A village within the city – The village committee’s bureau of Dongshan village in Guiyang city
In last week’s article I introduced the collective, which is designated by the Constitution as holding ownership rights of China’s rural and suburban land. I will analyze in a separate article the reasons why the Chinese leadership granted ownership of rural and suburban land rights to the farmers’ collective instead of declaring State ownership not only of urban, but also of rural land. But first, let’s continue elucidating the nature of the farmers’ collective through the analysis of the organizing bodies that exercise its land property rights.
Article 60 of the Property Rights Law (2007), which has taken me a long time to unravel, establishes the organizing groups that exercise the collective’s property rights. Article 10 of the Land Management Law (1986), includes a similar provision, although employing the terms “management” (jingying－经营) and “administration” (guanli－管理) instead of the more legal term “exercise of rights” (xingshi suoyouquan－行使所有权), revealing the strong political content of the Land Management Law, which has been widely criticized by Chinese legal scholars.
The three levels of farmers’ collectives are classified according to their territorial scope:
(i) Township (town) farmers’ collective (乡（镇）农民集体);
(ii) Village farmers’ collective (村农民集体);
(iii) Inner village farmers’ collective (村内农民集体).
Each of these collectives has a representative body to exercise its rights, which are, respectively:
(i) The township (town) farmers’ collective group (乡镇农村集体组织);
(ii) The village’s committee (村委会) or economic group of the village (村集体经济组织);
(iii) The villager’s group (村民小组).
Simply, each class of farmers’ collective have a different size and scope. The township (town) farmers’ collective assembles all the village farmers’ collectives, and each village farmers’ collective is formed by all the inner village farmers’ collectives, which is in turn formed by all the villagers living therein.
It is necessary to explain that the three representative groups of the farmers’ collective succeeded the commune, the brigade, and the team, respectively. However, there is an important difference between the two sets of groups. Before the promulgation of the Constitution, both political and economic ownership rights were vested in them whereas, after, a good part of the economic rights were disaggregated and given to the farmer’s household. In other words, the inner rights of ownership were split, separating bare ownership and usufruct, and granting usufruct rights to the farmers foremost through the house responsibility system (jiating lianchan zerenzhi－家庭联产责任制, now known as chengbao jingying quan zhidu－ 承包经营权制度).
In conclusion, even though there is still confusion among scholars and cadres about the identity of the collective, the law is not as ambiguous as has often been indicated. The law is not easy to understand, but this is the rule in and out of China. The law defines who holds property rights over rural and suburban land and who exercises these property rights. The key question boils down to determining who or what are these representative groups, and if they do really exercise ownership rights on behalf of the farmers.
Spanish qualified lawyer; PhD in Chinese Law. UrbaChina Research Officer. Has lived in China since 2006.
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