China to Regulate Land PriceChina has decided to give greater play to the role of public bidding and auction in an effort to improve the transparency in the transfer of state-owned land.Hu Cunzhi, director of the Land Use Management Department with the Ministry of Land Resources, said that at present only five percent of state-owned land is transferred through bidding and auction, and administrative allocation remains the major means. "Irregularities in land supply resulted from the behind-the- scenes dealings have caused nearly 10 billion yuan worth of losses in land-use revenues," said the official. The problems in land management have also caused corruption among officials, citing the cases of Cheng Kejie, former vice- chairman of the Standing Committee of the Ninth National People's Congress, and Hu Changqing, former deputy governor of Jiangxi Province in east China. The total value of China's land assets is estimated at some 25 trillion yuan, and it is increasing along with the country's economic growth. Hu said his ministry has adopted a series of strict measures to strengthen land asset management to prevent state revenues from losing and guard against corruption, as is required by the State Council. The ministry has mandated that the transfer of land for commercial purposes should be done by means of bidding or auction, and all the cities and townships should modify their land-transfer base prices before the year 2002. More than 600 Chinese cities have pinned down their own base prices for land transfer since the system was adopted in 1980. However, most of them failed to update on time the prices to suit the growing value of land and make them known to the public, Hu said. |
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