Migrants can retain their right to farmland while seeking urban hukou
Rural residents should not be forced to forgo their land rights if they want to settle in cities, according to a new policy on promoting and standardizing the transfer of right to use farmland from rural residents for commercial entities.
Rural residents are given greater freedom to transfer the farmland they have contracted, while their right to collectively own the land remains unchanged, according to the policy, which was issued by the State Council on Sunday.
Most of China's farmland is owned collectively by the people who work on it. After the rural workforce began to migrate to cities in search of better-paying jobs, China allowed farmers to rent out, transfer or merge the land amid a reform to bolster modern farming and reuse unattended land in 2008, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
Governments at various levels are asked to make sure the transfer will not lead to a decrease in arable land or a drop in grain output, and they should also guard against forced transfers and farmland being used for non-farming purposes under the guise of "land transfers," according to the policy.
The new policy will lead to creation of a mechanism that will make the transfer more standardized, while better protecting the landowners' rights. Meanwhile, it is also expected to raise the efficiency of agricultural production in China, according to Xinhua.
"The new policy, which explicitly puts a ban on forcing farmers to trade their land for urban hukou, or household registration, is set to safeguard the interests of the farmers as well as promote urbanization," Hu Xingdou, a professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, told the Global Times on Monday.
The State Council, China's cabinet, has recently issued a plan to help 100 million migrant people gain hukou in cities during the country's 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-20), in order to help break the urban-rural gap, accelerate urbanization and augment the country's economic growth.
However, some rural residents are reluctant to move into cities out of fear that they could not receive the same benefits including medical services and pensions as their urban counterparts, Hu said.
He also pointed out that the health insurance and pension systems are at a rudimentary level in the countryside and need much improvement.
Wang Lina, a research fellow with the Institute of Economics under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Monday that farmers will feel more assured to move to cities for work or even to settle if they are ensured rights to farmland and homestead.
"For those who choose to go to cities for better-paying jobs, education and medical services, they may develop an interest in either renting out or transferring their farmland they contracted. It is unfair for anyone including local governments to force them to abandon their rights," she said.
Hu said that cities should also provide subsidies to ensure a minimum living standard for the migrant workers from the rural areas since they have made great contribution to the cities.
