Land Reform

OK, I'm on a roll here. One of my students did an extra story about one of the central issues in China today, land reform. Here's part of her story:

--, an apprentice in a barbershop on Guangzhou Lu, had to leave his family five years ago. His home is in Shihu village of Chaohu county, Anhui province. His two little brothers are still living there now.
When I asked him why he left his family, he shook his head and kept silent for a while.“ Money!My family needs money !”he said.“When I graduated from high school, I went to Nanjing to look for a job. I wanted to study in university but my family didn’t have enough money for it because my two little brothers also needed money to pay tuition. As the eldest son, I felt that I must help my parents lightening the heavy burden on them.”
--- said his parents were farmers and once had more than ten mus of farmland. They mainly planted wheat, paddy rice and some other vegetables. His parents could only earn four hundred yuan every month by cultivating the land when --- was in middle school. The money didn’t cover their monthly expenses,so they had to borrow money from others and then fell deep into in debt.They wanted to sell the usage rights of their land but this was prohibited by the law.
One day two village officials came to his home and said that the local government needed to expropriate their farmland to build industrial parks and would compensate them for the loss with three thousand per mu.
“We dared not refuse and that was a large sum of money indeed," --- said. "We could use the money to pay the debts. So we transferred our farmland to the government. Later we learned that the government sold the land to some developers for ten thousand per mu."
__ and his parents left home and became migrant workers.
“Now I earn eight hundred yuan every month and the barbershop is my home in Nanjing. There are also several boys and girls like me in the shop. We work in the daytime and sleep on the sofa at night. We lack social security and face prejudice from others.”
I asked him what his family would do if the country returned their land and they had private ownership.“Sell our land at a higher price and become residents of the city,” he said.

On October 19, the Communist Party Central Committee issued a policy document as a guideline to further rural reform and development. Many experts and scholars believe that farm ownership will change soon and farmers will be allowed to mortgage and sell their farmland. But those changes don’t actually appear in the new Party document.
“At present, China's rural land reform has its bottom line,”said ---, a sociology professor at Nanjing University.

In ---’s view, rural land reform should be a long-term process. Permanent land use rights are equivalent to private ownership and that can’t be achieved in the current conditions, --- said.
“The breakthrough in the reform of land property rights depends on the level of economic development and the development of democratic politics,” he said. According to domestic law, farmland is collectively owned, but meted out to farmers in small plots by leasing contracts.
“Collectively owned” is a vague concept. In fact, the country is the true owner of the land. The local governments usually use the rights to buy the farmland back from farmers at a very low price in the name of “the collective” and sell the land at a higher price to a land agent. This expropriated land has become the government's main source of revenue. If farmers become true masters of the land, the government will lose a major source of income.
And if farm ownership becomes private,more and more farmers will give up their land by mortgaging or selling it and then move into the cities. That will bring more pressure on the already overcrowded cities. If the farmland is sold to developers, this also might further threaten the country's food safety and significantly reduce food production.

The new Party policy, --- said "will break the monopolizing right of government purchasing land... Simply speaking, farmers will not have to sell farmland usage rights to local governments at an unfair price but can sell them to users directly at a reasonable price.”
But this change, he said, is not "land reform" in the strict sense. The government has just adopted some more liberal policies. The current system will be kept stable and unchanged for a long time.
“In addition, ideology is a big problem,” ____said.“Allowing farmers to become true masters of the land means private ownership. In essence, it is contrary to the socialist public ownership and may be seen as the collapse of socialism.”
“How to make farmers have their own land and houses and benefit from land value-added gains is not only an economic issue," he said. "It must be seen as the fundamental rights of farmers as citizens. If this problem cannot be solved, it is impossible to solve the other problems in Chinese rural land reform.”