Chapter 16 All over the world, could it be the land

The land issue affects the history of China, and also profoundly affects the development prospects of China today. The promulgation of the "Property Law" awakened citizens' awareness of the protection of their private rights, and to some extent began to shift from the concept of "under the sky, is it the land" to "the wind can enter, the rain can enter, and the king's guards cannot enter." "The shift in awareness of private property ownership. Historical changes have always revolved around competition for land ownership.For many ordinary people who participated in the change of dynasty, owning their own land is a simple dream that accompanies them all their lives.Looking back at the communist revolution in Chinese history in the twentieth century, it was not without the tradition of seeking land private ownership.

From February 1931, when the Central Bureau of the Soviet Area of ​​the Communist Party of China first clearly proposed "land ownership" for farmers, to the first Constitution of the People's Republic of China in 1954, "land private ownership by farmers" has been legally confirmed.It's just that due to the turmoil of history, the farmers' land finally disappeared like a magic trick. The exploration of collectivization began after the land reform was completed in 1952. From the beginning, farmers were organized to form agricultural production mutual aid groups to junior cooperatives, senior cooperatives, and people's communes. The land that belonged to farmers was classified as collectively owned, and the "land confiscation" began process.From this point of view, whether China engages in land privatization today depends on which tradition we want to inherit, whether it is the earliest promise of "land to the tiller" or the land confiscation after the "permanent revolution".A profound paradox is that the Chinese revolution in the twentieth century started with the promise of private ownership of land to "conquer the world" and ended with the nationalization of land to "sit the world".

In the 1980s, with the implementation of "household production contract", "household joint production contract system" and "responsible land", China's land has long-lost vitality.However, since the 1990s, there have been constant disputes over land annexation in various places, and what people see is more of a crisis. After household contracting of land is implemented, collective ownership only remains the power to sell the land, change the owner, and contract the land to units and individuals outside the economic organization.Moreover, the collective is nothing but a fictitious subject of rights.Since they can only unconditionally cooperate with the state to purchase land, but have no right to sell their own land, collectives have become connectors and bridgeheads for the state or special interest groups to invade society.More figuratively speaking, the design of this country-supreme property rights system is no different from the kind of "fish bar" commonly used by fishermen because it is equipped with barbs so that it can only get in and out.

Whether it is in the period of royalism where the king is supreme or the period of nationalism where the country is supremacy, "there is no king's land under the world" and "there is no land under the world" represent two extremes.In the former, the king monopolizes everything, the world is owned by one person, and the subjects actually have nothing. Regarding this point, the emperor’s right to "ransack the house" is undoubtedly the best explanation; as for the latter, in the period when the state monopolized everything and the government arranged everything Nominally everything belongs to the people, but the people are a virtual subject, and in terms of property rights, what belongs to anyone also means that it does not belong to anyone.

In this regard, western theorists have a theory of "the tragedy of the public land", and Chinese Shenzi also contributed the fable of "who will win if the rabbit dies": "If a rabbit goes away today, a hundred people will chase it. It is undecided. It is undecided. Yao is not able to bend his strength. How about the people? The market is full of rabbits, and the traveler does not take them. It is not because he does not want rabbits. It’s all about setting points.” The general idea of ​​this passage is that: a hundred people chase a hare, not because this hare can be divided among a hundred people, but because everyone wants to catch it for themselves, because this hare The ownership is undecided; when it comes to the rabbit market, no one can take it casually, precisely because the ownership is determined.

Just because it is a land without owner, China's "land" has been seriously lost in recent years.Of course, compared with the "King's land" being robbed overnight, the country's land was stolen within a few years.Looking back at the nationalization of knowledge and the nationalization of the economy brought about by the “Anti-Rightist Movement” in the 1950s, it is not difficult to understand that the land confiscation that was conjured up at that time was just a different step in the state’s annexation of society.Its core content is the same, that is, to complete the "trinity" of government, state and society.In this sense, land privatization means both the liberation of society from the state system and the redemption or recovery of rights.

