The key to unified real estate registration lies in urban-rural unification
The notice issued by five departments on further accelerating the confirmation, registration and certification of the right to use homesteads and collective construction land was officially published by the Ministry of Land and Resources on the 10th. This is the first time since the establishment of the inter-ministerial joint conference system for real estate registration that the relevant departments have jointly issued a document clarifying the urban-rural unification of unified real estate registration. It has a foundational role and very important significance for major reforms such as granting farmers more property rights, safeguarding farmers' usufructuary rights over homesteads, establishing a unified urban-rural construction land market, and allowing collective commercial construction land to be “brought into the market as agricultural land.”
The reform of unified real estate registration, which the whole of society currently pays close attention to, is often narrowly understood as the reform of urban real estate issues such as “the unification of housing and land” or real estate tax. In fact, the largest stock of real estate in our country is in rural areas. For professionals studying real estate issues, there have long been vivid expressions of “big unification” and “small unification.” Simply put, making patchwork fixes while maintaining the multi-department management structure is “small unification”; a plan that thoroughly breaks the multi-department management system and truly realizes urban-rural unified reform is “big unification.”
According to the clear deployment of the Party Central Committee and the State Council, unified real estate registration in our country can only be “big unification.” This is because “small unification” in essence still maintains the urban-rural separation pattern, with real estate on urban state-owned land as one part and rural land such as mountains, waters, forests, fields and seas as another. Most of the obstacles currently encountered in accelerating unified real estate registration work ultimately come from the open or covert resistance of some interest groups favoring “small unification.” To put it plainly, they simply do not like breaking the urban-rural dualized real estate management pattern. The notice from the five departments will thoroughly shatter these interest groups' illusions about “small unification.”
Most of the various problems existing in the process of our country's economic and social development can be traced back to the root of the urban-rural dualized pattern. The urban-rural dualized pattern has two major “pillars,” one being the household registration system and the other being the land registration system. These two major “pillars” directly cause inequality between agricultural household registration and urban household registration, and between urban construction land and rural collective construction land. This notice from the five departments, from the height of comprehensively deepening reform, emphasizes that reform of the household registration system and rural land system are indispensable, demonstrating the determination for “big unification” reform.
On July 30, the State Council executive meeting simultaneously discussed the orderly promotion of granting urban citizenship to agricultural transfer population and the Interim Regulations on Real Estate Registration (Draft for Solicitation of Opinions); in late July, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Central Institutional Organization Commission Office and 11 other departments jointly issued the Notice on Carrying Out Comprehensive Pilot Work for National New-Type Urbanization, clearly proposing to include homesteads and rural housing into the nationwide unified real estate registration system, and to take the lead in establishing and implementing the unified real estate registration system. Taking stock of the series of policies intensively issued by the central government recently, the signals are consistent and clear: more than 30 years ago, China's reform began with the all-round contracting of rural land; today, our country's unified real estate registration and even the entire real estate management reform must also break through in rural areas, where the difficulties and key points lie, and start with confirming and protecting farmers' real estate rights on the basis of urban-rural unification.