Institutional defects in the arrangement of property Rights in Rural areas

The happiest thing in the world is to be a slave owner while pretending to be a savior. The worst thing in the world is to be banged and sucked into the marrow while thanking the Lord long.

I don't know who the happiest thing will fall on, but there is no doubt that the worst thing falls on contemporary Chinese farmers. Today I will exempt you from the negligible agricultural tax, tomorrow I will give people over 60 years old 55 yuan a month for the aged, and the day after tomorrow there will be a drizzling new rural cooperative medical insurance. Even people in their 90s (the average life expectancy of Chinese is only 73) are still paying tens of thousands of yuan of old-age insurance at one time and then receiving a paltry pension every month, and people are already grateful to the ground. But they do not know that the most basic property rights under their feet have been losing in the avalanche, sometimes earth-shaking land expropriation, sometimes quietly blood loss-capital can not irrigate the Chinese rural land of Guangmao.

In our magical country, the "three rural issues" of agriculture, rural areas, and farmers have become the number one problem of the word for a long time. At any time, there are "spokesmen for farmers' interests" who are "worried about the country and the people". Farmers' land cannot be privately owned and cannot be traded freely, otherwise they sell the land, and if they fail to start a business, they will lose their final pension and unemployment security!

I am surprised that people who say such nonsense are often regarded as "spokesmen for the interests of farmers" or "experts on the issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers"! Is it, like our "democracy" here, actually "making decisions on behalf of the people"? You can simply ask these "spokesmen for farmers' interests" and "experts on agriculture, rural areas and farmers" with the same logic: is it possible to understand that your money cannot be yours, otherwise what will you eat after you finish your next meal? Your house can't be yours either, or you sell it. Where do you live?

Those experts and scholars who emphasize that China's agricultural production still depends on family workshops, and that farmers' land cannot be traded freely, do you know that 90% of the average income of Chinese farmers already comes from working? Do you know an old Chinese saying: do not do to others what you do not want? Would you like to be a cottage farmer? If you do not want to, but force the implementation of such a policy, are you not afraid that the Chinese will have nothing to eat? Not afraid of heaven and earth? No conscience to blame yourself?

For those "saviors" who take it for granted that farmers who trade land freely will lose their land, let me just ask you one question: if urban houses can be traded freely, do urban residents lose their fucking houses? Do you want to treat the peasants as fools, or do you want to cover the fact that you are liars with a fig leaf?

Had it not been for the privatization of housing in 1998, today's urban residents in Beijing and Shanghai would have no property rights and the right to buy and sell their own property, and everyone would still be poor and the proletariat. By the same token, farmers do not have the property rights of homestead and land, and they will always be poor. When it comes to the integration of urban and rural areas, we should first integrate the property rights of urban and rural residents, otherwise the annual central document No. 1 will be the tears of crocodiles! Not to mention that the No. 1 document of the Central Committee has been about agriculture, rural areas and farmers for ten years in a row, and it is useless to emphasize the word "Heaven" for a hundred years in a row. Countries and regions with private ownership of land and rural houses and freedom of movement do not have the so-called "three rural issues" at all, nor do they need any basic farmland protection. The situation in China is to create its own problems and then solve them hypocritically. If the root problem is not solved, we will tickle on the fur problem.

Land, agricultural houses and homesteads cannot be traded freely, it is the chief culprit of the poorest Chinese farmers in the world, the highest house prices in the world in terms of purchasing power, the most serious industrial assimilation and overinvestment in China (cheap land to attract investment), and the most serious abandonment of land in China (high risk of agricultural atomization and low income). The property income of farmers in the far suburbs is negative under the background of urbanization, and there is no capital reservoir for the excess liquidity in the society. This kind of situation is only seen in Chinese history after 1949.

It is said that the privatization of land and free trading will lead to the loss of land by farmers and that a large amount of land will be changed for non-agricultural construction. This is slander regardless of the basic facts! Are you stupid to be a farmer and a developer? In fact, the existing land system has led to the loss of land, unemployment, social security and lack of money of hundreds of millions of farmers, while land has been expropriated excessively cheaply. The information center of the Ministry of Land said in early 2013 that the average annual growth rate of national residential land supply over the past eight years was three times that of urban population growth. It is because the short-term actions of officials are reckless. Anyway, they will reap political achievements and material benefits, and in the end, high inflation and high waste will be paid for by the whole people.

