China vows tighter oversight, illegal land use crack down
- Source: Global Times
- [05:32 February 09 2010]
- Comments
By Chen Xiaomin
The Ministry of Land and Resources (MLR) vowed Monday to crack down on illegal land use including idling land hoarding and land speculation over property development in a bid to strengthen arable land protection and use land optimally and intensively.
Starting from this month, the ministry will roll out a nationwide land use inspection, with the exception of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, said minister Xu Shaoshi.
Inspections will be carried out in 155 cities including municipalities, cities where provincial and autonomous regional governments are located, and cities with populations over 500,000 people.
Inspections will be done through self-audits, supervision and mutual checking.
The chief leaders of governments of cities where land and regulations laws are seriously broken will face severe punishment.
Illegal land use has been decreasing over the last three years, but the situation is still serious, Xu said.
In 172 cities inspected in 2008, illegally occupied arable land on average totaled 14.4 percent of the total average arable land with construction.
Xu said using land without approval, expanding land without authorization and changing arable land into constructed land without permission are still rampant.
The ministry confiscated 19.24 million square meters of illegal buildings last year, and more than 2,200 people were put under law-breaching investigations.
Xu said illegal land use faces growth pressure this year due to brisk demands for land, urbanization, and property development woes such as idling land, hoarding land and land speculation.
Li Jingguo, a property researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times that the planned inspections aren't new.
"The root causes of incessant illegal land use are lax supervision and insufficient punishment," he said.
Local governments may have been the biggest beneficiaries of China's property boom in 2009. MLR data shows land sale income accounts for at least half of local governments' fiscal revenues.
China sold 5.3 trillion yuan ($776.39 billion) of real estate in total between 1999 and 2008.
Land sales by China's local governments generated 1.59 trillion yuan ($233 billion) last year, up 63 percent from a year earlier, with the revenue from the sale of land targeted for real estate use accounting for 84 percent of the total.
Analysts said the trend has contributed to China's "overly rapid" rise in property prices, which the country's senior leadership has warned about since late last year.
