The prohibition of counter-urbanization is a practice worth questioning

Jiang Daming, Minister of Land and Resources and National Land Inspector-General, said on January 10: the reform of the rural homestead system should be based on the work of confirming, registering and issuing certificates, adhere to the principle of one household, one homestead, and absolutely must not allow the so-called "counter-urbanization" behavior of city people going to rural areas to buy land and build houses.

This statement caused an uproar online. Netizens almost unanimously opposed the formulation "absolutely must not allow city people to go to rural areas to buy land and build houses."

To this day there are still some officials who do not know that what they say and do must have a legal basis, and still less do they know that in expressing policy they should use clear legal concepts. Here, for example, as an official of the Ministry of Land and Resources, one should at least clarify how "city people" are defined in law, whether the "rural areas" involved include "urban villages" and "urban-rural fringe areas," how the areas where "peasant citizens" live within urban jurisdictions should be described, what category university graduates who transferred their household registration from the countryside and now want to return home belong to, and whether urban real estate developers and officials who approve land are "city people."

In fact, a term like "city people" has no legal meaning. If officials want to carry out a new policy, they first need to make a judicial interpretation of the concept of "city people" through legislation. Lacking this, the "new policy" issued by the Ministry of Land and Resources appears to have no legal basis. If such a "new policy" is to be forcefully rolled out, one has no choice but to find a politically correct and somewhat authoritative reason as its basis, and so "counter-urbanization" is used as a label to frighten people.

Let us for the moment count peasants moving into cities to live and buy homes as "pro-urbanization," and city residents going to the countryside to operate businesses and build houses as "counter-urbanization," but both this forward and reverse movement contain both positive and negative motives and effects. "Pro-urbanization" is not necessarily all progress, and "counter-urbanization" is not necessarily entirely backward. Peasants leave their hometowns to make a living in cities only because their hopes are not in the fields; city residents go to the countryside to operate businesses and live because they have discovered fields of hope. Officials, especially relatively senior officials, should perceive this.

Housing prices in cities are absurdly high, and when city residents pay costs in many respects to go and live in the countryside, this can in fact play a role in reducing the number of people without homes and mortgage slaves and in lightening the burden on cities. If city residents give up government-subsidized housing benefits and seek their own way out, why should government departments charged with safeguarding people's livelihood and increasing national well-being obstruct them?

Rural people can go into cities to buy homes, while city people are not allowed to go into villages to buy homes. This is obviously unreasonable. In the 1950s, some documents and decrees deprived Chinese people of freedom of residence and migration, firmly blocked the path for rural residents to move to cities, made the gap between China's urban and rural areas ever wider, and created social and economic problems that are still difficult to eradicate today. Now, many years after the state relaxed controls on peasants moving to cities, the Ministry of Land and Resources is trying to impose controls on city residents moving to rural areas. How such an important statement or possible decision concerning society's future is to be legalized through what procedures, and how it will operate, all require us to inquire further.

In fact, if city residents who cannot afford homes in cities go to rural areas to buy land and build houses, the result is bound to benefit the people but not local governments. Because this would break the situation in some places where local officials monopolize land transactions, and further, local governments would collect less in land transfer fees, the houses built by real estate developers would have difficulty selling, high housing prices in cities would be difficult to sustain, urban land not yet auctioned could no longer sell for a good price, the government's land finance dividend would evaporate, and the government, banks, real estate developers and other powerful groups would simultaneously face the danger of a broken chain of interests...

The government requisitions land at low prices, sells it to real estate developers at high prices, and after houses are built they are sold at even higher prices to city residents. Because this joint-operation model can best maximize the interests of powerful groups, some officials desperately defend it at all costs.

Some local officials and businessmen destroy and forcibly requisition good farmland for profit, yet parade under the banner of protecting cultivated land and safeguarding peasants' interests. Is it not to protect peasants' interests and land? In fact, the best way is simply not to seize peasants' right to control land and trade it independently. Because peasants are the people most eager to protect land, and peasants understand best how to dispose of and use their own land most advantageously and most economically. Their autonomy is their fundamental interest; with this right, the dual goals of protecting land and enriching the people can naturally be achieved.

The above remarks by the Minister of Land and Resources are worth questioning.

At present, "new urbanization" is being vigorously promoted, and one of its contents is relaxing restrictions on rural residents settling in small and medium-sized cities. This is undoubtedly an important reform measure that satisfies the desire of the broad masses of rural residents for a better life in cities and, to a certain extent, grants peasants freedom of migration. But if city residents are still prohibited from choosing to settle in rural areas in appropriate ways, this is clearly a puzzling measure that conveys erroneous information.