As Chinese senior officials are gathering in Beijing to lay out plans for the country's rural work in the following year, CCTV's reporter went to Jilin Province where rural development plays a key role in its economy.
One of the highlights from this year's central rural work conference is to outline and tackle the most current issues in rural land reforms. In Jilin province, disputes between rural residents and local governments caused by the requisitioning of land have been an issue in the past.
To simplify the matter we must understand the collectively owned rural land for construction purposes is allowed to enter the land market and have the same rights as State-owned land, and villagers are allowed to mortgage their contracted farmlands to banks; but the system does not allow to reduce the amount of arable land, and it should never affect agricultural production and damage the interests of villagers.
And in the transfer of the right to contracted land, sometimes it has become an excuse for local governments to requisition land for whatever purposes they want. therefore tight control should be imposed to make sure that whoever gets the right to use the arable land must use it for agricultural purposes. Rural villagers can mortgage their contracted land to banks but they should never use it for other purposes other than for agricultural production.
Moreover, the current rural land policy is meant to allow villagers to make better use of land resources for their own benefits. Still it will not be an easy job to balance the interests of all parties involved in the land reforms, and of even greater concern, arable land needs to be strictly prohibited from being traded for non-agricultural purposes.
