Imperative to build rural property rights system

At the Central Rural Work Conference in December, Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, stressed the need to revitalize rural areas.

A key aspect of that strategy is to deepen rural reform and address key problems, stimulate the vitality of rural resources, improve the agricultural support and protection system, and respect people’s creativity. It is necessary to help rural regions prosper.

China’s impressive agricultural and rural development is a result of continuously promoting rural reform, for which the relationship between farmers and land becomes central.

During the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25), China will enter a new stage of development, bringing with it a complex development environment in which opportunities and challenges coexist. However, it is necessary to keep the farmer-land relationship in mind while deepening rural reform.

To reassure farmers’ land-use rights, it is important to renew the land contract after it expires. At the same time, the orderly transfer of land management rights must be promoted and rural idle homestead be made good use of.

Over 98 percent of the country’s agricultural operators are individual farmers, and this will not change for some time.

Therefore, it is necessary to cultivate family farms and professional cooperatives, promote their high-quality development, further encourage individual farmers to improve productivity, give full play to agricultural enterprises, constantly improve the interest connection mechanism between agricultural enterprises and other business entities, especially small farmers, to give agricultural modernization a push.

Development of the new rural collective economy is an important component of deepening rural reform, as proposed by the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee.

In recent years, China has been gradually building a socialist rural collective property rights system with Chinese characteristics, which has complete power and function, smooth circulation and strict protection, and has laid a solid foundation for the development of new rural collective economy.

In the future, greater efforts should be put in to build more harmonious relationships among all players in the agricultural industry.