“Secure property in hand leads to peace in mind,” said Mencius,
an ancient Chinese philosopher, when asked how to manage a
country.
The central government of China, facing a daunting task of
building a harmonious society and developing the country in a
balanced way, issued the No. 1 Central Document, its first major
policy directive of the year, on the eve of the New Chinese Year.
The document is unprecedented in its concern for land rights, and
the degree of detail it devotes to specific mandates to protect the
land rights of the 700 million rural Chinese.
This document is Beijing’s strongest response yet to the
disturbing fact that farmers’ individual land rights remain
insecure a quarter-century after the breakup of the collective
farms, discouraging investment in land improvements and
facilitating rampant land expropriations and irresponsible urban
development.
Insecurity of farmers’ land rights slows agricultural
development and greatly affects farmers’ peace of mind. In the
first nine months of 2006, 17,000 cases of “massive rural
incidents” (often violent protests) were officially reported,
involving about 400,000 farmers. Land grievances were their top
complaint.
With the widening gap between rural and urban development, more
than 200 million farmers have migrated to cities, especially to
developed coastal areas, seeking a better livelihood. Still other
forms of upheaval result from this growing “floating population,”
as just witnessed in the toxic combination of natural disaster and
transportation paralysis.
For the most part, the central government is actually not to
blame for farmers’ insecurity and a lagging agricultural sector. A
series of national laws have been adopted to strengthen farmers’
land rights since the 1990s.
The problem lies with local implementation: farmers’ land rights
are illegally “readjusted” away based on household population
changes, reassigned to “outside developers,” or taken by the cadres
and sold for enormous profit to non-agricultural users. In a kind
of double whammy, local governments exercise virtually unfettered
power to expropriate farmlands for urban biased development, with
grossly insufficient compensation to the farmers.
AGAINST THIS BACKDROP, most of the tremendous wealth generated by
China’s reforms over the past three decades has not flowed into the
countryside. The official rural-urban income ratio has worsened to
1:3.28, even without considering many social benefits available
only in cities. Without secure property rights that would encourage
them to make long-term and productivity-enhancing investments in
land, many farmers choose working in developed cities.
One does not need to look far for counter-examples: after Japan,
South Korea and Taiwan completed their post-war land reforms and
ensured the security of farmers’ land rights. Their rural economies
roared ahead, resulting in a prosperous countryside that has helped
moderate mass migration to cities, spreading it over two or more
generations.
The 2008 Central Document now sends a powerful signal of change,
assuring farmers’ land rights in an unusually extensive and
forceful way. Highlights include:
* Local governments and collective cadres must strictly
implement legal rules on prohibiting readjustment and taking-back
of farmers’ land rights for selling them to non-villager
developers.
* No land expropriations by local governments will be approved
unless and until all procedural safeguards are satisfied,
compensation is deemed adequate and fully delivered to the hands of
affected farmers, and a social security safety-net is in place.
* Land rights certificates, which are the ultimate proof and
documentation of land rights, must be issued to every farm
household.
* For the first time, the Central Document calls for
establishing a rural land rights registration system that provides
further assurance and security to farmers.
THE IMPLEMENTATION of these policies will meet considerable local
resistance, and it will require determination and ingenuity to pull
it off. Beijing will have to put teeth in the policy. Political
careers of local officials should be tied closely with their
implementation of these pro-farmer initiatives. Serious
consequences should be imposed, including removal from official
posts, fines, civil or even criminal liabilities.
Last summer, several Ministries launched a joint campaign to
inspect and rectify rural land violations. More than a thousand
local officials were sanctioned over a three-month period as a
result.
There should also be independent and comprehensive monitoring of
local progress. Relying on self-reports from local governments on
matters like this has been proven grossly inadequate. Sending
independent inspection teams to the field will generate essential
first-hand information, but it is not practical to have inspection
teams everywhere.
The World Bank, my colleagues and I at the Rural Development
Institute, and others have applied another useful approach to such
monitoring of farmers’ land rights — including large-scale sample
surveys — over the past decade. A further option is to create
channels, such as telephone hotlines, by which farmers can
instantly report violations as they occur. News media and
grassroots NGOs should be encouraged to monitor and report
freely.
Finally, in the medium term, an accessible and reasonably
independent judicial system needs to be established along with
legal aid services for farmers. Local courts can hardly serve as an
impartial forum to address farmers’ complaints at present, because
they are largely appointed and funded by local governments that are
often the wrongdoers in land disputes. This link must be
severed.
Meanwhile, legal professionals should be encouraged to provide
independent legal aid services to aggrieved farmers, to at least
partially mitigate the present judicial failure.
The clear implication of this powerful new document is that
Beijing finally means business on securing land rights in farmers’
hands. Grassroots development and “peace in mind” should
follow.
Li Ping is head of the Beijing Representative Office
and a staff attorney with the Seattle-based Rural Development
Institute, which contributed the recent Cato Institute policy paper
“Securing Land Rights for Chinese Farmers.”
