The new policy is
intended to stimulate market-driven economic growth in the countryside and to
narrow the enormous income disparity between rural and urban Chinese, one of
the largest such gaps in the world. Its adoption is another significant step
away from the system of communal farming and collectivization put in place
under Mao Zedong. The announcement, made
through reports in state news organizations Sunday night, came at the end of
the Communist Party's annual four-day planning session. The reports did not
give details of the reform, nor did they say when the plan would take effect.
Policy decisions made at the planning session are often given pro forma
approval by the National People's Congress in an annual meeting the following
March before details are unveiled and implementation begins. Scholars and government
advisers said in interviews during the four-day session that the new policy
would allow China's more than 800 million peasants to engage in the
unrestricted trade or sale of decades-long land-use contracts that are given to
them by the government. Adopting such a system would be a significant move
toward privatization. Since early October,
state news media have run stories extolling the virtues of a system in which
farmers would be able to trade or sell their land rights. State news reports on
Sunday night described the rural reform package in general terms, but said that
a new land management system would be put in place. A draft of the new policy
that had been written up by the Central Committee began circulating Thursday in
the planning session, which was attended by 368 Communist Party members and
overseen by President Hu Jintao. Xinhua, the state news
agency, cited an official statement that said Chinese leaders had agreed at the
session that the country "will stick to and improve its rural basic
economic system." To do so, the agency reported, the government will
"set up a 'strict and normative' land management system in the
countryside, expand policy support for agriculture, establish a modern rural
financial network and a system to balance the development between rural and
urban areas, and improve the rural democracy." The government's goal is
to double the per capita disposable income of rural residents by 2020,
according to Xinhua. While China's cities
have profited enormously from economic reforms first announced in 1978, the
countryside has lagged behind. Protests in rural China are a big source of
social unrest these days, and the most common grievance centers on the seizure
of land by corrupt government officials.