The Impact of Land Property Right on China’s Rural-urban Migration

. Taking China as an example, this paper discusses and explains the influence of land ownership on rural-urban migration. The essay explains China's land system and immigration. And through the empirical analysis, it shows that there is a significant negative correlation between land property rights and population mobility.


Introduction 1.1 China's land system
After 1949, China established the socialist public ownership of land, and at the same time, the Constitution clearly stipulated that "no organization or individual may occupy, buy, sell, lease or illegally transfer land in other forms."This formed the main feature of the old stateowned land use system.One is free to use of land, the other is indefinite use, and the third is no transfer.Because land ownership and use rights are not treated separately, the land is occupied for free, indiscriminately and excessively, resulting in a huge waste of land resources.Since the 1980s, China has begun to reform its land management system, mainly in two aspects.First, the reform of the land administration system.In 1986, the state passed the Land Administration Law and established the National Land Administration.Second, the reform of the land use system separates the use rights and ownership of the land, and changes the use rights from free and indefinite use to paid and limited use, so that it can truly enter the market according to the attributes of its commodities.With the completion of socialist transformation, China implemented socialist public ownership, that is, land belongs to the state or collective.Urban population mobility, especially the urban and rural mobility of labor force, is the reallocation of labor force as a factor of production in various sectors of the national economy.Whether it is called an economic phenomenon or a social phenomenon, the restriction and incentive of the system on labor mobility is inevitable.As an important component of the rural economic system in China, the land ownership system refers to the sum of various social and economic relationships generated around land issues in agricultural production under certain socio-economic conditions, and is the code of conduct for people's mutual relations on agricultural issues.The rural land ownership system has an internal connection with the agricultural population flow, and different land system arrangements have different effects on the agricultural population flow.Clear rural land property rights and standardized rural land market transactions are the basic institutional arrangements to ensure that the rural population's original rights and interests are not violated in the process of leaving the countryside and moving towards the city.The status and important role of rural land system and agricultural population mobility in China's agriculture and rural economic construction are obvious.Practice has proved that there is an inevitable link between the two.Although the Land Contract Law stipulates that the land contract management right can be transferred by subcontracting, leasing, transfer or other means according to law, the normal flow of land contract rights is blocked due to the ambiguity of the subject of rural land property rights in China, the state's restrictions on the subject of property rights, the instability of land contract rights, and the imperfect transfer mechanism, which restricts the marketization process of agricultural land in China, It also makes it impossible for a large number of agricultural people to completely separate themselves from agricultural production and move outward.With the deepening and development of economic reform, township residents have gradually realized that under the market economy, the transfer and transaction of land ownership can promote the flow of labor in urban and rural areas, improve the efficiency of land use, and realize the scale operation of land.

China land system: urban and rural
Presently, there are two forms of state-owned and collective ownership of land in China: urban land belongs to the state, and the ownership of land is exercised by the State Council on behalf of the state.Land in rural and urban suburbs is collectively owned.The state may expropriate collectively-owned land by legal provisions.In addition, no organization or individual may occupy, buy, sell, lease or illegally transfer land in other forms.In rural areas, collectives and farmers are not allowed to change the use of land without permission, buy or sell land or transfer land in other forms.

HRS land property right characteristics
The household responsibility system is a form of agricultural production responsibility system in which farmers take the family as a unit to contract production materials and production tasks such as villages to collective economic organizations.It is a basic economic system in China's rural areas at the present stage.The land is allocated to individuals or units for use and management, and each responsible person needs to pay a quota or pay taxes, but can freely distribute the surplus.

Migration
With the development of society and economy, the characteristics of the floating population have hardly changed.In recent years, China's economic development has expanded rapidly, resulting in a substantial increase in employment opportunities.More and more rural people are beginning to seek jobs in cities, and public services and welfare policies for urban and rural immigrants have also improved, so more rural immigrants choose to settle in cities.

The profits of migration
China's population migration base is very large, and the migration from rural to urban accounts for a large proportion.Migration has two main benefits.First, it is good for economic development and reduces the gap between the rich and the poor, and families can increase their income through immigration.Secondly, it will also improve the living environment of the people.

Literature 2.1 Property right
Property rights are the legal rights that entities have over the things or living things they own.The owner can be a person, company, charity, government, trust, etc. Property rights are one of the most fundamental rights in a free society.Under the condition of market economy, the attributes of property rights are mainly manifested in three aspects: property rights are economical entities, property rights are separable, and property rights flow is independent.

