A Rural Reform Goal, But No Map

The state media previews of the just-ended Communist Party plenum gave strong indications of a major reform in rural land policy. But as Simon noted last week, the devil is in the details. The four-day meeting ended Sunday with a statement that the Party wants to double farmers' incomes by 2020. How they expect to do that is another question.

The government's planned reforms seemed clearer before the meeting than after. On the eve of the Oct. 1 National Day holiday President Hu Jintao visited a village in rural Anhui and declared that farmers will be able to “transfer the right of land contract and management by various means, in accordance with their will,” according to Xinhua. The village Hu visited, Xiaogang, is symbolic because farmers there decided to end collectivization of their land in 1978, a move that was illegal at the time. That step, which made individual farmers responsible for their own production, was eventually approved under Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms.

The communiqué released after the meeting Sunday offered few specifics on the sales of rural land rights. Part of that is procedural. The policy details are expected to unfold ahead of the National Party Congress next spring. But the airy statements issued Sunday—“We will firmly push forward the rural reform. We will continue to emancipate the mind”—raise questions about the means. Some conservatives still object to drastically changing China's socialist countryside, which creates political obstacles for the leadership. “No one should be surprised that they continue to be in the experimental mode rather than trying to transform the ideology,” says Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing-based political scientist. “They tend to engage in campaigns rather than in real policy reform.” He notes that speeding the development of interior provinces to catch up with coastal regions has been a goal for much of this decade.

In some regions farmers have already sold land rights on their own, moving ahead of what is allowed under the law just as the Xiaogang farmers did when they broke with collective farming in 1978. With nominal support from Beijing, those individual transactions will likely expand. Local governments will be challenged to respond. “You have a society, particularly in the countryside, that's moving relatively quickly,” says Moses. “The government, to its credit, reaches down to bypass local cadres and tell farmer it's OK to (sell land rights), but they haven't developed the institutional means to implement and enforce these sort of edicts.”