The Research On The Safeguarding Rural Women’s Land Rights And Interests

In rural areas of China, land takes an important and particular function of safeguarding the basic life of nearly700million farmers. For rural women, land rights and interests are the most concerned and practical issues for their survival and development.To guarantee rural women’s land rights and interests has its far-reaching theoretical origin. China’s land system and land property rights theory provides the theoretical support; while western philosophy on natural right, feminist ideology and social gender theory provide a new vision to make research on the land rights and interests of rural women. Marxism’s view on human rights, women feminist and population jurisprudence theory provide us with the correct world outlook and methodology.The Communist Party of China has always attached great importance to the land rights and interests of farmers, including the rural women’s land rights and interests since its establishment. Currently, with the improvement of women’s status, the principle of equality between men and women in the Constitution has got more widespread recognition; the realization of each aspect of women’s rights and interests has been basically ensured; laws like "Laws on the Protection of Women’s Rights and Interests","Laws on the Land Contract in Rural Areas" and others provide protection on rural women’s land rights and interests. But due to several factors, there still exists in reality that the phenomenon of violating the land rights and interests of rural women, and it is increasing year by year. According to the statistics of the All-China Women’s Federation, such complaints accepted by the system in2010have reached11,858, increasing25.8%within the same period.Different from men, the loss of land rights and interests of rural women occurs usually in the process of marriage change, manifested in the form of conflict between the interests of the individual and family, the minority and majority. Generally speaking, there are four kinds of rural women whose land rights and interests are infringed upon easily. First are the women who marry to other villages. Second are the women who marry to non-agricultural registered permanent residence, i.e."agricultural to marry the non-agricultural". Third are the divorced and the widowed women. Fourth are the women whose husbands live together with their families. Rural women’s land rights and interests are violated in the following aspects:the right to manage the land under contract, the right to receive the distribution of the compensation for using the land, the right to use housing land, land shares dividends and the rights to receive the benefit from other collective economic organizations. Tort parties are from the family, village and local governments. The disputes in land rights and interests of rural women present the feature of long-term existence, universality and severity. The essence of the problem is that there’s legal equality but it is not equal in practice; there is fairness in the starting point but unfairness in the process. Women claim their rights usually merely under the pressure of survival or the presence of huge benefit losses.Many factors cause the infringement of rural women’s land rights and interests and the problem here has the character of particularity and complexity. In general, first is in the law level:some current laws and policies lack of social gender perspective, some lack of maneuverability-part of the judicial authorities and the local government lack of maneuverability, some of them are not able to completely implement the legal policies and safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of the disadvantaged groups, etc. Second is in the system level, features of stability and sustainability in land policies don’t have sufficient concern for the flowing reality of the rural women caused by marriage. The current contracted management of rural land takes the family as the unit, the invalidity of collective land ownership and obscurity of qualification of membership in collective organization. All these lack of foundation for coordinating the benefit conflicts among different individuals. And the third is the cultural level. The perception of valuing male more than female, and the custom of living with the husband have great influences. The village custom formed on these foundations conflicts with safeguarding of rural women’s land rights and interests. In addition, it lacks of correction system. The difficulties of safeguarding the land rights and interests of rural women includes:the imperfection of legal system of safeguarding rural women’s land rights and interests. The conflicts between long-term land policy trends and rural women’s fluidity caused by marriage, corrections on village regulations, whether the right of land contract belongs to individuals, and the allocation of compensation cost by the land expropriation as well as the applicable legal procedures.It is suggested to learn from useful experiences in some places to strengthen the safeguarding rural women’s land rights and interests. First is to further improve the land rights and interests of rural women security laws and regulations as well as policies, including to make a clear definition of "rural collective economic organization member", revise rural land contracting law ","the land administration law", perfect the land circulation as early as possible. Perfect the implementation rules and policies, the realty registration system, regulating rural land property relations within the family. Second is to improve rural women’s land rights and interests protection mechanism of system, including strengthening the management of village regulations review, perfecting the judicial administrative helping system, promoting implementation of the contracted management of land and the rural women who have lost their land to the social security system. Third is to build a cultural environment which benefits the protection of realization in rural women’s land rights and interests, including promoting advanced gender culture, carry out educational campaigns on laws and regulations, improve the rural women’s ability to participate in the management of village affairs,etc.