Land Ownership as a Public Stewardship : Collective Land Ownership
"The reform [rural land ownership reform] is a key to solve the predicament of China's countryside."
"It is expected to greatly boost efficiency, strengthen the collective economy, develop productivity and help modernize agriculture."
Song Xiangqing, deputy director, public management institute, Beijing Normal University, 2018
"One of the problems that China faces is a very fragmented land base. The size of a Chinese farm may be what we consider a garden."
"The model of backyard production has been disappearing very fast, and it’s been moving toward more commercial models that have all the bad things of industrial farming without the good management."
"One of the criticisms of Chinese pig farms is that they crowd their pigs and don’t give them enough sunlight. U.S. farms do pay attention to the welfare of the animals, otherwise, it will end up costing the farmer."
"Now that I own a house, if something is leaking, I will fix it. I’ll spend extra time on improvements like yard work so that I can sell it for higher value [whereas in China farmland can only be rented, so no incentive to improve the land by the farmer exists]."
"Consolidation is also a big gamble. There’s no guarantee that people who come into farming know what they’re doing."
"It’s very uncertain if these new farms will actually be more productive, and it will take some time before this new generation of farmers can learn how to do a good job at farming. That’s something that nobody knows how it will play out."
Fred Gale, senior economist at the United States Department of Agriculture
| China Land, Losing the Plot Financial Times |
Unlike the Soviet Union when land was made public after having been wrenched by the new government from private hands and wealthy landowners were viewed as the enemy of the communist ideal, and kulaks were punished for their enterprise and wealth, (many punished by death, others sent to the gulags to repent their capitalist idealism), it took the Peoples Republic of China decades to decide to make land a public trust. Only in 1982 with the promulgation of a new constitution was all urban land declared state-owned, considered a pillar of Chinese socialism.
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| China's farmers need improved land rights to improve integrity of cultivation. |
Farmers in Xiaoxihe, in eastern China, dream of land ownership, knowing that dream to beyond their reach. "Ownership is not possible in China. Socialism doesn't allow that", a 69-year-old farmer remarked cautiously, withholding his name. It's a situation far removed from the promise 70 years ago that farmers' lives would be transformed through redistribution from rich to poor farmers.
Despite that promise, in the end land was nationalized instead, and now every bit of Chinese geography belongs to the state. Incentive for farmers, initially herded into collective farming concerns, was simply non-existent. As in the Soviet Union, crop yield was poor. Farmers, like state factory workers, put very little effort into their work. Human enterprise requires a self-actualizing motivation. It's all very well to claim that collectivization will result in equality and everyone will be deserving of equal treatment with the presumption that everyone will be prepared to put into any enterprise an equal amount of talent and effort.
Once the center of an experiment that helped turn China's fortunes around, forty years previously farmers whose output barely even fed their own families, made the determination to set aside the rules requiring them to labour in state-controlled collectives. They decided to return to family farms instead, resulting in an agricultural production boom. That success story served to motivate toward overhauls to remake Chinese fortunes into a swiftly-growing economy.
Farmers were permitted to individually lease land from the state and operate that land as a private farm. But the dream of land ownership remained remote and unattainable. China was unwilling to return land to private ownership, even if they were prepared to relax other rules and permit human initiative and ingenuity and pride in work to have free reign. The results in increased yield and quality of product made it clear that this partial freedom equated with superior results.
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| Chinese property law |
Farmers, since they don't own the land they work, are unable to buy, sell or rent plots with the intention to create economically viable larger operating tracts, or to use the land as collateral for loans -- thus limiting their capital-raising ability. They could go so far and no further, and the predictable result was stagnation. Urban incomes in 2018 were close to three times higher than the incomes of rural residents, as a result.
Yearly, government invests attention on a new rural policy with the intention of improving the situation. Eventually the state allowed farmers to lease their land use rights to owner farmers to free up some who had become too old to farm to live in the city without forfeiting their land-use rights. They could, in other words, 'bank' their leases, lend them out for a price to others willing to work the land. The idea of a quasi property market, however has resulted in a mere 37 percent of rural land transferred to other farmers or companies.
And the crux of that problem lies in the fact that government decides who may transfer land, and though new reforms are scheduled for next year to allow farmers the right to vote for land transfers, government still allocates to itself veto of transfers.Where they are permitted, the system will not necessarily allow the new holders rights permitting them to take advantage of larger scale farming.
Zhu Chanyue, 40, was a successful real estate entrepreneur working the coastal region in real estate investing. After two decades in the business she decided to return home and live closer to her family while changing her profession to farming. She amassed close to 200 hectares of cropland using the land-transfer system, but success has eluded her. "There's no point boasting. I made a lot of money in real estate but lost it all in agriculture", she said.
For a country with a population of 1.4 billion people, agricultural success is integral to the entire economy and to the vital capability of being able to feed its population. Yet, though the population of the country is growing, the economy has seen a downturn. In acknowledging the vital importance of agriculture to the country, President Xi Jinping in a recent speech declared: "If the countryside flourishes the country flourishes".
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| China land reform |
And China has a problem of immense dimensions. The wage gap between rural and city residents is wide and widening. Close to half the country's population lives in the countryside. Agriculture is still considered an engine for potential growth. But that growth has stalled. And part of the problem lies in the socialist ideals of collectivization and state ownership of land.
Labels: Agriculture, China, Collectivization, Land Reform
posted by Pieface @ Monday, October 14, 2019
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