Land rights confirmation must be fully implemented, not left half-baked
No matter which form it takes, farmers' property rights and interests must not be made smaller, or even wiped out; ensuring that progress is subordinated to quality, and giving farmers “genuinely confirmed rights and ironclad certificates”, is the only way to withstand the test of history and practice.
Rural land rights confirmation is a good thing, and also a difficult one.
An agricultural official in my home county complained: people are hard to find, land is hard to measure; in the village he was assigned to, not a single mu of land had been measured in half a year. Why? Every farmer has his own “little calculations”: some farm more land and fear that once rights are confirmed, the extra land will be taken back; some have moved the whole family to the city and do not care about three or five mu of contracted land; and others worry that the “connection land” and “favor land” they were allocated back then will be exposed once it is measured. The farmers are not enthusiastic, the officials are anxious. This official said: “The county requires rights confirmation to be completed within a year. What do we do if we cannot deliver when the time comes?”
Rural land issues are a tangled skein. On the one hand, affected by historical reasons, in many places farm households' contracted land has unclear property rights, inaccurate area, and accounts that do not match reality. On the other hand, with the rapid development of industrialization and urbanization, large numbers of farmers have gone to work in cities, villages have been merged, and rural land faces new problems. The intertwining of old and new contradictions has made rural land disputes increasingly prominent today.
⟦NL> Land is a farmer's lifeline. Although land cannot fully guarantee farmers' livelihoods at present, it is at least a reliable fallback. To untie the “knot” of rural land problems, carrying out rights confirmation and certification is a key step. The central government proposed the “separation of three rights” for rural land, which through institutional arrangements “clarifies ownership, stabilizes contract rights, and liberates management rights”, truly giving farmers a “reassurance pill”. Only through rights confirmation and certification, once farmers' contracted land has property rights protection, can the moderate-scale operations needed for agricultural modernization, new types of operating entities, and the transfer of more farmers to cities proceed smoothly.
However, some places rush land rights confirmation, relaxing quality in order to catch up with progress. Some confirm rights without sorting out leftover problems, ending up with a “muddled account”; some launch projects under the banner of reform, and while confirming rights, keep eyeing the transfer of farmers' land, even resorting to issuing orders and setting targets. Such rights confirmation becomes “half-baked rice”, leaving knots in farmers' hearts and discounting a good policy.
Farmers have a scale in their hearts. Whether land rights confirmation goes smoothly depends on how much weight officials give farmers in their minds. In a pilot county in the Northeast, officials went into villages and households, collected and sorted out more than 100 problems of various kinds, prescribed the right remedy, handled them by category, patiently answered questions, and solved one difficult problem after another. In a certain place in the South, where per capita arable land is small, farmers were initially not enthusiastic about rights confirmation; local officials conducted in-depth investigation and fact-finding, and democratically decided on “confirming rights without confirming land”, promoting joint plowing and joint planting, which was welcomed by farmers. It seems that land rights confirmation is difficult, but with enough effort it is not difficult.
Rural conditions vary greatly from place to place. Land rights confirmation does not seek to advance in lockstep, and cannot be cut to one pattern. But no matter which form it takes, farmers' property rights and interests must not be made smaller, or even wiped out. Land rights confirmation is not starting over from scratch with farm households' land contracts, nor is it a new round of land adjustment; it is further stabilizing and improving the basic rural operating system. Two principles must be upheld: first, hold the policy bottom line, uphold collective ownership of rural land, uphold the foundational status of household operation, stabilize land contract relations, be fair and just, and act in accordance with laws and regulations, so as to dispel farmers' worries. Second, respect farmers' wishes, fully mobilize the enthusiasm of the farmer masses, and safeguard their right to know, right to participate, and right to supervise, so that “they want me to confirm rights” becomes “I want to confirm rights”.
Rural land rights confirmation concerns the vital interests of hundreds of millions of farmers, and concerns rural reform, development, and stability. Ensuring that progress is subordinated to quality, and genuinely giving farmers “confirmed rights and ironclad certificates”, is the only way to withstand the test of history and practice.