Implementing a responsibility system with capable people in rural areas yields good results

It is hard to imagine that a village with 246 households and 856 people, with a confirmed land area of more than 1,000 mu, actually involves more than 3,000 plots, and the household with the most has more than 60 fields of various sizes. However, the common people used their own methods to accomplish a seemingly impossible task, and among the 104 villages selected in Beijing's Pinggu District for the pilot of county-wide advancement of nationwide land confirmation and registration, this village became the fastest-progressing large village.

Recently, the reporter came to Wulimiao Village, Zhenluoying Town, Pinggu District, just a few mountain ridges from the Beijing-Hebei border, to learn how they adopted a "responsibility system" approach to rapidly advance land confirmation.

"A vegetable garden of less than 8 mu actually involves more than 70 households"

Jin Cuiyan is the Party branch secretary of Wulimiao Village and has served five consecutive terms. She said this is a purely mountainous village, and the cultivated land is all terraced and dam land, with almost no contiguous flat land.

Land conditions in mountainous rural areas are very complex, and Wulimiao is no exception. Since two rounds of contracting were implemented in 1983, each plot here has not only been divided into grades one, two, and three, but also involves multiple forms such as hillside land, irrigated land, and vegetable garden land, and also includes the special method of "using trees in place of land," that is, dividing land based on fruit tree output.

"To what extent is the land fragmented? A place the size of a house has ten or eight families dividing it." Jin Cuiyan gestured with her hands. "A vegetable garden plot behind the village primary school of less than 8 mu actually involves 70 households." "Can the villagers remember it themselves?" "Definitely, they remember it clearly."

Leafing through relevant materials, the reporter saw that the village's confirmed land area is 1,010 mu, involving 3,019 plots; the household with the most plots, Liu Zhongshen's family, has 7 people with a total of 7.64 mu of land, yet it is actually divided into 62 plots!

The difficulty of confirmation is beyond imagination. "No matter how difficult it is, we must confirm it." Jin Cuiyan said firmly. "Tasks assigned by superiors must be completed fully and faithfully, and moreover land is the lifeblood of the common people, so every plot must be safeguarded."

"Capable people lead the way, implementing the responsibility system to drive it forward"

In April last year, after the town mobilized them, Wulimiao immediately began land confirmation. In the face of such complex work, relying only on the strength of 3 Party branch committee members and 3 village committee members was far from enough. They creatively came up with the "capable people lead the way" method, fully leveraging the role of former secretaries, former team leaders, former representatives, and former accountants, and adopted a responsibility system to drive the work forward.

"Peaches, jujubes, pears, and apples all have pits, and people also have a core." Jin Cuiyan said that what she called a "person core" was the core among the people, those with prestige in the village. They selected the most suitable "person core" from the 3 villager groups to serve as group leaders: Group 1 leader Sui Zhanjiang was a veteran former secretary and former director, Group 2 leader Zhang Guolin was an old accountant who had participated in dividing land and dividing trees, and Group 3 leader Yang Dianqi had done village work for many years.

To fully mobilize the masses, the village successively held seven or eight meetings, including the "two committees" leadership meeting, Party member meeting, representative meeting, broadcast meeting, group leader meeting, and land division discussion meeting. Each group signed an agreement with the village committee, specifying contracting tasks and specific requirements. The village equipped them with basic tools such as rulers, flags, pens, and notebooks.

Before the software surveying and mapping company became involved, the 3 groups had already begun a large amount of door-to-door inventory work, conducting on-site measurements of every plot, making records of information such as area, length and width, and neighboring plots, and drawing sketch maps of plot coordinates. "Because historical materials were not completely preserved, the workload was no different from redistributing the land." Jin Cuiyan said.

The whole village organized a total of 12 pilot work guidance personnel, conducted 310 household survey visits, filled out 240 household verification forms, and made two public announcements.

"The sketches drawn are precious wealth"

The coordinate sketches drawn by Yang Dianqi's group were actually drawn on the backs of 4 large wall calendar sheets, densely marked with numeric codes and various symbols, and the initial statistical sheets were even a thick stack.

"During the day I farmed, and at night I wore reading glasses to draw maps, and everything I looked at appeared doubled." He said, "Just these few calendars were redone 4 times; while drawing, I would get absorbed and a wipe of my sleeve meant much of it had to be redrawn." Now these calendars have become the village's "treasures." "This represents everyone's hard work, and it is also valuable material for future work." Jin Cuiyan said.

The work was arduous, and the common people's creativity was also endless. "We used every trick we had." Yang Dianqi said. When identifying land, usually several or a dozen families would arrange to go to the site together. Entering the data for every plot and every person took several months. "Often while entering data I would be so tired I fell asleep, and when I woke up I continued entering." Said Zhao Jinling, a college graduate village official responsible for data entry.

The final step before villagers confirmed and signed was to draw spatial location maps on satellite imagery. When the seven drawings scaled at 1:1000 were neatly laid out on the ground, a stone pressing on everyone's hearts finally dropped. Wang Xiaodong, head of the town's economic management station, believed that Wulimiao Village's work was the most complex, but it was completed most "solidly," and currently all 20 villages in the town have completed the basic data entry work.