Revitalizing Rural Homestead Assets: China Explores a New Path

With the rapid development of industrialization and urbanization, the problem of some rural homesteads and farmhouses in China being used extensively, difficult to exit, and gradually becoming dormant assets has become increasingly prominent. Starting this year, China launched pilot programs in 33 county-level administrative regions to explore a mechanism for voluntary and compensated exit and transfer of homesteads within a limited scope, so as to revitalize these idle assets.

On December 31 last year, the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council issued the "Opinions on the Pilot Work of Rural Land Expropriation, Market Entry of Collective Operating Construction Land, and Reform of the Homestead System," deciding to select about 30 county (city) administrative regions across the country for pilot programs. Authorized by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, China's rural homestead system reform has now entered the implementation stage.

Yujiang County in Jiangxi Province is one of the 33 pilot counties for homestead system reform designated by the state this time. Also included in the pilot are Daxing District in Beijing, Jixian County in Tianjin, and other suburbs of major cities.

In the Dawanjia group of Shuangyu Village, Pingding Township, Yujiang County, the reporter saw that this area is located on a plain, with the villagers' residential area surrounded by farmland. Villagers told us that "the land beneath our feet and the places where the farmhouses stand" were all farmland in the 1980s. Due to reasons such as building new houses without demolishing old ones and villagers going out to work, Shuangyu Village has more than 100 idle, dilapidated, or collapsed farmhouses, 15 percent of which have no use value.

Villager Wan Zhijin shook his head and said: "A few houses take up one mu of land. It's such a pity to leave them idle!"

In Yujiang, of the 300,000 rural population, only 120,000 are at home year-round. According to statistics from the Yujiang County Land and Resources Bureau, among the county's 114,000 homestead plots, 43,000 houses are idle (unoccupied for more than 11 months in a year), 8,300 are dilapidated, and 7,200 have collapsed, with half of the homesteads having become "idle plots."

"The baseline area for homesteads is in principle between 120 and 180 square meters, and those exceeding the baseline area are charged a paid-use fee. Homesteads exited by villagers can be transferred within the same collective economic organization, and depending on conditions, villagers may choose to build houses in market towns or purchase commercial housing at a preferential price." said Cai Guohua, Director of the Yujiang County Land and Resources Bureau. According to the pilot policy, Yujiang County will explore paid use and paid exit of homesteads, as well as innovate the homestead approval mechanism.

Before the state officially launched this round of pilot homestead system reform, some localities had already carried out exploratory adjustments to homesteads without breaking through the existing policy framework.

Yushan County, located at the border of Jiangxi and Zhejiang provinces, has in recent years successively completed village planning for 149 villages, providing a foundation for the rational layout of homesteads. Last year, Yushan County relocated the entire village of Zhegengtou Village, which was located on a high mountain, and merged it into Jianshe Village at the foot of the mountain.

In Jianshe Village, the reporter saw that most villagers who exited their original homesteads chose to build houses on centralized resettlement land. The exited homesteads in Jianshe Village were uniformly transferred and developed into tea gardens; the contract rights and transfer fees belong to the original homestead users, so that the usufructuary rights of farmhouses increase rather than decrease.

Gongqingcheng City, located by Poyang Lake, has, in conjunction with integrated urban-rural development, launched a reform of "exchanging farmhouses for urban housing," encouraging farmers living in flood-prone areas to voluntarily exit their homesteads and settle in the city.

Xiong Maojian, a villager representative from Nanhu Village, Jiangyi Township, Gongqingcheng City, told the reporter that his family of four has a 170-square-meter homestead and farmhouse. In 2013, he signed a contract to exchange his farmhouse for urban housing and voluntarily exited his homestead. Using the homestead and old farmhouse, he exchanged them for 3 new urban apartments with a total area of 170 square meters. After deducting various subsidies and rewards, he spent only a little more than 10,000 yuan himself. Locally, urban commercial housing sells for about 3,500 yuan per square meter.

Most young and middle-aged villagers in Nanhu Village work year-round in the urban area of Gongqingcheng City. At present, the more than 1,300 farming households in this village are about to complete "exchanging farmhouses for urban housing," and the exited homesteads, because of their relatively good soil conditions, will be reclaimed as cultivated land.

Of course, for many elderly farmers, giving up their homesteads still brings reluctance and worry. Xiong Maojian said that he is 52 years old this year and can still find work now. Once he passes 60 and can no longer find work in the city, he still wants to return to the countryside to farm.

In this regard, Huang Bin, Secretary of the Gongqingcheng Municipal Party Committee, suggested that the pilot reform of the homestead system should explore how to coordinate with the improvement of farmers' social security systems and other measures, so that people whose homesteads are not actually in use and who are able to exit under certain conditions can have the confidence to live better lives.

By revitalizing idle homestead resources through paid exit and transfer, and by reclaiming homesteads as cultivated land, the efficiency of land resource use can be improved, which is of great significance for China, a country with many people and little land. However, when exploring homestead reform, farmers' wishes must be respected and their interests effectively safeguarded.

"The reform of the homestead system is meant to better protect farmers' rights and interests. We must never use the banner of reform to make farmers lose the homes on which they depend for survival, nor make farmers pay a high price for reform. This is the bottom line." said Deng Youlin, Deputy Director of the Jiangxi Provincial Department of Land and Resources.