Why should the three red lines for rural land be drawn?

■Drawing the three red lines can both ensure the smooth implementation of reform and prevent some people from harming the interests of farmers and the state in the name of reform, so that scarce land resources can generate more output and benefits for the state and farmers.

China's rural land is divided into “three types”: the first is contracted land, the second is homestead land, and the third is collective operational construction land. Land is the foundation of farmers' survival and livelihood, but in the process of rapid urbanization, the price of land as a scarce resource keeps rising, so in many places rural land has become a piece of “Tang Monk's flesh” in the eyes of some people, who then try every possible means to extract private gain from it.

Land is one of the scarcest agricultural resources, because once it is occupied it is very difficult to increase. How to manage rural land well and seek development through reform has led the central government to issue a series of policies. The seventh meeting of the Central Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening Reform deliberated the Opinions on the Pilot Work of Rural Land Expropriation, Entry of Collective Operational Construction Land into the Market, and Reform of the Homestead System. The meeting pointed out that the three bottom lines must be upheld: the nature of public ownership of land must not change, the red line for arable land must not be breached, and the interests of farmers must not be harmed. Why should these three red lines be drawn? In advancing rural land reform, how can farmers' interests be guaranteed? How can reform be carried out in an orderly and steady manner? The analysis is as follows:

Upholding public ownership of land is an inevitable choice given national conditions

⟦NL> Regarding China's rural land system reform, in earlier years there was a voice advocating privatization. But this view has always been controversial among researchers of China's rural economy. The reason is simple: there is a theory according to which anything “related to the public” is basically nailed to the pillory, while anything “related to the private” is basically regarded as “highly efficient.” Against the background of developed capitalist countries with uniquely favorable per capita resources, this has an aspect of correctness, but applying this theory to China is clearly very unsuitable and does not fit the local conditions.

The reason China's reform and opening up has succeeded is that it was combined with China's national conditions and adopted a approach of taking what is useful rather than wholesale copying Western theory. It is a special institutional arrangement that fully takes China's national conditions into account.

In recent years, China's public ownership of rural land has in fact undergone substantial institutional evolution and is no longer what the West calls “public ownership.” It has imposed strict limits on this “collective public ownership,” rejecting the unfavorable aspect of the former emphasis on the primacy of the public, fully authorizing collective land to farmers holding contracted land, and defining farmers' contracting rights as property rights, which is in fact also a quasi-ownership system that does not allow the collective to arbitrarily take back farmers' contracting rights. On this basis, the “separation of three rights” was also derived, namely adding farmers' right to operate contracted land, and this operational right can be mortgaged and leased. Such an institutional arrangement is mainly intended to prevent this private right from being abused.

For example, land in Taiwan, China, is privately owned, but the agricultural land tragedy that has appeared in recent years is also regrettable: those farmers who long ago left the countryside for the cities are unwilling to give up their land in the countryside, not because they have feelings for the land, but because they value its appreciation, just like today's real estate speculators who buy, hoard, and flip houses. They do not farm properly, or farm lazily, allowing extremely scarce land to operate at low efficiency, and Taiwan, China has therefore fallen into an agricultural land tragedy. So retaining some rights of collective public ownership, so that land can be taken back when it is abused, should have its reasonable side against the background of China's extremely scarce agricultural land.

In my view, the “collective” referred to in Chinese land is in fact the Western concept of community, emphasizing the common rights and interests of community members rather than one-sidedly emphasizing individual rights. Retaining the ownership of community members in China prevents the collective rights and interests of community members from being infringed by individuals. In a country with many people and little land, this has a basis for reasonable existence.