A comprehensive audit of land finance will force the government to be more self-disciplined.

Starting from mid-August, the National Audit Office will audit local land transfer revenue and expenditure, land expropriation, reserve, supply, renovation, cultivated land protection and land law enforcement in the past six years. This audit is the third large-scale national audit after social security audit and local debt audit.

"Land finance" is a contradictory intersection point to observe and understand the complex national conditions of contemporary China. This is mainly reflected in: on the one hand, with the rising revenue from the sale of land, "land finance" has become one of the most important sources of revenue for governments at all levels. For example, in 2013, the revenue from the transfer of state-owned land use rights reached a record high of 4.13 trillion yuan, an increase of about 45% over the same period last year, and the proportion of land transfer fee income in the income of local government funds is as high as 86%, not to mention. In addition, there is an equally alarming amount of local government debt guaranteed by "land finance", so generally speaking, if we agree that competition among local governments is an important driver of China's rapid economic development, then "land finance" is the key to the effectiveness of this factor.

On the other hand, the increasing dependence of local governments on "land finance", combined with China's consistent "strong government" governance model, has also become a concentrated breeding ground for factors hindering China's sustainable development. for example, according to the 2013 Social Blue Book of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, about half of the group incidents that occur every year are caused by land expropriation and demolition. For example, real estate prices, which are soaring all the way and are backed up by local governments at every inflection point, the systemic risks accumulated and the "crowding-out" effect on real economic sectors and residents' consumption and welfare have long been a huge economic and social hidden danger that can be seen by everyone.

In fact, the above two aspects are also the "dilemma" of deepening reform, transformation and development in contemporary China. On the one hand, the changing situation makes it difficult for a large number of once effective institutional arrangements to continue to be used blindly, and because of path dependence, the correction of these institutional distortions is bound to be a race against time. But on the other hand, the huge interest entanglement and the stability, strategy and systematicness that the reform must pay attention to, often make many radical solutions either slow down or have to wait for the premise to be reset.

The permanent cure of local government land dependence involves the transformation of government functions, the reconstruction of central land relations, the improvement of the fiscal and taxation system and many other fields. At present, the reform in these areas is indeed being promoted step by step. The focus of the next step is to promote these reforms with greater strength and faster speed, and then to implement a number of small and progressive incremental institutional improvements immediately, so as to buy time for deep-seated and large-scale changes. explore the way, clear the periphery, and consolidate the foundation.

Sunlight is the best preservative. Through the comprehensive audit of "land finance", it is not only helpful to find out the situation and make the reform targeted in the later period, but also, more importantly, to make the detailed accounts of "land finance" widely known, recognized and supervised by the public. it is bound to force local governments at all levels to carry out more scientific, democratic, standardized and modest administration around land. And these credible effects are precisely the important demands of all reforms at present.