Rural Collective Land Ownership Trusts

The Chinese "Property Law" has stipulated national land ownership and collective land ownership. Instead of sourcing from legislation based on the nature of the object of ownership, these two types of ownership are sourced from subjective legislation. The subjective legislation situates national land ownership in a superior status in terms value, social system and morals. This superiority allows national land ownerships to merge collective land ownerships legally and monopolize the benefits from land appreciation. Therefore, in order to remedy peasants of the benefit deficit from land appreciation, a model of rights and law regarding benefit redistribution is needed to balance the status of nation and peasants that lost their land and provide favorable protection to the peasants. The structure and character of trust make it a possible solution to the aforementioned problemBesides this introduction, the article includes seven sections and is thirty thousand words in total.The first section indicates the peculiarity of Chinese land appreciation benefit generation which determines the inaccessibility of peasants to such benefit. Furthermore, this section analyzes the imbalanced legal structure of current land ownerships in China, the dependence of land appreciation benefit generation to expropriation, the administrative nature of expropriation and the deficiency of expropriation to conclude the reasons for the peasants inaccessibility to land appreciation benefits.The second section is feasibility analysis on collective land ownership trusts and comparison between collective land ownership trusts and similar systems Collective land ownership. This section mainly introduces the definition and functions of collective land ownership trusts. Then through further analyze collective lands as restricted circulative property that can only circulate among specific parties and define the nation as trustee whereas the collective peasants as grantor so as to conclude the feasibility on collective land ownership trusts. Collective land ownership trusts is a different system comparing to the U.S. real estate investment trusts and rural contracted land operation right trusts. But the two systems stated above could provide collective land ownership trusts with its experience and detailed regulations for reference.The third section discusses the proprietorship of the trust property in collective land ownership trusts. After a layout of difference of trust systems in civil law system and common law system, the author analyzes the proprietorship within the two systems and discusses the proprietorship of trust property in China. Combining the discussion above, the author demonstrates, in collective land ownership trusts, the proprietorship of trust property shall belong to the trustee.The fourth section discusses the parties in collective land ownership trusts. It analysis the three parties in the collective land ownership and trusts:grantor—rural collective economic entity, trustee-nation, beneficiary-member of the rural collective economic entity. And further discuss their rights and obligations.The fifth section discusses the operation of collective land ownership trusts. The model of operation would be:first stage, members of the rural collective economic entity conclude and sign an internal agreement with the entity. Second stage, the grantors and trustee conclude and sign a trust contract which transfers the land ownerships to the trustee that form the trust property and list the members within the entity as beneficiaries. Third stage, the trustee manages the trust property according to the objective of the trust. Fourth stage, the trustee distributes the income that comes from the management of trust property to the beneficiaries.The sixth section discusses the advantage of applying collective land ownership trusts to protect peasants that lose their land. The advantages include:the external manage model, the independency and uniformity of trust properties, the transcendence of trusts, the negotiability of beneficiary certificates. The above advantages are able to provide its beneficiaries with a perennial and stable income and form a "bank of land" for the peasants that lose their land.