Research On Transformation Of Rural Land To Urban Land

After the Founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, due to the complicated international and domestic political situation then, the Chinese Communist Party established, according to its understanding on industrialization at that time, the heavy-industry-oriented strategy of industrialization to realize the economical dream of powerful nation and wealthy people. In order to coordinate with this strategy, China gradually formed a highly centralized planning economy. It is a government-guiding industrialization road.Under this government-guiding and highly centralized planning economy, state-owned economy had a dominating position in all forms of economy, and the people's communes were commonly used to manage the agriculture. Accordingly, in the land system, soon after the land reform, the government began to launch the movement of the concentration of landholdings, but the unpractical concentration of landholdings caused disastrous results, such as the sharp decreasing of the total output of grain between 1958 and 1961, and the serious famine in China. In spite of repeated adjustments, owing to the fixed strategy of industrialization, the corresponding rural landholding system still plodded on, which made the agricultural production grow slowly, and the peasants lived in deep poverty. In the end, in order to produce adequate food and clothes, the poor peasants conducted a great creation, practicing the land-contracting management in 1970's and 1980's, and under the support of the government, developing it into the family contracted responsibility system with remuneration linked to output, which resolved the food problem overnight and created wonders of Chinese economy. In order to protect the peasants' initiative and strengthen the basic position of agriculture and lay down a solid basis for Chinese industrialization, the central government has stressed repeatedly that the family contracting responsibility system of rural land holdings is the great initiation of the peasants, and should be maintained over a long period of time.In the process of government-guiding industrialization, in order to acquire the construction land for industry, the state-expropriating system of land has been established. Before the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee, the government mainly implemented the land system of state expropriation and free allocation; after the establishment of the national developing strategy which placed economic construction at the center of the work in the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee, the economic construction fully recovered and grew rapidly, the need for construction land also increased speedily, and some new situations and problems appeared in the expropriation of construction land, therefore our state strengthened the work of land legislation, enacting and amending a series of laws and regulations on land utilization and the protection of cultivated land, such as Law of the People's Republic of China on Land Administration, thus gradually forming a complete land expropriating system, which included regulations on legal procedure, power of examination and approval, compensation and settlement, supervision and check, and other corresponding provisions, and which fully embodied the typical characteristics of the land expropriating system of planning economy.The serious disadvantages of Chinese highly centralized planning economy were exposed continuously in the practice from the very beginning of its establishment. Chinese economic reform has gone on for more than half a century since the Eighth Central Committee decided to reform the system of economic management. Roughly speaking, the course of Chinese economic reform can be divided into three stages: the administrative separation of power from 1958 to 1978, which focused on the transferring of power and interests of central government to the local governments; the stage of increment reform (priority of outside part of the old system) between 1979-1993, which stressed the reform of non state-owned departments and the promotion of their developments; From 1994 until now, the stage of integrated advancement, which has being taken the reform strategy of "integrated advancement and focal breakthrough", and is an overall reform to set up market economy. The sharp contradiction and severe confrontation of the society came into being between the market-oriented economic reform and the land system of planning economy.Since 1990s, in the process of the promotion of market-oriented reform, the breaking of the original two-pole pattern of central and local governments under the centralized system, the administrative separation of power formed in the reform strategy of the transferring of power and interest, and the separate financial system, have made the local governments control much economic policy- making power and lots of resources. All of these, together with the traditional cadre management system in which the lower governments are only responsible to the higher authorities, have stimulated the local officials, in the pursuit of their own proper interests, to develop the economy more rapidly. As a result, the local authorities have taken many measures to soften the budget limits and construct various image projects. The abuse of the land expropriating system to increase wealth is one of the important means. The vicious development of the land expropriation has worsened the original social confrontations and widened the income disparity between the urban and rural areas, giving rise to the paradox of land expropriation, and arousing many intense and complicated social contradictions.In order to resolve the paradox and alleviate contradictions, the local authorities actively conduct, out of the consideration of their own interests and on the basis of the original land expropriation system, some innovations on the land expropriation system. They created new measures to transform the rural land to urban land, such as self-use, shares and lease, and so on. The local authorities play the leading role in the reform of land expropriation system, and the incomes from the land also become the main financial revenue of the local governments. With the development of the social economy, the other measures of obtaining construction land, which are gradually replacing the old land expropriation system, have become the key forms of soft budget limits of the local government. Although these new measures improve the allocation efficiency of land resources, they destroy the current legal orders of land management. The strong investment impetus of local authorities has repeatedly caused the land gate of the central government out of control. The development of Chinese economy is characterized by the periodic over investment, and the macro control of the government becomes the control of the central government to the local governments, virtually the control of itself. It greatly influences the efficiency and effects of the macro economic control.The fundamental cause of the periodic over investment of Chinese economy lies that the economic development strategy has not been completely transformed to adapt to the thorough microeconomic reforms, the governments excessively involve in the economic activities, and the mechanism of market allocation of resources has not been fully established. So, in order to resolve the sharp contradiction and confrontation between the market-oriented economic reforms and the land system of planning economy, it is essential to divide the boundary between the government and the market, perfect the market mechanism and, on the basis of the full play of the basic function of the market in allocating resources, put the rule of law into practice to limit the power of the governments, build a limited government, and conscientiously perform the function of the public service of the state. Moreover, treat the civil servants as common ones who have all the human being's weaknesses and then make reforms on the management system of civil servant to sep up a staff of honest, upright and efficient civil servants to represent the people to fulfill the function of the management of the nation.