Win the basic tough battle of deepening rural reform
More than 30 years ago, as a major adjustment of rural production relations, "fixing farm output quotas for each household" and "contracting output quotas for each household" greatly liberated rural productive forces and solved the problem of feeding hundreds of millions of people in one fell swoop.
More than 30 years later, under the tide of urbanisation, industrialisation and global integration, the pressure on rural society and agricultural production methods to transform and upgrade has continued to increase, and the question of how to unleash rural vitality has once again been placed before us.
At the rural reform symposium in Xiaogang Village, Anhui, General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out: "To deepen rural reform under the new circumstances, the main thread is still to properly handle the relationship between farmers and land." The confirmation, registration and certification of rural land contractual management rights, as a major practice in correctly handling the relationship between farmers and land, is now bearing fruit across the land of Qilu.
Shandong is a major agricultural province and also a province with a large rural population. Starting in 2013, it undertook the arduous task of piloting ahead. It not only had to implement the confirmation, registration and certification of land rights in the province, but also had to accumulate experience and blaze a trail for rolling out the work nationwide. The Shandong Provincial Party Committee and Provincial Government accurately grasped the complexity, difficulty and sensitivity of the work, made overall arrangements and scientific plans, and carefully organised and meticulously arranged every link, including organisational support, policy publicity, technical design and working procedures. In 3 years, they basically completed the confirmation, registration and certification of rural land rights across the province, laying a solid foundation for further deepening rural reform and liberating and developing rural productive forces.
Recently, reporters set foot on this land that is in the midst of the tide of reform, exploring the "active, steady and rapid" progress of a new round of rural reform, witnessing the vivid scenes of "confirming the land, granting true rights, registering accurately and issuing ironclad certificates", and experiencing the unprecedented tremendous changes that Shandong's countryside is undergoing.
Top-level design, scientific planning, orderly implementation: the province's land confirmation, registration and certification work advances steadily and swiftly
March 15, 2013 was destined to be an unusual day for the broad masses of farmers in Shandong Province.
On this day, a special meeting was held in Yinan County in the Yimeng Mountain area. Then Provincial Party Committee Deputy Secretary Wang Junmin, Vice Governor Zhao Runtian, and party and government leaders, agricultural bureau directors and leaders of some provincial departments from all cities across the province sat in the meeting room, pondering how this land confirmation, registration and certification work, which affects the vital interests of more than 17 million farming households across the province, would be carried out.
Shandong governs 17 prefecture-level cities. There are 131 counties (cities and districts) with tasks for rural land confirmation, registration and certification. Adding various county-level development zones, there are 156 units in total; 77,070 villages (communities) with cultivated land; according to the Second Land Survey, the province's total agricultural land area is 112.65 million mu, and the cultivated land area is 92.96 million mu, of which 89.867 million mu of cultivated land was under household contracting in the second round of extended contracts, involving 17.653 million household contracting farmers. Clearly, this was a huge test facing party committees and governments at all levels.
This is a foundational project for deepening rural reform, and also a "tough battle".
The Shandong Provincial Party Committee and Provincial Government took the confirmation, registration and certification of rural land contractual management rights as an important task for comprehensively deepening rural reform, and as a foundational project for stabilising and improving the rural basic management system, realising and safeguarding farmers' property rights and interests, and promoting harmony and stability in rural society. They organised it carefully and arranged it meticulously.
In order to strengthen organisational leadership, Shandong Province established a leading group for land confirmation, registration and certification, with the Provincial Party Committee Deputy Secretary and the Vice Governor in charge as its principal and deputy heads, and with responsible comrades from 9 departments, including the General Office of the Provincial Party Committee, the General Office of the Provincial Government, the Provincial Party Committee Rural Work Office, the Provincial Department of Agriculture, the Provincial Department of Finance, the Provincial Department of Land and Resources, the Legislative Affairs Office of the Provincial Government, the Provincial Archives Bureau and the Financial Office of the Provincial Government, as members.
The Provincial Party Committee Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening Reform specially listened to reports on the province-wide work progress; Provincial Party Committee Secretary Jiang Yikang and Provincial Party Committee Deputy Secretary and Governor Guo Shuqing issued instructions and made requirements on handling major issues at key points many times; Provincial Party Committee Deputy Secretary Gong Zheng made a special trip to the Department of Agriculture to supervise the construction of the rural land confirmation, registration and certification information system.
