How can land better improve farmers' wellbeing?
Land is a basic factor of economic development, and also the lifeblood of farmers. How to enable farmers who guard the “golden rice bowl” of land to better enjoy the wellbeing brought by land in the process of modernization is certainly a very realistic and major topic. This requires distinguishing which farmers are having their land expropriated, and which farmers benefit from land expropriation; how exactly the proceeds from land appreciation should be distributed, and how farmers can better benefit in the process of land expropriation, all require rational analysis and careful study.
Why do farmers resist? Land expropriation and relocation have become an important factor in farmers' petitions and frequently trigger mass incidents, the core of which is the contest over distribution of interests. If analyzed carefully, because compensation for land expropriation is clearly stipulated by current law, the focus of farmers' resistance to land expropriation lies in compensation for attachments on the ground, whose value assessment has greater flexibility and involves more farmers' interests, often relating to the quality of future survival. Therefore, the difficulty of land expropriation lies not in expropriation itself, but in the compensation for ground attachments that accompanies expropriation; so-called vicious land expropriation incidents are mostly vicious demolition incidents. Because they are eager to obtain the land, the government hands over “raw land” that has not met consolidation standards to developers, who then directly confront farmers with violence, even resorting to underworld methods.
Because the key to the contest over interests in expropriation and relocation lies here, farmers located in different positions due to geographical location show different degrees of resistance: for urban villages, it is not a question of survival, but a struggle for more distribution rights over the huge appreciation of land, and the outcome of the struggle often means one household can increase compensation by several hundred thousand to a million, so farmers must fight with all their strength, and holdout households therefore emerge endlessly; for suburban farmers, it concerns livelihood after expropriation and relocation, and they must strive to raise standards on compensation issues to ensure subsequent housing, employment and social security conditions, but this area is often in newly emerging urban development zones, where demolition time is tight and tasks are heavy, ultimately leading to violent forced demolition after the government transfers the land to enterprises and extreme resistance by farmers; for farmers in far suburbs, the problem they face is being forced to integrate into industrialization and urbanization, facing a fundamental change in their way of survival, and they must struggle hard to lay a solid foundation for their future new life, and their resistance cannot conceal their inner expectation of land expropriation; for farmers in agricultural areas, the compensation fee for young crops on the ground also leaves room for negotiation, which can increase the one-time compensation amount and improve living conditions, but because the overall amount of compensation is relatively small, the degree of resistance is clearly weaker than that of urban village and suburban farmers.
How exactly should compensation for land expropriation and relocation be made? It can only adhere to a legal basis and, according to the actual conditions of each place, make compensation suited to local conditions. Moreover, land appreciation is not only a matter for farmers, but a matter for the government, society and citizens together, and must be comprehensively considered and reasonably distributed. As for the “same land, same rights, same price” fantasized by some armchair scholars, there is probably no possibility of realizing it at all. Since even a unified price for goods of the same value in different regions cannot be achieved, and unified online and offline prices cannot be achieved, how can land, a resource with such strong natural attributes, have a unified price across different regions?
First, greatly raising the price of land expropriation is not realistic. According to the current Land Administration Law, the total of land compensation fees and resettlement subsidies shall not exceed 30 times the average annual output value of the land in the three years before expropriation; converted, this is generally only twenty or thirty thousand yuan, and compensation for expropriating one mu of land generally does not exceed 60,000 yuan. If, regardless of use or region, compensation standards were uniformly and greatly raised, then the state might not be able to afford expropriation, enterprises might not be able to afford use, and public welfare facilities might not be able to be built. For example, if land expropriation compensation were raised tenfold, then who could afford an industrial land expropriation cost of 600,000 yuan per mu? Therefore, the draft amendment to the Land Administration Law discussed and approved at the executive meeting of the State Council only deleted the content in the current law that the total of land compensation fees and resettlement subsidies shall not exceed 30 times the average annual output value of the land in the three years before expropriation, and provided that compensation should be fair, and did not include the legendary tenfold increase.
Second, raising compensation standards must vary by region. The development levels of different regions are not the same, and the compensation standards for land expropriation must also be adjusted accordingly. For example, the current level in the central and western regions is still low and indeed needs to be raised; while compensation standards in the east and in large cities are already not low and need to be controlled within a reasonable range.
