The Party's Central Discipline Inspection Commission has given a
serious warning to two provincial-level officials in central
China's Henan Province on Wednesday for defying central government
rules on land acquisition.
The fact that such senior officials have been punished for this
offence for the first time indicates the determination and
persistence of the central government in curbing the rampant land
enclosure by local governments.
What is really disturbing about this case is that the occupation
of 992 hectares of cultivated land in the suburbs of Zhengzhou,
capital of Henan, was illegal from the very beginning in 2004.
The Regulations on the Protection of Basic Cultivated Land,
which took effect in 1999, stipulate that the acquisition of
farmland for other purposes must have approval from the State
Council. But the acquisition of such a large area of farmland did
not go through any transaction even in the local provincial and
city bureaus of land and resources.
The Ministry of Land and Resources was tipped about this
violation in 2005 and sent a team to investigate. The ministry,
after reporting it to the State Council, required Zhengzhou's
municipal government to rectify the matter. But, instead of mending
its mistakes, the municipal government sped up its land
seizure.
Local economic benefit is again behind this blatant violation of
State rules and the defiance of the central government's
authority.
The occupied land has been used for a university city, although
the central provincial capital has already developed three zones of
the same kind. The seemingly education-oriented investment can in
fact bring about even more chances for input in urban renovation,
and therefore more income from the trading of land.
When a dozen universities are moved out of the old city area to
the suburbs, the municipal government will be able to sell the city
areas they have left behind to real estate developers for another
round of urban renovation.
In part, this explains why the craze of urban construction, and
the unbridled use of arable land for this purpose, can continue for
years and is hard to bring under control.
Two phenomena here deserve special attention, as both are likely
to affect the realization of the central government's goal of
keeping the total area of arable land at 120 million hectares
nationwide by the year 2020.
First is the arbitrary decision by a local government in this
matter with no regard to any relevant law or regulation. As in this
case, the provincial and municipal governments made the decision on
their own, before which the local watchdog of land and resources
could do nothing and did not even notify the Ministry of Land and
Resources as it should have.
Second is making the illegal occupation of land a fait accompli
as quickly as possible, before the central authorities get wind of
it and intervene. It took only a year for at least five colleges to
move in after construction of this zone started in August of
2004.
It is impossible to get back the nearly 1,000 hectares of arable
land, whatever punishment the central government may inflict upon
local officials. But the central government needs to be alerted by
this particular incident where the root cause of the pain is, and
thus work out countermeasures.
The central authorities must also impose even more severe
punishments on illegal land seizure to deter other local
governments from following this example.
Another lesson from this incident is that a mechanism must be
established to make the local department of land and resources
function as a real watchdog -- one that at least barks when an
illegal occupation of arable land occurs.
(China Daily September 29, 2006)