Experts proposed radical land reforms to make land management rights transfers freer and liberate rural dwellers from being bound to their lands, ahead of the Communist Party of China's (CPC)'s most important annual meeting.
Traditionally, key issues are discussed and personnel is reshuffled at the CPC Central Committee's plenary sessions, the next of which runs from tomorrow until Sunday.
Land reform has zoomed toward the top of this year's agenda, as Party leaders are expected to review an amendment to the land management law, earlier reports said.
From 1978, China adopted collective land ownership for its 750 million rural dwellers, according to which villages or townships assume land ownership. Households manage land, usually on a small scale, for 30-year periods through contractual agreements with village or township communities.
The system had liberated rural households from the highly concentrated feudal land ownership system but today fails to meet residents' income and productivity requirements, the experts said.
Under the proposed reform, farmers could trade, rent or mortgage their land use rights for profit, which they could then use to fund their relocations to cities.
However, many people also fear unregulated land transactions will lead to a concentration of land in the hands of a few, especially during in a time in which the number of landless farmers is growing.
Such concerns could be addressed by beefing up social security to ensure a basic living standard for farmers and by reforming the judicial landscape to ensure fairness in land transactions.
China's rapid industrialization and urbanization has led to severely lopsided development, such as the widening income gap between the urban and rural areas, experts said.