Some people blame the children of rich families for spending money like water, but this is obviously not the crux of the problem.The key point is that whether it is war or peace, "demolition politics" and "demolition culture" that resort to force and violence have dominated Chinese history.When property cannot be truly protected, people can only pursue the possession of property, not who has the longest possession. A rich man with a lot of money lived a leisurely life on weekdays. Once he encountered a big flood, he climbed a tree with his treasure.Since the water did not recede, he could not go down to the ground. These treasures were all burdens, and finally he fell into the water and drowned.This story indirectly shows that land ownership is the foundation of all rights, because people must rely on the land to create, live and accumulate wealth.Any property rights without land ownership, even including human rights, may become a mirror image and a castle in the air.In this respect, nothing is more conducive to long-term peace than the return of the land to the people.Otherwise, the people may be in the situation of "wearing gold and silver and hanging on the tree" like the rich man.

A similar story also has the tragedy of "Antaeus the Giant".Antaeus in ancient Greek mythology draws power from Gaia, the mother earth, to challenge enemies and defeat them.When "Hercules" Hercules knew his secret, he lifted him up.Antai, who was separated from the mother earth, became vulnerable and was finally torn to pieces by Hercules.Perhaps this is also a tragedy often encountered by people who do not really own their own land. Those who have lost the land will also lose the sky; just as those who have lost their property rights will lose their human rights.If even the basic rights of material life depend on power, individual people may be able to maintain some kind of spiritual freedom, but for the vast majority of people, the freedom and rights they can insist on will definitely be greatly reduced.

As mentioned above, the loss of land ownership by Chinese peasants began with the government's "permanent revolution".The problem is that if the government (country) can "constantly revolution" without restraint, then the property rights of citizens on paper cannot become the real property rights of "the wind can enter, the rain can enter, and the king's guard cannot enter".In this regard, even if farmers were to regain land titles someday, there would still need to be institutions in place to defend their land.The state prohibits mutual infringement among members of the society, and the society must also have the strength to avoid tossing from the state or the government.

After 2003, with the heating up of China's real estate market, many villages and towns began to directly or indirectly develop "small property rights housing" under the temptation of huge economic interests.However, no matter what name the government uses to "suspend", judging from the fact that the price is lower than half or more in the urban area, it is believed that the "small property rights housing" boom will continue.Because the common people can't afford houses more and more, because the "big property rights" have exploited too much houses.A developer once "revealed": "The development cost of real estate only accounts for 20% of the house price, and the developer can get 40% of the profits, and the remaining more than 40% of the profits are all 'digested' by the relevant functional departments." So , With the participation of the government, housing prices are getting higher and higher, and "individual cooperative housing construction" and "no housing campaign" are also under the intervention of various factors to achieve nothing.

