Li Guoxiang: How to Reform and Innovate the Rural Land System

China is actively and steadily promoting a new type of urbanization, which inevitably requires the expropriation of farmers' land. How to reasonably determine the compensation standard for land expropriation? Do peasant households entering cities and towns need to give up the right to contract rural land and the right to use homesteads when migrant workers become citizens?

Land urbanization and population urbanization will inevitably bring about changes in rural land and the redistribution of rights and interests, and continue to trigger contradictions and conflicts among various rural interest groups. Therefore, it is urgent to innovate the rural land system. The author believes that the bottom line should be drawn through the top-level design to ensure that the land rights and interests of special groups in rural areas are not infringed.

Encourage rural grassroots to innovate land systems that are compatible with the local area, allow multiple forms of collective ownership of rural land, solve the problem of value-added income distribution of rural land expropriation, and promote the effective circulation of agricultural land to realize the optimal allocation of rural land. The existing rural land system is generally designed in accordance with the road of urbanization with Chinese characteristics and the protection of farmers' rights and interests in rural land. Years of practice have shown that my country's rural land system and policies have played an important role in promoting the rapid advancement of my country's urbanization and rural social stability. However, in real life, more and more contradictions and conflicts in the existing rural land system and policies cannot be avoided.

Therefore, on the basis of basically stabilizing the rural land system and policies, continuous reform and innovation can better provide institutional guarantee and motivation for the coordinated advancement of my country's new urbanization and agricultural modernization.

With the continuous advancement of urbanization in my country, if the rural land system is not adjusted accordingly, contradictions and conflicts in reality will continue to accumulate, hindering the advancement of new urbanization. However, the reform and innovation of the rural land system involves a wide range of interests and has a very obvious impact on the economy and society. it is directly related to the stability of rural society, the allocation of rural land resources, the cost and risk of agricultural production, the price level of agricultural products (000061, shares) and the burden of food consumption of residents. Objectively speaking, in reality, there is no perfect rural land system reform and innovation plan to protect the interests of micro-subjects and the overall economic and social interests at the same time.

How to reform and innovate the rural land system? In order to avoid confusion and negative effects, an overall design is needed. Who will design it? Should there be a top-level design first, or should we let the grass-roots level explore first? According to the author's many years of investigation in rural areas, we know that China's rural areas are very different, farmers defined by agricultural hukou as a symbol are rapidly dividing, and there are differences in the specific arrangements of rural land systems chosen and the implementation of rural land policies.

If the top-level design of the rural land system is too detailed, it may seriously restrict the enthusiasm of the grassroots to explore and innovate the specific arrangements of the rural land system. In reality, farmers will not implement the relevant regulations on rural land in place, but damage the authority of the top-level design. If there are no principles and certain constraints, the reform and innovation of the rural land system at the grassroots level is very likely to infringe on the rights and interests of rural vulnerable groups and affect rural social stability.

If the top-level design and villager autonomy are organically combined, better results may be achieved. The key to the top-level design of the rural land system arrangement is to draw a bottom line to ensure that rural women and children and low-income groups or rural land rights and interests of groups that use land as the main source of livelihood are not infringed. On the basis of this bottom line, we can let go to innovate through villager autonomy. The specific arrangements of the rural land system in China stimulate rural vitality, and use market mechanisms as much as possible to promote the optimal allocation of rural land.

When the rural land is legally requisitioned by urbanization, who should make the decision in rural areas? How to determine the compensation standard for land requisition? How to distribute the compensation income of rural land? These issues must be defined in land urbanization. In order to prevent a small number of village cadres from sacrificing the interests of landless farmers and rural collective interests in order to obtain private interests, the protection of farmers' rights and interests in land urbanization can consider the hierarchical decision-making mechanism.

High-level decision-making power is given to land-lost farmers to safeguard the rights and interests of land-lost farmers as the bottom line; intermediate decision-making power can be given to villagers' congresses or all villagers to balance the interests of land-lost farmers and village collectives in accordance with the democratic principle that the minority is subordinate to the majority; low-level decision-making power is given to a small number of village cadres to review and supervise the legality of land urbanization. For the illegal expropriation of farmers' land or the expropriation of farmers' land by rent, we should strengthen the punishment of rural management cadres to ensure that the red line of cultivated land is not broken.

In order to promote the new urbanization and solve the problem of population urbanization, the corresponding overall idea of rural land system innovation should follow the strategy of easy first and difficult step by step. The first step is to keep the contracted management rights of rural land unchanged for a certain period of time, build a rural land transfer market, and encourage land transfer; the second step is to introduce a market mechanism when the time is right to contract rural land through one-time compensation. But farmers who have not cultivated land for a long time give up the right to contract management and implement land ownership for the tillers.

In the construction of the rural land transfer market, institutional arrangements should allow those farmers who are less dependent on contracted land to transfer out of contracted land more actively. In particular, most middle-and high-income families in rural areas mainly rely on non-agricultural industries or migrant workers for income, the opportunity cost of operating small-scale contracted land is high, unable to concentrate on agricultural production, and the output of contracted land is inefficient.

If the middle-and high-income families with little dependence on the contracted land are allowed to transfer the contracted land out, it will not affect the family income, but also benefit the agricultural scale operation. With the continuous maturity of conditions such as a sound social security system, through market mechanisms and policy adjustments, urban families who no longer rely on rural land will completely give up their land contract management rights and homestead use rights in rural areas.

Vulnerable groups in rural areas are restricted by family labor resource endowments, non-agricultural employment opportunities are few, wage income is often difficult to guarantee basic survival needs, and their dependence on rural land is relatively large. In any case, it is necessary to ensure that the land of these rural households Contractual management rights are not infringed.

2013-08-07 16:15 Daily Economic News