell their land use rights for profit. "We must respect farmer households as market players," he said.
Respecting the property rights of farmers may help achieve a number of central government aims, from easing 200m under-employed rural workers quietly off their plots and into new cities, to loosening the control of corrupt local officials over land.
The government also wants to consolidate land holdings to build bigger, more productive farms, better equipped to handle increased foreign competition following China's entry into the World Trade Organisation.
New rules on selling rural properties were quietly passed by a committee of the National Peoples Congress in August, but will not take effect until March next year.
Dang Guoying, a rural specialist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the "ultimate goal of the reform is land privatisation", an aim he doubted was achievable in the short term.
"One recent survey showed that neither farmers nor local officials think land belongs to individuals. Farmers especially have a very weak sense of private ownership," he said.
In China, all land is officially owned by the state. Instead of freehold title, Chinese in both the countryside and cities enjoy "land use rights", of anything from 30 to 70 years.
In many urban areas, the enforcement of these rights in a codified title system has helped create a vibrant private property market, something that is absent from the countryside.
In Shibalixiang, a small semi-rural village near Beijing, She Yanhong, the official responsible for land, said this week she had never heard of peasants being able to sell their usage rights, as outlined by Mr Jiang, as all land was ultimately owned by the town.
"They don't sell it when they don't want to farm any more, they just give it up to the village for free," she said, adding that the village kept no records of property title. In return, the village pays the farmers and their families some dividends as a kind of rent for using the land.
In some cases, this system works. Yue Hongpao said he had given up his small plot of farming land for a better-paid factory job 10 years ago and still received a regular stipend from the authorities that took his land.
"I am very satisfied with my life right now," he said.
Farther away from Beijing, the power of officials seems to be much more arbitrary and harsh, and difficult to rein in.
"I don't think the new law will give much protection to farmers, because even if they know there's such a law, most are not daring enough to fight against local governments," said Mr Wang, who has now left his plot to run a restaurant.
"And in many rural areas, local regulations often run counter to the national law."
A second problem is how to value land, much of which is uneconomic in the small-scale plots it is now divided into.
"Only old people and children still live on the land," Xu Xinyan, who worked for decades as a farmer in Anhui.
"Many young people have gone to the cities to work. It's very difficult to transfer land for profit."
Mrs Xu and her family signed a contract with the local government in 1999 to use a small plot of land for 30 years but later decided to leave. If they had left their land fallow, they would have forfeited their usage rights, so they transferred their contract to another farmer who was willing to work the field.
"He didn't pay us, and we still pay the taxes and fees - that's because very few people want to cultivate land these days," she said. "The land belongs to the country, of course. In the contract we signed, the government is one side and we are the other." |