The mechanism of land property right
impacting migration Land property rights are the core of the land system, especially the exclusive and complete rights that exist in the land, including land ownership, use rights, lease rights, mortgage rights, inheritance rights, etc.The nature of land property rights reflects specific social relations and land systems.Rural land property rights system is the concrete property rights system on agricultural land resources, and refers to the system of building land property rights structure and property rights relationship.Defining the subject of farmland property rights, clarifying the relationship between farmland property rights, and regulating farmland market transactions are the basic institutional arrangements to ensure that the original rights and interests of the rural population will not be violated in the process of leaving the countryside and moving to the city.The reform of my country's rural economic system is to change from a highly centralized planned economy system to a socialist market economy system, from direct government control of farmers' production and operation to farmers' independent decision-making under the guidance of the market.The current household contract system generally implemented in rural areas is a form of contracting to households, that is, farmers, as independent business entities and accounting units, have the autonomy of production and operation and the right to claim residual income.For the collective part, the remaining income belongs to the farmers.The urban-rural migration of population, especially the urban-rural migration of labor, is the reallocation of labor as a factor of production in various sectors of the national economy.Regardless of whether it is an economic phenomenon or a social phenomenon, the constraints and incentives that institutions impose on individual migration decisions are inevitable.

When the land property is not well protected (appropriation)
Land provides farmers with a stable income and improves their ability to withstand the risk of unemployment.Under the current system, peasant relocation means giving up land, which increases the cost of peasant relocation.The development of small towns is an important part of China's urbanization policy, and in order to promote industrialization, it is necessary to use rural land.For most farmers, the land and the assets on the land are the most important part of their assets.If these assets cannot be freely realized, it will greatly affect the farmers' migration behavior.If the land system allows farmers to leave their land and receive compensation, it will facilitate migration.
If the government or local government decides to misappropriate the land allocated by farmers, compensation and resettlement will be implemented for farmers.Land expropriation has a negative impact on resettlement: in the expropriation channel, state land expropriation inhibits the flow of people.Although farmers will be compensated from state expropriation, the amount is too small.At the same time, after the national land acquisition, farmers will face a series of problems, such as rent and meals, pension, medical and education costs.In addition, farmers' household registration remains unchanged after land acquisition, which is not good for farmers.

When the land property is well protected (rent your land out)
The free land system created conditions for the separation and combination of population and land, and promoted the occurrence of population migration.Because this system can make the population and land separate freely, and can easily obtain land, thereby promoting population migration.However, this system promotes the formation of a decentralized mechanism in China, which makes it difficult for capital accumulation to form, and although it has stability, it cannot promote economic development.
However, lease rights are not the key factor affecting migration, but lease rights plus use rights increase the possibility of migrant starvation.

Empirical Analysis
This paper is mainly used to study the impact of land property rights on urban population mobility.Therefore, the explanatory variable chosen is TQ: land property rights; The explained variable is urban population mobility, namely migration; At the same time, in order to avoid the influence of the unobservable heterogeneity of some questionnaire results on the experimental results, some control variables are added to ensure the accuracy of the results.It mainly includes health level, education level, age (years of living in cities and towns), regender, land requisition, rental ratio, etc; The dummy variables 0 and 1 are introduced to replace the analysis of the rental population; Among them, 1 for renting a house and 0 for not renting a house; See the following table for specific variable definitions.

Conclusion
According to the above analysis, it is not difficult to see that there is a significant negative correlation between land property rights and population mobility, which indicates that on the basis of rural ownership of land property rights, rural people are unwilling to move to cities.So how to effectively improve the well-being of the population after moving to cities and towns is the first issue we need to consider.
(1) Establish a full set of personnel security system On the one hand, improve the social security level of farmers in cities, and actively provide social environment for them to settle in cities; on the other hand, stabilize and reliable social security, reduce farmers' dependence on land security, and eliminate the instability of farmers' expectations for the future.Only in this way can the process of urbanization be accelerated.
(2) Establish clear ownership of property rights Although China has issued the Property Law aimed at protecting farmers' land ownership, and on the basis of the Property Law, it is clear that the right to use agricultural land can be transferred, leased and mortgaged.The farmers' right to the use of agricultural land was not clearly defined, and the subsequent document GF [1998] did not further clarify the disposal of agricultural land by farmers who applied to enter the city.Due to the ambiguity of ownership, farmers in cities can not rely on to dispose of agricultural land.In reality, the ownership of agricultural land is either recycled by the village committee or entrusted to others by farmers in cities.This gives people away from home the illusion that land ownership does not belong to them as long as they leave their hometown in the countryside, which makes some people unwilling to leave the countryside and go to cities and towns.

Table 1 .
Variable Definition and Description

Table 2 .
The results are as follows

Table 3
This paper takes the analysis results of the 2014 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study questionnaire as the research object, and based on the principle of data integrity, some samples with missing data are removed.After perspective cleaning of the questionnaire data, the conclusions are as shown in the table above.