On The Urban And Rural Construction Land Use Linking Program In The City Of Chengdu: A Case Study

Upon being approved as a pilot study area of the Urban and Rural Comprehensive Reform Program in June 2007, the City of Chengdu started to set the coordinated developments of urban and rural areas as a fundamental guiding rule in work. The concentration of land under large-scale management is one of the “Three-concentration” policies of the coordinated developments of urban and rural areas. As indicated by the report of the Urban and Rural Comprehensive Reform Program, the rate of industrial concentration, urbanization and large-scale land operation will reach 80%, 70% and 75%, respectively, within the next decade for the City of Chengdu. The vigorous growth of urban and rural construction land use linking program has been promoted by the economic development, urbanization and large-scale land management.Due to its very early participation in the urban and rural construction land use link program, the City of Chengdu is able to serve as a typical example in terms of policy guidance and project experience, especially the well-established regulations and rich experiences on implementing the land use link program.The urban and rural construction land use linking program involves the relocation of farmers and concentrated living, the improvement of rural infrastructure, rural development and agricultural industrialization and urban land use demand indicator. A wide range of interests are involved in the urban and rural construction land use linking program, the balance of which has always attracted much of the attention of previous studies. On one hand, it can be viewed as a demand by local developments and local farmers. On the other hand, it is a solution to relieve the pressure due to the lack of governmental capital and technology and high level management by recruiting social capital. Like the utilization of social capital elsewhere, the involvement of social capital can ease the financial pressure on the government and promote the use of advantages of investment enterprisesfaster and better carry out the project, but also to introduce competition mechanism to promote the sound development of the project. But there would be the risk due to the profit-purpose by investment enterprises.Based on the new public management theory and several case studies on land use link program, project investment,the implementation model, project management and follow-up industry support to understand the role and functionality of the implementation of land use linking program in the City of Chengdu and to analyze the partition of profits between enterprises, governments and farmers.Based on the analysis of the cases involving the participation in the urban and rural construction land use linking program by social capitals, it is found that it is feasible and necessary to privatize the linking program of public utilities. It is found that it is urgent to solve the problems regarding promoting a healthy development of the program and protect the interests farms within the context of the urban and rural construction land use linking program being promoted by all levels of government and with the participation of social capital.It argues that social capitals have the advantage of capital, technology and management. The participation of social capitals will bring more competition and can ensure a better quality of innovation and engineering projects. In this study, we analyzed the interest balance between different parties in the program. It is found that well-established regulations are able to balance the interests of different parties and protect the farmer’s right and profit.