The Research Of Multi-subjects And Nature In Chinese Rural Land Property Rights

Property rights is the form of property ownership within a country's economy, it is a series of institutional arrangements to consolidate property relationship and to constraint the behavior of economic agents. The three basic elements of property rights are the property rights subject, the property rights object and the bundle of rights subjects have. In the theoretical study of rural land ownership in China, the research of land itself as a static, passive object of property rights was attached to the structure of property rights. Many documents of land property rights system in Chin were from the resource allocation angle of property rights structure. Otherwise the study of property rights'subject that was the most dynamic element was mostly fragmented and scattered. The conclusions weren't comprehensive and accuracy to study one or two land property subjects separately. Thus, we constructed a framework of multiple property rights subjects with the rural land, meanwhile with the main content of the property rights owned by several subjects and the conflict or overlap between them, thereby to reveal the nature of rural land collective ownership using empirical methods.Exclusiveness is the core of property rights system, which means the consistence among rights, responsibilities and obligations. The features of Chinese rural land ownership were characterized by multiple subjects that everyone had certain rights, and the rights multi-subjects had was overlapped and conflicted mutually. Specifically, there are four different property rights subjects:the country, the collective of peasant, the collective agents and individual households. The interests of country in agricultural land was shown from two aspects:on the one hand, the country guaranteed a certain amount of agricultural products, especially ensuring the safety of food supply; on the other hand, the country got the land resources from farmers with low-cost for the economic development, industrialization and urbanization. The rights of country was achieved by administrative meditation directly and other law which was formulated through the "land management law" and land use plan. In the realization of national interests, the farmers had not the abilities of resisting and bargaining. The collective of peasants was the legal property rights subject. Its rights could be traced from the history of lineage, clan and traditional villages. The collective of peasants who formed through the several land institutional change was the basic unit of rural social, economic and political life. Their legal status was neither clear nor uniform. The property rights of collective were weakness and emptiness, especially because it was short of practical implementation capacity and the households own the using rights. Despite the village committee or the collective economic organizations weren't the legal property rights subjects, they controlled the collective property rights actually as the proxy of collective property rights. On the one hand, all the peasants owned the land as the member of collective, but as individual they could not the exercise the collective ownership separately; on the other hand, they had the using rights through the collective membership. The overlap and conflict of rights among multiple property rights subjects constituted the principal contradiction in the system of Chinese rural land property rights institution. Therefore, the system of our rural land property rights was a pre-modern property rights system which was different from market economy completely. That was why it couldn't be last and needed to reform and adjust in long-term. The researchers studied this problem from the law of "collective ownership" generally. They didn't recognize the multiple subjects in the Chinese rural land property rights, and therefore they could not understand the true nature of collective ownership of rural land. That was why it was chaos in the existing research. The significance of this paper was that it revealed the problem.This study concluded the main source of multi-subjects confliction in our rural land system. In the converse process of land's security function and production function which caused by rapid market development, the structure of land property rights was changed through mandatory power of country, but not the result through free, voluntary, fair transaction. Therefore, the nature of China's rural land property rights was a traditional, pre-modern, non-market economic system. On the one hand, it reflected the property relationship under the personal attachment condition in the traditional society and natural economy. On the other hand, it had executive order attributes strongly. There was conflict between the pre-modern nature of land property rights system and the modern market economy, which decided we had to adapt and reform.