Revitalizing rural land so people can settle down in the city
Dehua is located in the mountainous area of central Fujian and is one of China's famous porcelain capitals. In a county town of about 20 sq km, more than 1,300 ceramic enterprises are gathered, ceramic output value exceeds 17 billion yuan, and of the county's more than 300,000 people, 200,000 work in ceramic-related industries.
Looking at these numbers, people would surely think this place is filled with smoke and dust, with sewage flowing everywhere. But when you walk into Dehua, what you see is a green porcelain capital: surrounded by green mountains and clear waters, Dehua's forest coverage rate reaches 77.7%. On September 11, 2014, Dehua County's pilot demonstration zone construction plan for ecological civilization development also passed review by the Ministry of Environmental Protection, making it Fujian's first county (city, district) to pass review on the basis of having been named a national ecological county.
Property rights trading hall activates rural “sleeping” resources
Since reform and opening up, more and more Dehua farmers have moved into the cities, and with this has come an increasingly prominent hollowing out of rural areas: large amounts of mountain forest resources sit idle, farmland is abandoned, and the rural resident population is shrinking. In Chishui Town, a major agricultural town with a population of 18,000, fewer than 4,000 people remain at home, most of them elderly people left behind, and nearly 3,000 mu of land has been abandoned.
In September 2013, Dehua became Fujian Province's first pilot county for coordinated urban-rural development. Taking this as an opportunity, Dehua took the lead in launching reform of the rural property rights system. On May 14, 2014, the Dehua County Rural Property Rights Trading Center officially began operating. In the property rights trading hall “shelves” on the website of the “China Porcelain Capital · Dehua Rural Property Rights Trading Center,” reporters saw rural land contractual management rights, rural collective forestland use rights, and rural reservoir water area aquaculture management rights, among others. Since the center began operating, by the end of last year it had carried out 65 transactions for the transfer of property and management rights, with a transaction value of more than 66 million yuan, and long “sleeping” rural resources such as land rights, mountain rights, forest rights, water rights, and housing rights have been revitalized.
Veteran forest farmer Yan Aming of Sibin Village, Sanban Town, originally managed several dozen mu of forestland. After 2000, he and his family moved one after another to work at ceramic and tea set enterprises in the town and county seat, and the forestland on the mountain gradually fell into neglect because no one managed it. Several years ago, Yan Aming and other farmers in the village transferred the forestland management rights to Xiangsheng Crafts Co., Ltd., with a lease term of 38 years.
“After the forestland was transferred, we put all our energy into working at the porcelain factory, and every year we can still get dividend income from the forestland management rights. If it had stayed in our own hands, it would have gone to waste within a few years!” Yan Aming said.
Recently, village officials in Dongli Village, Chishui Town, have been busy going door to door to seek opinions on subleasing mountain-valley fields. Dongli Village has over 1,000 mu of cultivated land, but less than 200 mu is still being farmed. Not long ago, a large grain grower took a liking to part of Dongli Village's abandoned cultivated land and hoped to contract it to run a new type of sightseeing agriculture.
“It's been abandoned for many years, and now the abandoned fields can be reused. This is a good thing!” The opinion-gathering work went very smoothly, and 98% of the villagers expressed support. The matter was basically settled. The villagers were happy, and the lessee was satisfied.
“When large numbers of farmers move into the cities to work in ceramic factories, rural fields easily fall out of management.” said Wu Shensheng, secretary of the Dehua County Party Committee. “To resolve this contradiction, we can only proceed from the reality of a mountainous county and promote the transfer of rural property rights, concentrating the use rights of farmland and forestland in leading enterprises and large operators. This revitalizes rural resources, promotes agricultural industrialization, and at the same time allows forest farmers to enter the secondary industry without worries.”
Able to settle down and live well, worry-free farmers become the main body of industrial workers
Although it had been some time since they moved into their new home, Xu Minshu and his wife still often felt as if they were dreaming. Xu Minshu and his wife are farmers from Yangtian Village, Meihu Township, Dehua County. Several years earlier they had transferred their family's forestland to a forestry company, and the couple moved to the city to work, but they had always rented a place to live. Their dream was to one day own an apartment in the city too. At the end of 2013, according to county policy, they bought a three-bedroom, one-living-room price-capped commercial apartment in Sanban Xiangyun Residential Community.
Since reform and opening up, more than 100,000 Dehua farmers have bid farewell to the land on which their ancestors depended for generation after generation and come to the county seat, supplying a large number of industrial workers to Dehua's ceramic industry. In 2014, Dehua's ceramic output value reached 17.715 billion yuan, making it the country's largest production and export base for craft ceramics. In 2014, Dehua County achieved 5.73 billion yuan in added value from the tertiary industry.
In recent years, Dehua County has successively built more than 16,000 units of various types of affordable housing, price-capped commercial housing, and low-rent housing. Farmers from the county who have worked in the city for 3 years, and people with non-local household registration who have worked in the county seat for 5 years, are all entitled to buy price-capped housing at 3,300 yuan per sq m, about half the market price. In addition, farmers who move to the city and whose forestland transfer reaches a certain area can also enjoy the policy of buying price-capped housing in the county seat. While retaining their original land rights, mountain rights, forest rights, and housing rights, farmers who move to the city can also obtain dual income from “wages from urban employment and returns from rural property rights,” which both removes their worries and adds a valuable new force of industrial workers to the city.
Starting in 2002, Dehua County took the lead in Fujian Province in achieving zero-threshold school enrollment for the accompanying children of migrant workers. At the end of 2013, the spouses and children of non-Dehua migrant workers who had worked continuously in Dehua for more than 5 years were included in the new rural cooperative medical care system, enjoying the same medical and health services and protections as local residents.
Just after the start of 2015, several dozen non-Dehua migrant farmer workers formally obtained the price-capped housing they had long awaited. “In the past, who would have dared to imagine being able to buy a house in Dehua? Thanks to the government's preferential policy, I was able to have my own home, and now I feel that I am truly a Dehua person.” said Su Lin, a non-local who came to Dehua to buy a house.
“The permanent population of Dehua's urban area has now increased to more than 200,000. Rural industries cannot be hollowed out, and cities cannot lack industrial workers. Therefore, we are reforming the rural property rights system, bringing idle rural resources to life, changing rural modes of production, and enabling farmers who move to the city to have work, be able to settle down, and live well.” Wu Shensheng said.