Changing the Collectively-Owned Construction Landscape

For many decades, there has been an issue with ownership titles of rural collectively-owned land in China – namely that titles are often incomplete. This poses obstacles to the circulation of collectively-owned for-profit construction land, significantly impeding the integrated planning and development of the country's urban and rural areas. This in turn causes the development of rural regions of China to greatly lag behind urban areas, restricts the means by which farmers may increase their income, and reduces the capabilities of rural residents to steadily grow their earnings. As a result, this disrupts China's overall development, and leads to a divergence between the legal treatment of urban and rural land, and inequality between the status of ownership of collectively-owned land and state-owned land.

Alongside this issue, there have always been defects in the confirmation of ownership and planning relating to collectively-owned land: the ownership of most of this kind of land in rural areas is not formally acknowledged by way of registration, and therefore there are no certificates which can attest the relevant titles to the land. This, compounded by the underdevelopment of rural planning, frustrates the normal circulation of collectively-owned for-profit construction land and confines the use of such land to individuals and entities within the collective.