How is the collective concept of land right formed?

I.

The concept of land right is the product of the practice of land right. Once the concept of land right is formed, it will have an impact on people's land behavior.

In the current land system, China's land is subject to public ownership. The land of public ownership is divided into two forms, one is state ownership, the other is collective ownership. The design of such a land right system is confirmed in the form of national fundamental law.

Generally speaking, rural land is owned by collectives. After the land is divided into households, the right to use the land will be devolved, and farmers will have the right to use the land. During the period of the second round of contracting, the state issued laws and policies stipulating that the contract relationship of rural land shall remain unchanged for 30 years, and the collective shall not recover or adjust the land during the contract period.

At the beginning of the new century, the state abolished the agricultural tax, and the collective was no longer able to collect funds from farmers and apportion them for village public utilities. The state mainly solves the problem of the supply of rural public goods through project resources and "one thing, one discussion". However, because the project needs to be actively fought for, and the discussion is faced with huge coordination costs, the above two models are difficult to meet the actual needs of rural areas. Subject to the relevant institutional arrangements of the state, it is difficult for rural collectives to realize their ownership rights on the land, which leads to the low collective ability, the falsification of collective functions and the weakening of farmers' collective concept.

If the power and function of the collective are not brought into full play, the more farmers feel that the collective is useless. Farmers farm on their own. What is the value of keeping useless collectives? In some places, rural land is nominally owned by collectives, but in the actual concept of farmers, the imagination of land privatization is already very obvious. Therefore, it seems that the continuous falsification of rural collective organizations is not only in line with theoretical logic, but also in line with social conditions and public opinion. Therefore, the virtual collective ownership and strengthening the right of use of individual farmers seems to have become the direction of the current land system reform.

However, this survey in Lijiazhuang Village, Hekou, Shanxi Province, gave us a very different impression. The farmers here have a "deep-rooted" collective concept of land rights. Farmers in the estuary generally believe that the land is collective, not private. However, as the state has stipulated that the land contract relationship will remain unchanged for 30 years, there has been basically no land adjustment since the distribution of land around 1994. Before that, the local people generally practiced the habit of carrying out land adjustment once every three or five years. Now, everyone is waiting for the expiration of the 30-year contract period, and then carry out land adjustment and enter the next land contract period.

2.

Generally speaking, land adjustment is a very important channel for village groups to give full play to land ownership. It is also an important manifestation of the collective exercise of land power. Through the adjustment of land, we can strengthen farmers' understanding of the collective attribute of land and avoid the imagination of land privatization. Therefore, in recent years, our survey shows that for those rural areas that continue to adjust their land, the less farmers imagine the privatization of land, and the deeper their understanding of the collective nature of land.

It is precisely that the land is collective rather than their own, so farmers' disposal of land is also subject to the collective very strict constraints and control, land use and management is more orderly. In those places where the privatization of land is more serious, farmers dispose of their land just like their own personal belongings, so it is easy to cause land abuse and management failure.

In the past, the main reason for adjusting land was fairness. According to the simple point of view of the peasants, that is, "the dead cannot take the jobs of the living." Those who have passed away should hand over the land and distribute it to the new-born children and newly married women, because the latter people need to eat. Those who get married should hand over the land she originally had in the village because she should be given the land in her husband's house. According to Liu Shouying, this is due to farmers'"deep-rooted concept of collective membership". This deep-rooted concept of collective membership puts great emphasis on the fairness of the distribution of collective resources and requires the allocation of land resources to constantly adapt to the changes of collective composition. This leads to the continuous adjustment of collective land.

However, our survey in Shanxi shows that since the second round of land contracting in 1994, the local policy of "increasing population without increasing land, reducing population without reducing land" has been strictly implemented. During these 20 years, the local land has not been adjusted, which means that Liu Shouying's "deep-rooted concept of collective membership of farmers" has not been expressed. However, this does not affect farmers' understanding of collective ownership of land. How is this going on?