Land should be the focus of rural rule-of-law development

Chen Xiwen, deputy head and director of the office of the Central Rural Work Leading Group, said in a recent interview with media reporters that as of June this year, more than 140 counties nationwide are carrying out pilot programs for confirming and certifying rural land rights, among which more than 60 percent of the areas in Zhejiang province have completed the confirmation and certification of rights, making it the province where this work is currently advancing fastest in the country.

Behind the rapid progress of rural land rights confirmation and certification, “because existing laws and systems do not specifically limit the term of land contracting after certification, a rather knotty technical problem has arisen.” The fact that the term of land contracting is not specifically determined may be one of the many knotty legal problems surrounding rural land. Despite years of development, our country's rural rule of law has made considerable progress, but in certain respects it still needs to be improved, and the focus of the contradictions is precisely on land, as the recent Jinning incident once again proved.

Facing the yellow earth with one's back to the sky, this is a true portrayal of the daily life of the broad rural masses. Sociologist Fei Xiaotong said, “Country people cannot do without the soil, because living in the countryside, farming is the most common way of making a living.” In a self-sufficient traditional rural environment, land could only be regarded as a means or tool of making a living. But along with the impact of modernization, the advancement of urbanization and the surge of economic interests, because more and more things are attached to rural land, the problems have become increasingly complex, sometimes presenting a situation of three-way gaming among the government, enterprises and farmers; it is also very likely to combine with negative problems in grassroots governance, and the village committee, which should represent the villagers, also carries its own interests and plays both sides, becoming a fourth party, with interests becoming ever more intertwined. Many major rural conflicts originate from this.

The large amount of gaming and contradictions surrounding rural land are all related to the inadequacy of the relevant laws. Most matters involving rural land apply certain provisions of the Land Administration Law and the Property Law, but the operability of these provisions still needs to be improved. In legal practice, sometimes things rely on local policy operations, and it may even be one policy per village. Taking the work of rural rights confirmation and certification as an example, according to media reports, “the Third Plenary Session of the Seventeenth Central Committee mentioned that the existing contracting relationship should remain stable and unchanged for a long time, so in some places the contracting certificate simply writes the words ‘unchanged for a long time’ in the column for the contract term, yet there is still no specific provision for this in law or system.”

Without complete legal regulation and safeguards, it is difficult to eliminate the possibility of backroom operations and transfers of benefits in the contracting, operation and transfer of rural land, and what is even more worrying is that if farmers in a weak position cannot properly protect their own lawful rights, they may ultimately choose to express their demands through large-scale extreme actions. The central authorities recently deliberated and approved the “Opinions on Guiding the Orderly Transfer of Rural Land Operating Rights and Developing Moderately Scaled Agricultural Operations,” which contains many provisions of far-reaching significance. For example, adhering to collective ownership of rural land, and the separation of ownership, contracting rights and operating rights into three rights. For rural rule-of-law development, similar provisions should be continuously implemented and refined in practice, and a time should be chosen to elevate them to the legal level, further enriching the rural rule-of-law system.

The Third Plenary Session of the Eighteenth Central Committee proposed that the urban-rural dual structure is the main obstacle restricting the integrated development of urban and rural areas. In view of this, rule-of-law development should also have a clear target, not only striving to bridge the urban-rural gap and change the urban-rural dual structure, but also steadily advancing in response to hot and difficult issues in rural rule of law, rather than being keen only on chasing some urban hot issues and frontier legislative issues, and focusing discussion on some legal issues that sound very modern and very high-end; if this goes on for a long time, it will become a manifestation of being detached from national conditions and from reality. “No matter whether it is a black cat or a white cat, a cat that catches mice is a good cat” - Comrade Deng Xiaoping's famous assertion applies not only to economic construction, but also to rule-of-law development. As long as we keep our feet on the ground and keep exploring, based on national conditions, based on the countryside and based on land, many difficult problems in current rule-of-law development can be readily solved.