Whose cheese has been moved by the collective land in the market?

The entry of collective land into the market is nothing new. with the rise of township enterprises since the reform and opening up, the land used at that time was collective land, which was in line with the provisions of the Land Management Law of 1988 that the establishment of township enterprises allows the use of collectively owned land. However, this law also clearly stipulates that "the land use rights owned by the state and collectives can be transferred in accordance with the law." The specific measures for the transfer of land use rights shall be formulated separately by the State Council. Two years later, the State Council promulgated the interim regulations on the assignment and transfer of Urban State-owned Land use Rights, but up to now there are no regulations on the transfer of collective land use rights. Realistically speaking, the existing legal system basically blocks the ways and channels of "collective land entering the market". However, according to Liu Shouying's survey, some developed coastal cities, such as Nanhai District of Foshan City, Guangdong Province, have not been limited to "setting up township enterprises" since the early 1990s. More factories are used to build factories for foreign capital, joint ventures and private enterprises.

Although the entry of collective land into the market has been in the "encirclement and interception" of the policy since 1988, all official documents relating to the transfer of the right to the use of collective land are "prohibited, strictly prohibited" and so on. In fact, a large number of activities to enter the market can only be turned "underground". At first, the scale was small and the influence was limited, and the local government also turned a blind eye. However, when the "climate" gradually became, the attitude of local governments was also divided, some advocated "cleaning up and rectifying", while others insisted on bringing these "extrajudicial acts into the legal system" and advocated to open up legal channels by amending the law. Now when we discuss the logic of reform, there are debates about "problem-oriented" and "concept-oriented", as well as "grass-roots innovation" and "top-level design," but they all follow the same principle, that is, pilot projects are formed by a large number of "extrajudicial innovation behaviors" in reality, and a social consensus on reform is slowly formed, and the introduction of the "red head document" is the confirmation of reform at the highest level. The entry of collective land into the market is no exception. After more than 20 years of exploration, the phrase "gradually establishing a unified urban and rural construction land market" was added at the third Plenary session of the 17th CPC Central Committee in 2008, but the word "step by step" in front of it also shows that it is still in the pilot exploration stage and there is no clear timetable. It was not until the third Plenary session of the 18th CPC Central Committee that the word "step by step" was removed, and the reform direction and promotion path of "rural collective construction land entering the market with the same rights and prices as state-owned land" were clearly defined. In 2014, 33 counties and districts, including Beijing Daxing District, were included in the pilot areas of "collective construction land into the market".

There are many literatures about collective land entering the market. Since the 1990s, scholars such as Zhou Qiren and Liu Shouying have begun to call for "giving the property right system of equal protection to collective land and state-owned land". Since the third Plenary session of the 17th CPC Central Committee, the central government has continuously released the signal to support the legal entry of collective land into the market, which has caused a new round of fierce debate in the society. There are two focal points of debate, one is "whether or not to enter the market", and the second is "how to enter the market".

On the first question, there are two very different voices. One kind of voice declared that "the entry of collective land into the market will impact the urban land market, and even weaken the effect of the existing land system on economic growth." the theoretical logic is that the entry of collective land into the market breaks the monopoly that urban land can only be supplied by the government, and the rise of land supply lowers the urban land price and the monopoly income that the local government obtains from the process of land expropriation. It increases the cost of land expropriation, which is not conducive to the promotion of urbanization, which is highly dependent on the land expropriation system. According to the above logical reasoning, we can naturally draw the conclusion that "entering the market is not conducive to the promotion of urbanization and affects economic growth". Another kind of voice advocates that "collective land should completely enter the market", which is an important way to protect farmers' land rights and interests, enhance collective assets and farmers' property income, and more importantly, break the duality of China's land system. Allowing farmers to go to cities with tradable and consideration-worthy "land assets" will thoroughly reform the existing urbanization model. The villagers who stay in rural areas and the collective economy also have a long-term and stable return on assets, which can be said to be "mutual benefit between urban and rural areas".

The author fully supports the second kind of view. The existing urban-rural dual land system has played an important role in China's rapid economic growth in the past decade, and many theories have been used to explain it, but most intuitively, it adapts to the characteristics of China's high dependence on investment and exports in the stage of economic take-off and rapid growth, and a large number of industrial parks, infrastructure, real estate and new town construction are closely related to the mechanism of government monopoly on land supply. However, the disadvantages of this model are becoming more and more obvious, especially in the "new normal" stage, the two major engines of investment and exports, which have supported rapid growth for a long time, have obviously slowed down, and the urbanization model of "land rather than people" has led to the emergence of a large number of new cities that do not have sufficient agglomeration ability. as an important support of the traditional urbanization and growth model, the land system has also reached the stage of "must be changed". The entry of collective land into the market has broken the institutional monopoly that "state-owned land can only be used for non-agricultural construction". The old urbanization model promoted by the government's land expropriation will of course hit a brick wall. In this sense, the first kind of point of view that "is not conducive to the promotion of urbanization" is also right, but their "urbanization model" is the traditional set, "not conducive to growth" seems reasonable in the short term, but in the long run. Breaking the dual system of land and activating the "capital potential" of rural land has a great impact on the sustainable and balanced growth of China's economy.