Today, the scourge of land annexation and farmers' loss of land lies in privileges, not private rights. It is precisely the poor protection of the private property rights that farmers should have, such as land and farmhouses, that leads to privileges like a wolf in an uninhabited land! The land belongs to agriculture, and farmers in urbanized areas can grow houses without growing crops in their own land, even if the land is sold at the market price, is it better than being forcibly expropriated at a low price?

Zheng Zhenyuan, former director of the Planning Department of the State Land Administration, wrote in the article "reforming the land system to promote industrialization, urbanization and urban-rural integration" ("partial Collection of the Reform consensus Forum", Beijing, China, November 16, 2012):

The 1982 regulations on the Administration of Land for Urban Housing Construction stipulates that 'retired workers, retired workers and soldiers who have settled in their hometowns, overseas Chinese who return to settle in their hometowns' and 'non-agricultural users in market towns' can all obtain homestead houses in rural areas with approval. Article 41 of the 1988 Land Administration Law also allows urban non-agricultural hukou residents to use collective land to build housing, but the area is limited and subject to examination and approval and paid use. That is to say, before 1998, the labor force and homestead allowed two-way flow between urban and rural areas. However, the 1998 version of the Land Management Law retains the nature of the average welfare distribution of the right to the use of rural homestead (each household can only have one homestead that meets the provincial area standard); Article 41 has been deleted. In 1999, the State Office issued document No. 39 prohibiting the sale of farmers' houses to urban residents and urban residents from occupying farmers' collective land to build houses, that is, the flow of the right to the use of rural homestead is prohibited. (China's urban housing began to be privatized in 1998)

"A large number of farmers went to work in cities, which reached about 88 million in 1998 and increased to 160 million in 2011 (now more than 230 million), of which 33 million go out with their families, and the second generation of farmers who cannot return account for about 40 per cent. The rural labor force has moved away, but their homestead and houses cannot be transferred out. A family in this village already has a homestead and cannot buy it. Urban residents are not allowed to buy it, and they are reluctant to hand it in, so they have no choice but to leave it idle. This has resulted in a large number of 'hollow villages' (now an average of about 200 villages disappear every day). Houses in the countryside cannot be sold, houses in cities cannot be bought, and farmers' lack of 'original capital' to settle in cities is also a drag on the citizenization of migrant workers, which has become a factor hindering population urbanization. Migrant workers can not be citizens, their contracted land in rural areas can not completely withdraw, although the "Rural Land contract Law" stipulates that the contracted management right can be transferred through the market, but this market has not been able to develop. If the contracted land can not be withdrawn completely, it will hinder the expansion of agricultural operation scale and agricultural modernization.

"taking land expropriation as the only way to increase construction land and expropriating land at low prices has led to the impoverishment of hundreds of millions of land-lost farmers, built trillions of yuan of 'land sales finance', and widened the gap between the rich and the poor. Forbidding the right to the use of collective land for construction into the market and taking land expropriation as the only legal way for new construction land is bound to violate the provisions of the Constitution that land can only be expropriated for the sake of the public interest, and expand the scope of land expropriation, thus creating nearly 100 million land-lost farmers. Land expropriation also follows the low-price land expropriation policy in the planned economy period. On the grounds that the development right (that is, the right to the use of construction land) belongs to the state and the price increases are returned to the public, the land compensation fee is calculated according to the original use output value. It has taken away trillions of yuan of development income from collective land (that is, the appreciation of location land rent), resulting in the impoverishment of 60% of the landless peasants. Although the government has issued several policies to increase the compensation fee for land expropriation, from 35000 yuan per mu in 2003-2005 to 41000 yuan per mu in 2009, the land transfer fee has increased from 218000 yuan per mu to 519000 yuan per mu in the same period. the government takes more property income from collective farmers. This is the root cause of the frequent occurrence of forced evictions and murders in recent years, which has led to serious social problems.

"the 'land sales finance' has strongly supported the rapid urbanization of land and the development of the local economy. at the same time, it has also promoted the fever of local government investment and development zones, encouraged it to reclaim more land and expropriated land, resulting in more land-lost farmers and further widening the gap between urban and rural areas. Part of the 'land sales finance' flows into the pockets of developers, creating a group of property tycoons; part of it has become a source of rent-seeking and corruption for land-related officials, further widening the gap between the rich and the poor. "