"Small property rights" houses are sold at low prices, which is a unique way to mock the government's policy of "regulation and out of control"-in the absence of the government, the society regulates housing prices very well. Property rights are property rights, there are only questions of "yes" and "no", not "big" and "small".Just like a person, if he has life, he lives, if he doesn't have life, he dies. If it weren't for someone causing trouble or snobbish discrimination, there would be no difference between "one big life" and "one small life".If houses with "small property rights" are against regulations, then what are the houses built by farmers themselves?It has to be said that property rights can be divided into "township level" and "national level", which has to be said to be a great invention in China during the transition period. Taking a step back, as far as the world today is divided into "small property rights" and "big property rights", the author thinks that this distinction does not lie in China.Chinese people are used to comparing their housing prices with those of foreign countries. In fact, from the perspective of purchasing power, China's housing prices have already reached the ceiling.That's not the most important thing.The most important thing is that with the property rights structure of China's real estate, compared with foreign countries, housing prices are not in a heavyweight category.The difference is that when the Chinese talk about "real estate", they actually only have "real estate" but not "real estate".In this sense, commercial housing in China is basically “small property rights” housing. Policy experts have repeatedly warned everyone that "small property rights" are risky and not protected by national policies. In fact, in my opinion, the biggest risk of housing is not that it is not protected by national policies, but that it may be violated by state actions.Considering the prevailing policies of "demolition politics" and "separation of housing and land", what kind of housing in China has no risk? In countries that believe in private ownership of land, buying a house means buying an ancestral property, which can be passed on from generation to generation, because the land is your own, and it doesn’t matter if it is demolished and rebuilt, and its rights will not be wiped out due to natural disasters and man-made disasters.In China, buying a house is nothing more than buying a few bricks on the ground, because ownership does not include land.The land will always be there, but the bricks will disappear one day, which determines that the right the Chinese currently have is nothing but a right that can be "weathered away."To paraphrase a line of Haizi's poem, in the state of "separation of housing and land", the iron-clad people are also enduring life, and the iron-clad houses are also in turmoil. The legal background related to this is that the "Provisional Regulations on the Assignment and Transfer of Urban State-owned Land Use Rights" promulgated in 1990 stipulated that the maximum use period of residential land was 70 years, which is today's "70-year limit".From a legal point of view, the right to use other people's land to build a house is a superficial right, which is a restricted real right rather than a complete real right. What is even more disturbing is that in the spring of 2009, the new "Land Administration Law" revision draft for comments changed the term on the land use rights after the 70-year period of residence, from the original "free automatic renewal" to "Automatically renew in accordance with relevant national regulations", thus laying the groundwork for paid renewal. When it comes to land privatization, opponents once listed two reasons: one is that land is the means of guaranteeing farmers' livelihood and cannot be privatized; Market push creates polarization. Qin Hui, a professor at Tsinghua University, logically clarified and refuted the former: the so-called land security cannot be privatized, the concept itself means that the obligation of social security cannot be privatized.Those who claim that all the ownership is given to the peasants, but the peasants have less security, are tantamount to saying that the self-cultivating peasants have no security, but become tenant farmers, but have security. As for the latter, the demonstrators are exactly the same as those who advocate the delay of Chinese democracy.Saying farmers can't protect their land is like saying they can't protect their votes.The underlying logic is that "having money makes people poor", because when a person has money, he spends it recklessly.However, looking back on land mergers in recent years, it is not difficult to find that the Chinese-style "land enclosure movement" has already arrived, and the main reason for farmers' loss of land comes from the "marketization of power" by the administrative monopoly department.Chen Zhiwu, a professor at Yale University, believes that the fundamental problem in China's rural areas is "the excess of official power and the decline of private power in rural society." History is the accumulation of various increments, and for a country in transition, so is rights.Breaking the government's monopoly on land, clarifying the land rights, and returning the land to the people is also an addition to the existing rights.However, why are there so many people wishful thinking that farmers do not have the ability to properly dispose of their own property?The unfounded worry is that the sky is falling, and the unfounded worry is that the peasants are short-sighted and will not calculate their own interests and take care of their own lives, which will lead to the fall of the earth and ruin the future of China. As mentioned above, in essence, those who believe that farmers do not deserve land rights are exactly the same as some officials or scholars who reject Chinese people's democratic rights.The difference is that the fear that farmers will not handle their land properly refers to economic rights, whereas democracy refers to political rights.In four words - China's national conditions. China's "international