(Ecns.cn) – Rural collective land reform is high on the agenda in China, involving new measures for land identification, simplified transfer of titles and the adoption of market principles in land transactions.
On August 31, officials from the Ministry of Land and Resources, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Agriculture formed a team to accelerate the process of releasing land registration certificates.
At the historic meeting, Wang Shiyuan, Vice Minister of Land and Resources, stressed that the work of land identification is closely related with the stability of rural society. Land is one of the fundamental production elements in the development of the national economy, which plays an important role in both economics and politics, he added. The work will also protect the interests of farmers.
There is public concern that the land policy will likely be tightened in the future. However, experts explained that the rural land registration process aims to draw a clear demarcation between collectively-owned land and state-owned land.
First step: land identification
Under China's existing land ownership structure rural land is owned by collectives, often village committees, who distribute land use rights to households on 30-year contracts. Farmers are then allowed to contract, rent, exchange or transfer their land use rights.
Last February, the Ministry of Agriculture released a notice of the pilot project and started land registration work in cooperation with other departments, such as the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Land and Resources, the Legal Affairs Office of the State Council, and the State Archives Bureau.
Dang Guoying, a researcher with the Rural Development Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the project will improve the current system of land registration and lay a solid foundation for further reform by allowing farmers to transfer their land use rights at will.
Reforming land identification first and then transferring land has already been put into practice in some regions of China.
On June 7, 2007, Chengdu was approved as a pilot area for reform in rural land rights, whose primary content was land identification. After the identification process, information such as location, ownership and use-rights could be inferred from the identification numbers, and basic judgments could be made about whether any land rights had been violated.
