Nine Trends of "New Land Reform" under urbanization

All previous land reforms have had a significant and far-reaching impact on China. "New Land Reform" is difficult to know and difficult to do. the existing land system has formed a self-cycling and self-reinforcing pattern of interests and development inertia. To break this cycle does not take overnight, it requires not only top-level design, the determination of strong men to break their wrists and iron marks, but also approachability. Go to the grass-roots level to listen to the experience of bold exploration and careful verification of pilot projects in various places.

The third Plenary session of the 18th CPC Central Committee made a new strategic plan for China's urbanization, defined the main tasks of rural land system reform, and opened the curtain of a new round of land reform. How strong will the new land reform be? Where will this "sharp arrow" go? In this paper, according to the spirit of the new round of reform of the central government, combined with the current local exploration practice and the law and experience of foreign land reform, this paper tries to make a forward-looking judgment on the possible trend of "new land reform" from nine aspects, such as the goal orientation of reform, the mode of urbanization, the property right of collective land, the main body of land market, the distribution of land income, the issue of agriculture, rural areas and farmers, the source of new construction land, small property rights and land laws and regulations.

(1) the reform orientation has changed from "land-oriented" to "people-oriented".

For a long time, local governments are keen on the city-building movement with the promotion of land value as the original driving force, which is negative to the citizenization and welfare improvement of land-lost farmers, which brings huge social costs and affects the sustainable development and balance of economy and society. and entered a period of continuous outbreak of negative effects. The new round of land reform is bound to change, which will not only increase the proportion of farmers' land property rights, but also follow up a series of institutional arrangements for employment, social security and household registration of land-lost farmers. At the forum on promoting the pilot work of the new type of urbanization, Premier Li Keqiang pointed out that the importance of the new type of urbanization lies in highlighting the word "new", the core is to write the word "human", and it is necessary to implement the policy of differential settlement. We will explore the implementation of a link between transfer payments and the citizenization of agricultural transfer population, and incorporate urban farmers into the urban housing and social security system. From the information revealed by the senior level, whether it is the reform of the land system or the related supporting system, whether it can achieve the happiness of the people is the core guidance to measure whether it is successful or not.

(2) it will promote the transformation of urbanization mode from "land-led" to "three-wheel drive".

The "land model" supporting the rapid development of urbanization in China in the past 30 years, that is, the circular mode of low-price land expropriation-- attracting investment-- developing and realizing-- enriching finance-- investing industry-- feeding the society-- re-expropriating land, is essentially government-led, relying on the monopoly mechanism of state-owned urban land and collective ownership of rural land, through the transfer of land use rights, the development road of capital accumulation in urbanization and industrialization. It is an endogenous and indispensable institutional arrangement to promote the rapid development of China's economy in the past three decades.

With the promotion of the integration of urban and rural land, the improvement of the income of farmers' land property rights, the end of the era of profiteering of residential real estate, and the rise in the cost of scarcity of land resources, the urbanization model of government monopoly and rolling cycle of cheap land expropriation will be difficult to sustain. on the other hand, after decades of hard accumulation, China has accumulated abundant capital on the whole. China's new urbanization model will change the single land-driven development model and enter the trinity driving development stage of "capital-industry-land" with capital as the forerunner, industry as the core and land as the basis. In the future, we will no longer pursue such a quantitative indicator of urbanization rate, but focus on solving the problems closely related to the quality of urbanization, such as the reform of the household registration system, diversified investment and financing mechanisms, the modernization of urban governance, the integration of production and cities, and the employment of residents.

(3) the transformation of urban and rural land market from "dual system" to "integration"

If we say that the core of the last round of land reform was the separation of ownership and the right to use, and realized the marketization and capitalization of state-owned land, then, the new round of land reform will focus on exploring and promoting the capitalization and marketization of collective land, and the integration of urban and rural land market with "same land, equal rights and equal pay" will be finally established. Considering the imbalance of regional development and the different degree of perfection of the supporting environment in our country, the process of integration must be promoted step by step in stages and batches. First of all, narrow the scope of land expropriation and clearly define the public welfare land; secondly, gradually liberalize the collective construction land to enter the market, first liberalize the commercial, tourism, industrial collective construction land and public rental housing and other land; thirdly, on the basis of perfect financial, property rights, household registration and other systems, it will be possible to allow free transactions between urban and rural areas, and then completely break the dual system of urban and rural land.

(4) the property right of collective land has changed from "collective ownership" to "quasi-privatization".

The clarity of property rights is the basis for the realization of land marketization and capitalization. At present, people from all walks of life talk a lot about the direction of collective land property rights reform, which is roughly divided into three factions: state ownership, private ownership and mixed ownership. Our research shows that, taking into account the diversified and unbalanced characteristics of China's national conditions, pure one-size-fits-all nationalization or privatization is not desirable, in view of the awakening of people's awareness of property rights and the popularization of market awareness, it is a general trend to give farmers greater income rights and disposal rights to contracted land, homestead and collective assets without changing collective ownership and strengthening strict land use control and land planning. In the United Kingdom, for example, the ownership of land belongs to the King, but individuals have a lease term of 999 years, which is equivalent to a permanent lease. In particular, it should be pointed out that "quasi-privatization" does not change collective ownership, but emphasizes that farmers have more rights of use and income, and giving farmers more income from property rights does not mean that the government withdraws. The government will be more stringent in land planning, use control and development rights supervision.