According to the Land Management Law of the People's Republic of China, China implements socialist public ownership of land, that is, ownership by the whole people and collective ownership by the working masses. The land in the urban area of the city is owned by the state. Land in rural areas and on the outskirts of cities shall be owned by peasant collectives, except as provided by law for the State; Homesteads, self-cultivated land, and self-cultivated mountains belong to peasant collectives. At the same time, the Land Management Law of the People's Republic of China stipulates that the State shall implement a land use control system. The State prepares an overall land use plan, stipulates land use, and divides land into agricultural land, construction land and unused land. Due to historical reasons, collective construction land and state-owned construction land have formed a dualistic land market that is separated from each other, and most of the collective construction land is in a state of idle or inefficient use, which affects the development of urban and rural areas.
Urban villages are the product of the dual development of land and urban expansion, and the lack of supporting facilities in urban villages, sanitation and fire protection and other conditions seriously affect the living environment, which have generated the demand for urban village transformation, and the problems behind the land expropriation and the entry of collective management construction land into the market have also become constraints on the road of urban-rural integration development. In order to understand the difficulties existing in the transformation of urban villages, it is necessary to sort out the reform of China's land system and understand the historical causes of China's current land system.
The reform of China's land system.
Since the founding of the Communist Party of China, China's rural land system has undergone many major reforms, such as land reform, agricultural cooperativeization, "separation of two powers" and "separation of three powers", which have had a far-reaching impact on agricultural and rural development in different periods. In general, China's rural land system has a period of land reform, agricultural cooperativeization, "separation of two powers", and "separation of powers".
1.During the period of land reform (1921-1951), the period of national revolution and agrarian revolution, the all-out war of resistance against Japanese aggression and the war of liberation gradually implemented the land policy of "cultivated land owned by farmers", and realized the transformation of land from "feudal landlord ownership" to "individual peasant ownership". 2.During the period of agricultural cooperativeization (1952-1955), through the development stages of agricultural mutual aid groups, cooperatives and people's communes, the land policy of "mutual assistance and cooperation, centralization and unification" was implemented, which laid the foundation for collective ownership of rural land and realized the transformation of land from "individual peasant ownership" to "peasant collective ownership". 3.During the period of "separation of powers" (1978-2012), after reform and opening up, the right to contract land management was gradually developed, and through the implementation of the household responsibility system, farmers regained land use rights, realized the clear separation of land ownership and use rights, and greatly stimulated the enthusiasm of farmers to engage in agricultural production. The property rights of rural land have changed from a single form of collective ownership and unified management to a model of "separation of powers" in which rural collectives own land ownership and peasant households contract land management rights. 4.During the period of "separation of powers" (2013 to the present), through a series of operations such as stripping, circulation and guarantee, the effective revitalization of rural land management rights was realized, giving more autonomy to business entities, and forming a pattern of land ownership, contracting rights, and management rights being separated, and management rights being transferred. In 2019, the separation of three rights officially ushered in the clarity of the law, and the newly revised "Rural Land Contract Law of the People's Republic of China" separately established the right to operate land, indicating that the "separation of three rights" of rural land has been formally determined at the legal level, marking that the system has officially become the basic land system in rural areas in China. The reform of the "separation of powers" system has liberalized the right to operate land, provided a more adequate legal guarantee for the circulation of agricultural land, and guided the orderly circulation of rural land, which is another major institutional innovation in rural reform after the household contract responsibility system. It will provide a broad channel for a wider range of funds to enter rural land, and solve the problem of shortage of funds and insufficient efficiency in agricultural production and operation. It can be seen that China's land reform has always revolved around the reform of ownership and use rights in the rural land system, but has never fundamentally broken the dual system of collective land use and state-owned land. Since collective land cannot be directly entered into the market for a long time, collective land rights holders cannot achieve effective financing through mortgages, which greatly limits the ability of rights holders to use land assets to generate income. On the other hand, the city's property rights reform has been more thorough, and after the housing reform was launched in 1998, most urban residents were able to share in the land appreciation brought about by the prosperity of the city's real estate and capital markets, and they could also make a profit through mortgage financing or transfer. On the other hand, in the process of urban development, the reserve of state-owned construction land is nearly depleted, and it is necessary to acquire land in rural areas, resulting in prominent contradictions in rural land expropriation, including low-price land acquisition, resulting in the loss of farmers' land property rights and interests, and at the same time, urbanization has led to a reduction in rural labor force and low agricultural productivity, resulting in a serious waste of rural land resources"Reform. The reform of the "three plots of land" in rural areas refers to the overall promotion of the reform of the three plots of rural contracted land, homestead land, and collective management construction land. On December 2, 2014, China deliberated and adopted the "Opinions on Rural Land Expropriation, Collective Management Construction Land into the Market, and the Pilot Work of Homestead System Reform", which is regarded as a signal for the reform of the "three plots of land" in rural areas and a starting point for accelerating and deepening the reform of the land system. In 2023, the first document "Opinions of the Communist Party of China on Comprehensively Promoting the Key Work of Rural Revitalization in 2023" put forward the requirements of studying and formulating the guiding opinions on the extension of the pilot work for another 30 years after the expiration of the second round of land contracts, exploring the effective realization form of the "separation of three rights" of homesteads, and deepening the pilot project of rural collective management construction land into the market.
