What are the multiple difficulties faced by rural land confirmation and registration?
Recently, the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council jointly issued the "Opinions on the Pilot Work of Reforming the Rural Land Expropriation, the Entry of Collective Operational Construction Land into the Market, and the Homestead System," marking that China's rural land system reform is about to enter the pilot stage. Jiang Daming, Minister of Land and Resources, mentioned that the main tasks of this reform include improving the land expropriation system, establishing a system for the entry of rural collective operational construction land into the market, and reforming and improving the rural homestead system.
The "Interim Regulations on Real Estate Registration" issued by the State Council also include rural land in the scope of registration, including collective land ownership, land contractual management rights for cultivated land, forest land, grassland, and homestead use rights.
As the foundational work of rural land system reform, land confirmation, registration and certification is one of the preconditions for the smooth implementation of various reforms.
But problems followed one after another. The precondition for completing land confirmation and registration is accurate on-site measurement of farmers' land. At present, "rural land still has the phenomena of inaccurate area and unclear data," found Li Guoxiang, a researcher at the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, during rural field research.
Although certificates were all issued during the second round of contracting, the certificates issued in 1998 calculated land areas that were not accurate. Li Guoxiang said that in 1979, Xiaogang Village in Anhui began implementing the household contract responsibility system, and by 1983 it had been rolled out nationwide. This was the first round of land contracting, dividing collective land among each household, and the first round of contracting lasted 15 years. So by 1998, it was called the second round of contracting, and the second round of contracting was for 30 years.
However, at the time of the first and second rounds of contracting, there were no measuring instruments like those available today. "Everyone used a rope to make rough estimates, and many of the calculated areas were inaccurate." Li Guoxiang believes that confirming and registering the vast majority of contracted rural land is very difficult, because the funding required for on-site measurement is very large, and there is also "buck-passing" over who should pay for it. The central document says it should be included in local government fiscal budgets, but local governments do not have that much funding, so their enthusiasm is not high.
Some analyses also point out that the pace of confirmation is linked to the willingness of local governments. This is because confirmation will affect the future work of some local governments, especially making land expropriation much more difficult. In some past land expropriation work, farmers were excluded from the distribution of land value-added benefits; farmers could not decide the buying and selling of land, nor could they negotiate prices with buyers on an equal footing. After confirmation, this can to a certain extent prevent previous infringements such as arbitrary land expropriation and can play a role in protecting farmers' interests to a certain extent. But many local governments find it hard to adapt to this change, so their enthusiasm for carrying out confirmation has been affected.
According to the plan, this year China's pilot confirmation, registration and certification work will, on the basis of last year's full advancement in three provinces, select another 8 to 10 provinces, with registered area reaching about 500 million mu, basically covering one quarter of the country's agricultural land. The timetable given by the central government is to finish the confirmation, registration and certification work within 5 years. Li Guoxiang said that whether the on-site measurement work for confirming, registering and certifying rural land contractual management rights can be completed on schedule, and whether after completion it can be incorporated into the basic platform for real estate registration information management and share registration information in real time with the national, provincial, municipal and county levels, all still require time.
"But what can now be affirmed is that the practical impact of unified registration and certification is that farmers will receive better protection of property rights. In the long run, it will prepare for the mortgage, transfer and marketization of homesteads and rural houses. But the land measurement process requires a large amount of funding and manpower, and even takes time to handle disputes among farming households, so 5 years is clearly very tight." Li Guoxiang worried.