Five ministries to include rural housing in immovable property registration, conflicts of interest are the obstacle

Xinhua News Agency dispatch: The Ministry of Land and Resources announced on the 10th the "Notice on Further Accelerating the Work of Confirming, Registering and Issuing Certificates for the Right to Use Homestead Land and Collective Construction Land" (hereinafter referred to as the "Notice"), jointly issued by the Ministry of Land and Resources, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, the Ministry of Agriculture, and the State Forestry Administration. It explicitly incorporates the confirmation, registration and issuance of certificates for the right to use homestead land and collective construction land into the implementation process of the unified immovable property registration system, and stresses the need to lay the property rights foundation for establishing a unified urban-rural construction land market.

The "Notice" makes clear that the goal of the work of confirming, registering and issuing certificates for the right to use homestead land and collective construction land is, under the premise of implementing the unified immovable property registration system, to include buildings and structures on collective construction land such as rural housing within the scope of confirmation, registration and issuance of certificates for the right to use homestead land and collective construction land, and to basically achieve unified investigation, unified confirmation and registration, and unified issuance of certificates. This is the first time relevant departments have jointly issued a document since the State Council agreed to establish the inter-ministerial joint conference system for immovable property registration work, clearly expounding the important significance of the "urban-rural unity" of unified immovable property registration.

According to the introduction, including buildings and structures on collective construction land such as rural housing in the work of registering and issuing certificates for the right to use homestead land and collective construction land will help establish and improve the immovable property registration system, form an immovable property registration system covering both urban and rural areas with integrated housing and land, improve the government's administrative efficiency and regulatory level, avoid increasing the burden on the people, and reduce duplicate construction and waste of funds. A relevant official of the Ministry of Land and Resources pointed out that the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee proposed establishing a unified urban-rural construction land market and reforming and improving the homestead land management system, and that advancing the work of confirmation, registration and issuance of certificates is the property rights foundation and legal guarantee for achieving these reform goals, and is of great significance to farmers' basic property rights.

The "Notice" requires comprehensively accelerating rural cadastral survey work, determining survey methods and precision according to local conditions, and avoiding a "one-size-fits-all" approach; it is necessary to further refine and improve relevant policies and technical standards in response to the actual problems of each province. It insists that illegal rural homestead land and collective construction land must go through the procedures for retroactively obtaining land use approval in accordance with the law before registration and issuance of certificates may be carried out. Local governments must, in accordance with the requirements of the No. 1 documents of the Central Committee in 2013 and 2014, include the funding for confirmation, registration and certificate issuance work in fiscal budgets, and effectively guarantee the progress of the work.

Commentary

Resistance from interest groups is an obstacle to "great unity"

⟦NL> The reform of unified immovable property registration, which is currently highly attention-grabbing across society, is often narrowly understood as "unity of housing and land" or reforms of urban real estate issues such as real estate tax. In fact, the country's largest immovable property assets are in rural areas. For professionals studying immovable property issues, there have long been vivid terms such as "great unity" and "small unity" for many years. Simply put, making patchwork repairs while maintaining the multi-department management structure is "small unity"; a plan that completely breaks the multi-department management structure and truly realizes urban-rural unified reform is "great unity."

"Small unity" in essence still maintains the pattern of urban-rural separation: real estate on urban state-owned land is one pile, while rural land including mountains, waters, forests, fields and seas is another pile. Most of the obstacles encountered in the currently accelerated work of unified immovable property registration ultimately come down to the open or covert resistance of some "small unity" interest groups. To put it plainly, they simply do not like breaking the urban-rural dualistic immovable property management pattern. The notice from the five departments will completely shatter these interest groups' illusions about "small unity."