It would be unfair to say that the New Village Movement caused the New Enclosure Movement. In 2001, there were already experiments with housing conglomeration in Jiangsu Province. Local governments did so to expedite urbanization and boost the efficiency of arable land use.

This continued into 2006, as Jiangsu Province decided to combine over 250,000 villages into 40,000 new settlements within 20 years. Even without the New Village Movement, there would have been pressure on the government to push this pattern.

This pattern has proliferated from more developed regions to less developed regions since then. Governments' enthusiasm has been attributed to financial incentives from reselling the appropriated farmland and zhaijidi (rural housing land). But another rationale lies in Keynesian interventionism: Local governments believe they are justified in creating more jobs and carry on heavy urbanization, even if farmers oppose it.

The ownership of zhaijidi is legally ambivalent. Compared to the stringent regulations on arable land to secure food supply, zhaijidi, subject to collective ownership, can be transferred to State ownership. This allows local government to resell zhaijidi for commercial use, but to pay farmers compensation at lower-than-market rates, leaving the government profiting and the farmers out of pocket.

The problem is that it's not up to farmers to decide the use of farmland and zhaijidi. But their de facto proprietary interests are considerable. Farmers have anticipated the boom in the land market, and may expect their de facto property right to appreci-ate with it.

Without fair compensation, their reluctance to give up ownership may slow urbanization down. Local governments, spurred by the need to boost GDP and urbanization, have to smash any resistance in front of them.

Conventional ways of addressing issues of agriculture, the countryside and farmers' rights often emphasize politically peripheral means such as projects to fight poverty, more regulation to reduce graft, and technological advance to make agriculture more productive.

But this overlooks the property rights of land, which has an innate tendency to change at times of fast economic growth. It also lacks a way to arbitrate conflicts between local governments and farmers at the local level. Hence shangfang (petitioning to upper-level governments) has become ubiquitous.

Ultimately, it's vital to put forward a workable rural policy which recognizes de facto proprietary interests, and acknowledges that the transfer of land must be based on a voluntary basis.

Obviously, in a socialist China it could be politically sensitive to contemplate the privatization of property rights. Yet the critical point is not about who owns the land, but about whether local governments are justified to circumvent the law and define ownership in favor of themselves.

The author is a reporter with the Global Times. wangdi@globaltimes.cn