Cities, counties and townships also generally established leading groups and working bodies led by the leaders in charge of party committees and governments and joined by responsible comrades of relevant departments, forming a work leadership and coordination mechanism featuring unified leadership by party committees and governments, division of labour and cooperation among relevant departments, and overall linkage between higher and lower levels.
Wang Jinbao, Director of the Shandong Provincial Department of Agriculture, introduced: "The entire work of rural land confirmation, registration and certification in our province has followed the requirement that 'the village level is the implementing body, the township is the body responsible, and the county-level party committee and government bear overall responsibility'. Tasks were decomposed level by level, responsibilities were implemented, and a work promotion mechanism was built in which each level supervises the next and every level implements the work, ensuring that the province-wide work is carried out actively and effectively.
Starting in 2014, the Provincial Party Committee included rural land confirmation, registration and certification work in the province's comprehensive assessment of scientific development for 3 consecutive years."
Shandong Province's land confirmation, registration and certification work was steadily rolled out on the basis of pilots. It started with village-level pilots and gradually expanded to towns, counties, cities and even the whole province. First, an opening was made in places with a solid foundation for the second round of extended contracts and complete contract ledgers, summing up methods and accumulating experience, and then the work was advanced to places with more complex situations.
From what aspects should rural land confirmation, registration and certification start? How many steps are there? What work links and contents are included? In order to establish unified standards and requirements for the whole province, Shandong Province arranged two rounds of pilots successively in Tengzhou City, Changyi City and other places, and gradually explored and summarised the "5123" working method for rural land confirmation, registration and certification suited to Shandong's reality (that is, the entire work is divided into 5 stages: organisation and publicity, investigation and verification, boundary survey and mapping, review and confirmation, and material archiving. 12 work steps: establish a working team, carry out policy publicity and mobilisation, collect relevant materials, conduct household investigation and verification, conduct on-site boundary survey and mapping, enter relevant information, form cadastral sketches, confirm spatial location and area, fill in confirmation letters and sign contracts, establish and improve registration books, issue contractual management right certificates, establish an information system and archive materials. 3-list public announcement system: the first list announces the results of the baseline survey of household members and contracted plot information from the second round of extended contracts; the second list announces the location and mapped area cadastral sketches of contracted land after farmers designate boundaries; the third list announces the cadastral map of farmers' contracted land area, four boundaries and spatial location after error correction. After public announcement without objection, farmer representatives sign to confirm.) This was then promoted at the provincial level, ensuring that the province-wide work formed one rope vertically and one chessboard horizontally, advancing in unison and as a whole.
In order to strengthen guidance, the Provincial Department of Agriculture and other departments formulated guiding documents such as the "Opinions on Carrying Out the Confirmation, Registration and Certification of Rural Land Contractual Management Rights" and the "Work Plan of Shandong Province for the Confirmation, Registration and Certification of Rural Land Contractual Management Rights", and compiled and printed the "Answers to Relevant Legal and Policy Questions in the Confirmation, Registration and Certification of Rural Land Contractual Management Rights in Shandong Province" and the "Compilation of Work Materials", which were distributed to all localities for study and grasp.
The answers to legal and policy questions involved 34 universal problems encountered in land confirmation work. They were meant to guide grassroots specific operations and could not tolerate the slightest deviation. The office of the provincial leading group for land confirmation, registration and certification organised dedicated personnel to sort out policies item by item, ensuring that they both complied with laws and regulations and could guide problem solving.
In order to ensure the smooth progress of the work, the provincial government included the funds needed for this work in the fiscal budget for guarantee. On the basis of a central government subsidy of 10 yuan per mu, the provincial government subsidised another 5 yuan per mu. The provincial, municipal and county governments invested a cumulative total of 1.67 billion yuan, truly ensuring that farmers did not spend a single cent.
The confirmation, registration and certification of rural land rights is a systematic project involving the vital interests of millions of farming households, with strong policy and technical dimensions and quite complex work tasks. In order to steadily and reliably advance this reform, Shandong Province adhered to the principle that progress must submit to quality, issuing certificates in batches only when they were mature, and resolutely refused to eat "half-cooked rice".
"In order to understand the actual situation, we adopted the method of random spot checks. Taking a map of the whole city, we randomly selected counties, randomly selected villages and randomly entered households, just to see whether the certificates had been issued to farmers and whether the common people were satisfied. The ultimate goal is to confirm a real land contractual management right for farmers and issue an ironclad certificate with legal effect that can stand the test of history." said Chu Ruiyun, Deputy Director of the Provincial Department of Agriculture.