Third, compensation for farmers in different locations within the same city must also be treated differently. For farmers in urban villages, they have already become rich overnight in the process of urbanization, and their contest with the government over land expropriation is only to obtain more benefits and consolidate their position as a land rentier class; for farmers in suburban villages, they may become a new land rentier class because of incorporation into the city, or they may face the danger of poverty and unemployment because the land is used for industry, so compensation must be raised to solve long-term livelihood; for farmers far from cities, especially farmers in agricultural areas, land expropriation may bring a considerable large sum of income, but subsequent employment and agricultural production need to be fully considered.
Third, the government's land management costs should not be ignored. The government should obtain returns in land management, or at least recover costs, otherwise the government's operation of cities and investment promotion cannot continue; if the government cannot manage land, farmers will also find it difficult to benefit from changes in land use. On the issue of land interests, the government and farmers are closely linked; farmers want to obtain more compensation, and the government may also want to sell for more money, but in the final analysis everything must be determined by the land market.
Finally, the methods of land expropriation compensation must also be explored. To whom exactly should land rent belong? Land is owned collectively by all farmers; if it belongs only to farmers whose land is expropriated, is that fair to other farmers? Is it fair to the government and industry and commerce that cause land prices to rise? Is it fair to urban residents who are about to use the expropriated land? According to current legal provisions, the appreciation from land expropriation belongs to the collective, and farmers can only receive partial compensation; how should the proportion between these be determined? How to guarantee farmers' survival after land expropriation over the long term requires good study; the approach of dividing it all up and eating it all up leaves endless trouble. But in practice, farmers are often willing to divide the money equally right now, perhaps thinking little about long-term matters, or distrusting the government and worrying that they will not receive it in the future, so more targeted measures are needed.
How can land better improve wellbeing for farmers? From the general trend of China's economic and social development in the next twenty to thirty years, China's urbanization still needs to add a large amount of construction land. Even if industrial construction land no longer expands greatly in the future, and may even need to shrink overall, some areas will still increase. More importantly, there are the construction land needs for the roughly 200 million rural floating population and their family members to settle in cities, the living land needed for the roughly 10 million new urban population each year in the future, and the construction land needed to further improve the level of related urban public transport, electricity, communications, water supply and drainage and other municipal public facilities, as well as schools, hospitals, cultural facilities, sports venues and other public service facilities. All of this requires sustained and stable investment in urban construction land as a basic guarantee. Against such a broad background, land expropriation also needs transformation and innovation.
The diversity of land development methods should be promoted. The government should do more planning and overall coordination, reduce direct expropriation, expand market-based land operations, and allow suitable rural construction land to enter the land market, etc. At the same time, land development should be advanced in an integrated urban-rural manner to reduce serious waste of land resources (for example, the idle rate of rural enterprise land left behind by some migrant workers after moving to cities is as high as 55% or more, and in the future it will inevitably face transfer and consolidation), and make good use of the policy linking increases and decreases in urban and rural land use.
Efforts should be made to achieve diversified protection of farmers' land rights and interests. Should we focus on the immediate or the long term? What if the money is taken and squandered, and what about the future of children and grandchildren? Whether the government or land-lost farmers themselves, both now need to consider long-term plans, such as employment issues, social security issues, prominently pension and medical care, and children's education, etc. How to make farmers trust the government is the key issue; there must be reasonable current compensation and also a beautiful future expectation, and only then can the land contest between farmers and the government achieve a win-win result.
The overall principle is to give farmers sufficient livelihood security, but not to the point where they become a completely land-rentier class, especially not to let a small number of farmers become land rentiers while the majority of farmers do not benefit better. As the author pointed out when commenting on the land reform issue in Shenzhen, when in a society the discourse of disadvantaged farmers is used to speak for an already extremely powerful land rentier class, when the economic surplus of a society is mainly carved up by the land rentier class, and when a society has already formed a rigid and enormous land rentier class, the economy of that society has no vitality and development has no hope. I hope this is not the author's alarmism, and I also hope society will pay more attention to the truly disadvantaged farmer groups, namely the land-expropriated farmers in the central and western regions and the land-expropriated farmers in pure agricultural areas.