How is the collective concept of land rights formed?

1.

The concept of land rights is a product of land rights practice, and once the concept of land rights is formed, it in turn affects people's land behavior.

In the current provisions of the land system, our country implements public ownership of land. Publicly owned land is further divided into two forms: one is state ownership, and the other is collective ownership. Such a design of the land rights system has been confirmed in the form of the fundamental law of the state.

Generally speaking, rural land belongs to collective ownership. After land was allocated to households, the land use right was devolved, and peasant households held the land use right. By the period of the second round of contracting, the state issued laws and policies stipulating that the rural land contracting relationship would remain unchanged for 30 years, and during the contracting period the collective may not withdraw or adjust land, etc.

At the beginning of the new century, the state abolished the agricultural tax, and the collective could no longer independently collect funds and apportion fees from farmers for village public undertakings. The state mainly addressed the problem of the supply of rural public goods through project resources and the “one case, one discussion” method. However, because projects need to be actively sought and one case, one discussion faces huge coordination costs, both of the above models find it very difficult to meet the actual needs of rural areas. Constrained by the relevant institutional arrangements of the state, rural collectives find it very difficult to realize their own ownership powers over land, which leads to the low capacity of the collective, the hollowing out of collective functions, and the weakening of farmers' collective concept.

The less effectively the collective's powers and functions are brought into play, the more farmers feel that the collective is useless. Farmers farm entirely on their own. If the collective is useless, what value is there in keeping it? In some places, rural land is nominally under collective ownership, while in farmers' actual conceptions, the imagination of land privatization is already very obvious. Therefore, continuously hollowing out rural collective organizations seems not only to conform to theoretical logic, but also to conform to social conditions and public opinion. Thus, hollowing out collective ownership and strengthening the individual use right of peasant households seems to have become the direction of the current land system reform.

However, this survey in Lijiaban Village, Hekou, Shanxi, gave us a very different impression. Here farmers' collective concept of land rights is “deeply rooted.” Farmers in Hekou generally believe that land is collective, not private. However, because the state stipulated that the land contracting relationship would remain unchanged for 30 years, since land was allocated around 1994, there have basically been no further land adjustments here. Before that, the local area generally practiced the custom of conducting a land adjustment every three to five years. Now, everyone is waiting for the 30-year contracting period to expire, and then to carry out land adjustment and enter the next land contracting period.

2.

Generally speaking, carrying out land adjustment is a very important channel for village and group collectives to exercise land ownership. It is also an important manifestation of the collective exercising land powers. Through land adjustment, farmers' understanding of the collective attributes of land can be strengthened, and the imagination of land privatization can be avoided. Therefore, our surveys in recent years show that in rural areas where land adjustments are continuously carried out, farmers' imagination of land privatization is weaker, and their understanding of the collective attributes of land is deeper.

It is precisely because land is collective rather than their own that farmers' disposal of land is also subject to very strict constraints and control by the collective, and land use and management are relatively orderly. In places where the imagination of land privatization is more serious, farmers dispose of land as if disposing of their own private belongings, which easily leads to abuse of land and failure of management.

In previous conceptions, the main reason for adjusting land was fairness. In farmers' plain formulation, this means “the dead cannot snatch the rice bowl from the living.” Those who have already died should hand back their land, to be allocated to newly born children and women who have just married in, because these latter people need to eat. As for those who have married out, because they should be allocated land on their husband's side, the land they originally had in the village should also be handed back. According to Liu Shouying, this is caused by farmers' “deeply rooted concept of collective membership rights.” This deeply rooted concept of collective membership rights places great emphasis on the fairness of collective resource distribution and requires that the allocation of land resources continuously adapt to changes in the composition of the collective. This has led to the continuous adjustment of collective land.

However, our survey in Shanxi shows that since the second round of land contracting began in 1994, the local area strictly implemented the policy guideline of “no additional land for added people, no reduced land for reduced people.” During these 20 years, local land has not been adjusted, which means that the “farmers' deeply rooted concept of collective membership rights” in Liu Shouying's sense has not been expressed. But this does not affect farmers' cognition of collective ownership of land. What is going on here?