integration" has a very delicate relationship with "China's national conditions".Any reform measures that are beneficial to oneself, they shout to be in line with international standards, as if they cannot be accepted by the world if they do not do so; Do not seek truth from facts.The most amazing thing is that in the spring of 2009, when a high-ranking official was asked how the property declaration system was progressing, the high-ranking official actually had the desire to "connect with the common people"—why didn't the common people announce their property first? For thousands of years, the Chinese people have longed to own the land that truly belongs to them, but they have turned into "you deserve it" without knowing the heights of the sky and the earth? Why does China implement the strictest cultivated land protection system, but it often fails in practice?Regarding this question, the person in charge of the Cultivated Land Protection Department of the Ministry of Land and Resources pointed the finger at the current land income distribution method - the old mechanism of "more land, more benefits" and "the better the cultivated land is protected, the more disadvantaged the locality" makes some localities or departments Keen on "low entry and high exit", "big power and small responsibility", seeking to maximize "geographical advantage". The market can subdivide interests, but it may not be able to restrain power. The "invisible hand" is always powerless in front of the "visible feet".Therefore, when people criticize "vested interest groups", they should point the finger at certain "vested power groups" that compete with the people for their interests. China's current land leasing system was borrowed from Hong Kong in the 1980s. It objectively solved the problem of inability to transfer land and the lack of funds for urban reconstruction and construction.However, after the reform of the tax-sharing system at the end of 1993, the land transfer fee was completely assigned to the local government, and these land proceeds were naturally reduced to the "coffers" and "cash machines" of the local government.The development of China's economy and the "PK achievements" of local governments have finally led to the resurgence of "land finance" today.In the past 20 years, China's economic development has experienced three rounds of "enclosure fever". The reason is that local governments regard land as a way to make money. Many land reserve centers even directly include agricultural land in land reserves after pre-expropriation. Therefore, it has become "relying on the land to eat the land". On the other hand, the issue of land ownership in China is still unresolved.What this era urgently needs to answer is who is most qualified to stand up and defend which specific piece of land when people gather together to call for "the land must be defended".For every citizen, only if he knows what he has, can he talk about what he will defend to the death. In an interview several years ago, sociologist Mr. Lu Xueyi once expressed to the author that rural land is collectively owned in name, but in fact a lot of land is arbitrarily controlled by parents and officials. “We have entrusted the most precious non-renewable resources to the Some of the most unreliable people".Another time was when I was interviewing about a dispute over land expropriation in Wuqing, Tianjin. Local farmers set up a tent on the side of the road and took turns guarding it.A red cloth banner was hung high outside the tent, which read, "People of all nationalities unite to protect every inch of our land." Inside the tent was an empty coffin.Such a scene cannot but be said to be shocking. The history of human civilization is, after all, a history of land.From the old "abandoned well fields, open rice paddies" to the introduction of the "Property Law" today, from Napoleon crossing the Alps immediately with a sword to today's European Union's opening of national borders, all these all show that human beings' attitudes towards land will determine their own destiny.Like the American epic, the movie "Farand Away" (Farand Away) also interprets the magnificent spiritual history of Europeans looking for land: Joseph?Donnery was a farmer living in Ireland in the nineteenth century. His "Irish dream" was to own a piece of land of his own.The only legacy left to him by his father before his death was a sentence full of warmth and hope: "A man has value and a soul only when he owns land. When you own your own land, your father will smile in the heaven where God is, Watching my kids fall and get up all the way in heaven." Undoubtedly, China is undergoing an unprecedented transformation, and "transformation" has thus become a prominent feature of our era.However, many people are not clear about the type of transfer.Coincidentally, I observed some interesting things in the character "Xing": the character "Xing" means "punishment" and "earth". .Readers will definitely say that I am far-fetched. Of course, the future of China does not lie in how to write this word.However, through my above analysis, this judgment is not completely unreasonable. Transformation is actually the completion of a land revolution.In a broad sense, "land" is not limited to the material level, but also related to the spiritual level; it is related to both property rights and human rights.That is, everyone should not only have their own land where they can walk freely, but also their own spiritual territory that cannot be violated by others, and the right to self-realization.Without the full autonomy of these two levels, it is impossible for man to be truly free and happy. Open society, closed doors.The author of this book believes that the first step of constitutional government is to "close the door", that is, everyone can keep their income.The transformation period is destined to be an era of "sadness and joy".On the one hand, old things are fermenting; on the other hand, new things are growing.And the reason why we "boast" that we are in a "great era" is that this era provides some possibility for this "dual revolution" related to land.