Three Land Reform Policy Documents Expected to Be Issued This Year

Han Jun, deputy director of the Office of the Central Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs, said on the 24th at the 6th China Economic Outlook Forum that relevant departments are currently drafting three policy documents related to land system reform. The first is nationwide guiding opinions on confirming, registering and certifying rural land contractual management rights; the second is a policy guidance document on pilot projects for mortgage loans backed by rural contracted land management rights and farmers' housing property rights; and the third is a policy guidance document on implementing the policy of keeping land contracting relationships stable for the long term. These three guidance documents are expected to be issued in 2015.

Han Jun pointed out that the land system is a foundational institutional arrangement of the state, and this system bears on the protection of farmers' rights and interests and on the building of a new type of urban-rural and worker-peasant relationship. The stakeholders and interest relationships involved in land system reform are extremely complex. Therefore, the formulation of land-related reform plans requires balancing the interest concerns of all parties, adhering to the central government's unified arrangements by persisting with pilot projects first, and then gradually rolling them out after summing up and improving them. Pilot first, summing up while piloting, improving while piloting, and gradually rolling out on the basis of the pilots.

Han Jun said that land system reform needs to hold the three bottom lines of "ensuring that the nature of public land ownership does not change, that the red line for cultivated land is not breached, and that farmers' interests are not harmed." "Rural collective land ownership in China is the guarantee for achieving common prosperity for farmers. If we mess around with changing the nature of public land ownership, the gains will not be worth the losses, and we will pay a price." He pointed out that stabilizing farmers' contracting rights means fairly and reasonably allocating contracting rights to every qualified collective member. And invigorating land management rights means allocating land management rights to entities that are willing and able to operate the land, improving the efficiency of land resource allocation, and solving the problem of who will farm the land in the future amid rapid industrialization.