China's Contemporary Urban-Rural Construction Land Replacement:Practices and Problems

Abstract

Recently,there exists more and more severe urban-rural construction land use problems in China,including lack of urban construction land,low rural construction land use and both of urban and rural construction land increasing.Urban-rural construction land replacement impelled by increasing vs.decreasing balance land-use policy is expected to be the method to deal with those problems.It was put into practice in several cities and provinces after unveiling a succession of fresh policies since 2004,and the practices in Jiangsu,Tianjin,Shandong and Chongqing were typical,respectively focusing on the boundless expanse of fertile farmland construction,homestead exchange,rural community-oriented development and land transaction.Based on analyzing the cases and system of the land replacement practice,this paper summarizes problems occurred,the reason and their development are as follows: problems exist for every factor in the practice,especially hidden problems are more obvious,such as the farmers' interests are harmed including being against farmers' wills,compensations are not satisfactory,and production and lifestyles changed.The first reason is because of imperfect law,regulation and policy,and unreasonable operation and lack of research are another two main reasons.In the future,it should set up an integrated urban-rural land market system,improve land market mechanism,establish compensation mechanism,and conduct in-depth scientific research.In addition,the future land use development should pay attention to intensive land-use growth,and in the replacement process,combination of small town construction with village landscape protection should be practised properly.