How should the rights of farmers moving to the cities be secured

No matter how the law resolves it, some basic principles and ideas probably cannot change, namely giving farmers fair and reasonable compensation, ensuring that farmers share in the fruits of development, and not reducing the cost of urbanisation by sacrificing farmers' interests

Because the value of rural household registration has risen, a phenomenon of "counter-urbanisation" has appeared in some places. A reporter investigating in Anhui, Sichuan, Hubei and other places found that most pilot small and medium-sized cities have fully lifted restrictions on farmers settling in the cities, but before the "zero threshold" farmers' willingness to settle was generally not high. In one county town, only just over 200 people converted from agricultural to non-agricultural status in 2015. A considerable number of farmers are willing to buy homes, work and live in the cities, but choose to leave their household registration in the countryside.

In 2014, the State Council issued the "Opinions on Further Advancing the Reform of the Household Registration System", praised by the media at the time as an "ice-breaking move", and the urban-rural dual household registration system that had lasted more than sixty years in China was broken. The opinions clearly proposed fully lifting restrictions on settling in incorporated towns and small cities: as long as one has a lawful and stable residence, even a rented place, one may apply to register as a permanent resident according to one's own wishes.

Many people thought that after this policy was introduced it would drive rapid urbanisation and trigger a surge in urban household registration, but in fact that was far from the case. The reason is simple: people are rational, and people's choices are rational choices.

First, the value of urban household registration differs. The value of household registration in megacities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen is vastly different from that of an ordinary county town or small city; whether in welfare guarantees or convenience of life, the two cannot be mentioned in the same breath. And the conditions for settling in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen are far stricter than in ordinary small and medium-sized cities; for many migrant workers, such conditions are almost impossible to meet. So after the household registration system reform, for a rural person, obtaining urban household registration is easy, but obtaining household registration in the city one truly aspires to is hard. In other words, after the household registration system was opened up, the problems represented by household registration were not fully resolved.

Second, the value of ordinary urban household registration and rural household registration differs little. As Xinhua News Agency found in its investigation, among the 12 rights and interests linked to household registration, 5 - employment, old-age insurance, education, basic public health services and public cultural services - have basically no policy difference between urban and rural areas; 5 - land rights, direct grain subsidies, returning farmland to forest, the rural five guarantees and poverty alleviation - are unique to rural household registration; only the urban minimum living allowance standard is 40 yuan per month higher than the rural one, and public rental housing and low-rent housing are unique to urban household registration. Seen this way, whether or not to convert household registration means little to many rural people.

And compared with urban household registration, rural household registration holds another important expectable benefit for farmers, namely what we often call farmers' "three rights", that is, the right to contracted land, the right to use homestead land, and the right to distribution of collective returns. These "three rights" are the three pillars of farmers' property rights. In other words, through these "three rights" farmers can obtain expectable property income. Whether so-called urbanisation is fair and reasonable for farmers depends crucially on how we treat these three rights of farmers. In the process of urbanisation in some places, farmers' "three rights" have been converted into a single urban apartment, which is clearly unreasonable; after moving to the city, farmers still face a predicament of survival.

Xinhua reporters found in their investigation that a phenomenon of "counter-urbanisation" has appeared in some places; farmers in some places are unwilling to give up rural household registration, and there have even been cases of many people longing to convert back to rural household registration, the reason being people's expectations regarding the "three rights". But here we can only use the word expectation, because in the process of converting farmers' "three rights" into property rights there are many uncertain factors. Our country's laws do not clearly stipulate how farmers' "three rights" are to be converted into property rights; each place has only made some policy arrangements according to its own actual conditions. Taking rural Beijing, which the author knows, as an example, some villages strictly restrict the transfer-in of household registration, even more strictly than Beijing urban household registration, because as long as one transfers into the village, the village must allocate homestead land, and the monetisation of these homestead land use rights is considerable.

If farmers' "three rights" are to be converted into individual property rights in the true sense, there is a "blockage" in between that must be resolved, namely collective ownership. Collective ownership is a legacy of our country's history, a unique form of ownership between public ownership and private ownership, neither public nor private. In a market economy this form of ownership seems somewhat anomalous; whether it is deemed public or private is not entirely reasonable, so this issue needs to be resolved by relevant legislation, especially in the revision of our country's Land Administration Law, where this question must be seriously answered.

However, no matter how the law resolves it, some basic principles and ideas probably cannot change, namely giving farmers fair and reasonable compensation, ensuring that farmers share in the fruits of development, and not reducing the cost of urbanisation by sacrificing farmers' interests.