BEIJING, Jan. 31 (Xinhua) -- China is to make greater use of land transfer fees to finance rural development this year as it is making "steady progress in comprehensive rural reform", said an official here on Thursday.

    "Some arable land has been used in the process of the nation's industrialization and urbanization. The land approved by the State Council in recent years has been an average 2.8 million mu (187,000 hectares) annually," said Chen Xiwen, Office of the Central Leading Group on Financial and Economic Affairs deputy director.

    To fully guarantee land rights to farmers, China uses a two-layer operative system featuring a combination of centralized and decentralized management with household contracts as the basis.

    The government would insist on and streamline the system in 2008, said Chen, also director of the Office of the Central Leading Group on Rural Work, at a press conference.

    Comprehensive Reform

    Reforms of the township institutions and fiscal management system at county and township levels would be further promoted to speed up reform and renovation of rural financial systems and to properly settle debts in rural areas.

    Chen said the government would continue reinforcing institutional and organizational guarantees in the rural areas.

    Efforts should be made to enforce the legal rights of migrant workers, form an equal employment system for rural and urban labors, and explore approaches for those farmers who have stable jobs and residences in cities to gain a status as a city resident.

    Other efforts were needed to establish mechanisms of regular pay increases and pay guarantee, employment improvement, social security, housing and their children's education, he said.

    Chen said the Party should advance the all-round development of primary Party organizations in rural areas, especially in villages, to improve the system of village autonomy. This was needed to build leadership in rural primary Party organizations and to explore effective mechanisms for village management.

    The press conference was held a day after the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and State Council jointly issued this year's first policy statement. It was dedicated, for the fifth consecutive time, to rural issues.

    Pilot Programs

    According to National Bureau of Statistics data, per-capita disposable income was 13,786 yuan (1,919 U.S. dollars) in urban areas last year, up 17.2 percent, or 12.2 percent in real terms. Per-capita income was 4,140 yuan in rural areas, up 15.4 percent, or 9.5 percent in real terms.

    There is still an impoverished rural population of over 20 million, even though it dropped from more than 250 million three decades ago.

    Observers believed land use rights transfers and the declining number of peasants who were confined to the land through such transfers would be key to the integration of urban and rural areas and hence the narrowing of disparities.

    According to the document, the basic system for rural operations and land contract relations will be stabilized and improved. The market for transferring land contract and management rights will be improved in line with the law and on a voluntary, compensated basis.

    Some experiments with the land contract and management right transfer market have been conducted in some areas around the country.

    Leng Gang, former party head of Shuangliu County in Chengdu, the capital of the southwestern Sichuan Province, said his county encouraged arable land to be held by large-scale farmers to support the development of efficient modern agriculture and economies of scale.

    Peasants were encouraged to lease land and benefit from such leases. They could either work for large-scale farmers or find jobs outside their hometowns. Manufacturing and service industries were being expanded to provide more jobs for peasants who abandoned their land-use rights and apartments would be built for them in urban areas.

    More than 2,700 officials had been referred for prosecution on land use violation charges after investigations by the discipline and supervisory authorities, said the Ministry of Land Resources last Monday.

    These people, with another 1,000 still being investigated, were allegedly involved in 31,000 land use violation cases involving more than 3.3 million mu (220,000 hectares), said Minister of Land and Resources Xu Shaoshi at a televised conference on the results of a 100-day campaign.

    The campaign, launched on Sep. 17 last year, was implemented to crack down on local governments that illegally transferred household land to property developers. It targeted officials who failed to seek permission from higher authorities for land use and those who flouted decrees to expand the size of development zones.

    About 300,000 mu (20,000 hectares) of land were taken over in the name of leases, one million mu (67,000 hectares) involved expanded development zones and two million mu (133,000 hectares) was used without authorization, said Xu.

    The courts had convicted more than 300 people, punishing them with fines and confiscating properties worth up to two billion yuan (274 million U.S. dollars).

    He said the campaign proved land supervision must win support from local governments. "Perpetrators should pay a high price for what they have done."

    He also urged more efforts in establishing a warning system of land violation behavior and stronger liaison among departments such as the police, courts and supervisory watchdogs.

    Land Issue

    Land violation has evolved into a controversial issue in China and in 2004 a central government order was promulgated to implement "the strictest land management policy". Since then, the order has hit many snags at local level.

    Some government officials still sought to attract capital and technology by offering investors cheap or even free land, a practice that was rife along the east coast early in China's economic reform and opening-up. Land yields remain a steady source of fiscal revenue for local governments.

    Some governments have stealthily restored development zones closed down years ago or allowed management of legal development zones to invite business for abolished ones.

    Since a national overhaul to shut down inefficient or idle development zones started in 2003, the number of development zones had shrunk by more than 70 percent to 1,568 and their aggregate land size diminished to 9,949 square kilometers at the end of 2006.

    But rapid urbanization has triggered outrage from some farmers who were not properly compensated for appropriated land. It also led to a drastic decline in the area available for cultivation, prompting the government to set a minimum area of 1.8 billion mu (120 million hectares) of arable land.

    In 2004, domestic policy makers started to track the speed and scale of new land supply in non-agricultural sectors annually to control land supply and boost overall macro-economic control.