The formation of urban villages and a new round of urban village transformation.
Under China's existing institutions and policies, the main way to meet the demand for land for urbanization and industrialization is through the expropriation of rural collective land and its conversion into state-owned construction land. In the process of urban expansion, rural homesteads are often encountered, because the cost of demolishing rural homesteads is generally much higher than that of agricultural land, so many cities will generally bypass rural homesteads when they expand by extension, so there are a large number of "urban villages" in some large and medium-sized cities.
In July, the General Office of the People's Republic of China issued the "Guiding Opinions on Actively and Steadily Promoting the Transformation of Urban Villages in Super Megacities", and held a video conference for special deployment. It also clarifies that there are three types of implementation in mega cities: the implementation of demolition and new construction that meet the requirements, the regular renovation and upgrading, and the implementation of demolition and consolidation in between. The driving forces behind the new round of urban village transformation are: first, the new crown epidemic has exposed the shortcomings of the living conditions and social governance of urban villages; Second, the recovery momentum of the real estate market is insufficient, and the transformation of urban villages can directly adjust the relationship between supply and demand, create demand, and activate the market; The third is to integrate with the new round of "housing reform", which needs to be equipped with a certain proportion of affordable housing.
In 2009, Guangdong Province carried out the "three olds" transformation project of old towns, old factories and old villages on a pilot basis. The basic idea is to plan according to the requirements of towns or villages in areas where the "three olds" are concentrated, clearly stipulate the use and function, building density, floor area ratio, and supporting facilities of each plot, and implement the "three olds" transformation including comprehensive demolition and reconstruction, partial transformation, and micro transformation. The transformation mode includes collection and storage transformation, self-transformation, and cooperative transformation.
For the transformation of old villages on the village collective land, the ** collection and storage mode is to expropriate the village collective land, give the village collective expropriation and demolition compensation, and ** after the collection and storage, it will be publicly transferred to the developer to develop the property. The self-transformation model of village collectives shall be funded by the village collectives or the village community economic development company, and the nature of the village collective land shall remain unchanged. Limited by capital and development experience, there are few examples of self-transformation mode. The cooperative transformation model refers to the mode in which the village collective economic organization introduces development enterprises to participate in the transformation through public bidding. Cooperative enterprises can obtain the land use right of the development plot through agreement transfer, which can either retain the nature of village collective land or convert it to the nature of state-owned construction land. From the actual experience of the "three olds" transformation in Guangdong Province, the mode of cooperative transformation between village collectives and developers accounts for the majority, and the land use right is obtained through agreement transfer, and only 40% of the market assessed land price is paid for the land transfer. The transformation of the "three olds" has to deal with many problems left over from history, which can be summed up as the "three transformations", that is, the transformation of legality, the transformation of nature, and the transformation of land. Legalization refers to the legalization of a part of the illegal occupation of land in the past. The nature of conversion refers to the conversion of village collective land included in the urban planning area into state-owned construction land, which is mainly to pay part of the land premium. Land transfer refers to the conversion of a part of the original industrial and mining enterprises or public welfare land into commercial, commercial and residential and other operational land.