Land rights confirmation should become the engine of rural reform

From September 17 to 18, the Sichuan Provincial Conference on Deepening Rural Reform was held in Chengdu, and Provincial Party Secretary Wang Dongming attended the meeting and delivered a speech. He stressed that in the complex rural reform, grasping “land,” the most important, most basic and most extensive factor of production in agricultural production, and grasping the “ownership, contract rights and management rights” of land, the most critical, most complex and most dynamic production relations, can drive breakthroughs in other rural reforms and achieve deep, overall and triumphant progress. (Sichuan Daily website, September 19 dispatch)

Rural land is a scarce resource and a basic factor of agricultural production. In the past, for farmers, land was their lifeline; losing land meant being unable to eat and losing the production and living conditions on which they depended for survival. History and practice both show that every change in our country's economic development and historical outlook has benefited from rural land reform. As is well known, our country's reform took the countryside as its breakthrough point, and the key to rural reform was to start with adjusting land policy and gradually form a rural land contract system with the “separation of two rights,” namely ownership and contract rights. Although many years of reform have passed, there are still some prominent problems and contradictions urgently in need of resolution in the current rural reform and development, such as the contradiction between fragmented rural land contracting and large-scale agricultural development and operation, and the contradiction between agricultural land development and farmers' interests…… These problems are the key and difficult points of the current rural reform, and they are also unavoidable hurdles in advancing the construction of a new countryside.

At present, the most serious economic and social problems and even political problems our country faces are, in the final analysis, still related to the land system. It can be said that if farmers' land problems are not solved, almost all other economic and social problems and even political problems cannot be fundamentally solved. With the development of industrialization and urbanization, contradictions involving land are common. The reasons mainly lie in whether farmers' wishes were respected in the process of land changing “identity,” whether land expropriation compensation standards are reasonable, and whether safeguards for land-lost farmers have been implemented. These problems are all directly related to the price of land requisition and the benefits farmers receive.

Overall, to date our country has not established a modern land property rights system compatible with the development of the socialist market economy. Judging from the land system implemented in most areas at present, because rural land property rights are unclear, farmers' rights to dispose of, speak about and independently decide on contracted land management rights are all very limited, resulting in constant contradictions in rural land requisition and demolition, with both officials and the people complaining endlessly. Tracing the problem to its source, the key lies in the fact that our country's current rural collective land ownership system separates legal ownership from economic ownership.

Therefore, in the process of deepening rural reform, it is necessary to take land system reform as the entry point and to take further improving the property rights attributes of rural collective land as the engine, finding a balance between protecting farmers' land property rights and safeguarding the government's right to manage land. On the one hand, farmers must be made to approve; through land rights confirmation, registration and certification, farmers' rights to trade, inherit, mortgage, use as shares and lease contracted land must be clarified, the land use term must be extended, land use rights and property rights must be innovated, and every possible means must be used to increase farmers' property income. On the other hand, it must be able to meet the needs of current and future rural development by breaking the current administrative monopoly pattern of land requisition, realizing the optimized market allocation of rural land resources, consolidating the foundation of modern agriculture, especially large-scale land operation, developing and strengthening the collective economy, and promoting the development of rural productive forces.