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November 28, 2013

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Rural land reforms will give farmers more property rights

EVEN without his son and daughter by his side, 50-year-old Shen Jialiang will no longer worry about harvesting his 1 hectare (15 mu) in east China’s Anhui Province.

Thanks to a land transfer trust promoted in the Yongqiao District of Suzhou City this October, Shen can now receive 500 kg of wheat per mu as a contract fee, worth more than 1,000 yuan (US$163), almost as much as his typical earnings from harvests in previous years.

CITIC Trust, a Chinese trust company, introduced the country’s first land transfer trust program in mid-October. The program manages 5,400 mu of rural land in Yongqiao District and pays contract fees to the farmers.

A local company is building an agricultural park on the land. With the income from contract fees as well as the expected value-added profits of his land, Shen can spend more time working in cities to earn more to support his family.

China’s leaders put forward a multitude of reforms two weeks ago at the third plenary session of the 18th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee.

A reform plan approved at the session promises to give the country’s 650 million rural residents more property rights.

A rural property market will be established, and people will be encouraged to transform their collective rights into a share-holding system. A pilot program will enable the mortgaging and transfer of homesteads.

“A new round of ‘land reform’ will allow farmers to enjoy more revenue from their land and will prompt the integration of urban and rural areas,” said Zhang Deyuan, director of the rural reform and economic and social development research institute with Anhui University.

According to Chinese law, urban land is owned by the state, and rural land is under collective ownership. Farmers may use the land, but have no rights to sell or develop it.

Since the 1990s, the property market has flourished in cities and has been a major engine of growth, while ownership rules for rural land have not changed in decades, constricting rural development.

Anhui Province spearheaded land reform in 1978 in a bold move that broke up the previous commune-style collective farming, resulting in a nationwide policy change in which collective-owned land is leased to individual rural families for private farming.

Thirty-five years later, another reform is looming in the province to give rural families more opportunities to profit from land.

On November 12, the provincial government said it would experiment with the trade and compensation of farmers’ residential land.

Shen Jialiang, however, is hesitant to follow suit and give up his land.

“I cannot afford to buy a house in the city and for now it’s hard for me to be registered as an urban resident,” he said. “Without my countryside house, I would be homeless.”

Equal status between urban and rural residents is a prerequisite for rural land to be traded in the market, said Chi Fulin, head of the China Institute for Reform and Development, a think tank based in southern China’s Hainan Province.

“Rural residents should enjoy the same welfare, educational and medical resources as their urban peers so they can settle in the cities,” said Chi.

The priority now is to unify the social policies in urban and rural areas, he said.

 




 

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