China’s industrial structure is changing profoundly. To improve development, the blind expansion of construction land must be addressed. Photo: FILE

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This year, the themes of China’s National Land Day are the strict protection of arable land and intensive land utilization. Scholars at a recent academic forum came to an agreement that the land use in China has entered an era of maximizing the use of current land.

China has a vast population, but its land is inadequate. The inadequacy refers to per capita possession, quality arable land and reserved farmland. Moreover, the area of land under construction has expanded too fast amid the country’s urbanization. Between 2000 and 2012, China’s urban construction land grew by 70%, resulting in a sharp drop of population density in urban built-up areas. At present, a total of 5,000 square kilometers of land marked for urban industrial and mining construction is used inefficiently, accounting for 11% of China’s urban built-up areas.

Zhu Daolin, a professor from the College of Land Science and Technology at China Agricultural University, conducted a survey and found that in more than 60% of provinces, the value-added of the tertiary industry calculated per square kilometer was lower than the national average, and the overall industrial efficiency was unsatisfactory. Geographically, since 2009, the figure has declined incrementally from the coastal area to the inland region. More than half of Chinese provinces’ land efficiencies for industry, mining and warehousing have failed to catch up with the national average. The efficiency of the country’s southeastern region is higher than that of its northwestern region.

Regarding residential land, urban residential land accounts for 33% of the total urban construction land, and the per capita residential land is 39 square meters, according to the 2017 statistics.
Ye Yanmei, a professor from the Institute of Land and National Development at Zhejiang University, has been studying the dissipation of rural construction land. She found taht from 2006 to 2015, 190 million people moved from rural areas to cities. The rural construction land didn’t drop correspondingly and instead increased by 2.6 million hectares, thus the per capita rural construction land has reached 325 square meters.

Zhu said that China’s long-term extensive development model has caused the low efficiency of urban land use, because economic growth heavily relies on construction land. This has contributed to many cases concerning the inefficient use and blind expansion of urban construction land.

Meanwhile, the imbalanced economic development among regions has also led to a large gap in land use efficiency between the east and the west. Since 2009, most of the 84 major cities nationwide have engaged in inefficient and extensive expansion. Only 20% of them have followed an intensive development pattern, all of which are located in the Yangtze River Delta and such city clusters as the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Metropolitan Region. The improvement in their intensive land use can be attributed to their more developed service sectors and limited land resources.
Du Guanyin, deputy director of the Department of Development and Utilization under the Ministry of Natural Resources, said that the industrial structure formed during China’s rapid economic growth period is undergoing profound changes. As a basic production factor for economic development, construction land must be adjusted accordingly.

Regarding construction land use, Du said that the proportion of the land supply marked for industry, mining and warehousing has remained above 20% for years. Presently, production-based service industry is gaining momentum and strategic emerging industries continue to rise. The redevelopment of urban low-efficiency land and the optimization of the land use structure can support the development of emerging sectors.

Land conservation and intensive utilization is also a fundamental requirement for the construction of ecological civilization, because saving resources is the best way to protect the ecological environment. Land conservation and intensive utilization can help sustain long-term economic growth through limiting land use and reducing ecological pressure.

In addition, the influence of the external environment deserves attention. In cities, there is less and less land available for development. The disorderly expansion makes cities’ radii bigger and bigger, such that people’s costs of living and transportation are increasing. Rising housing prices have invited the rising cost of the land used for settlement and production. We are facing a transition. We need to redevelop the inefficiently utilized land and delineate the boundaries of urban development, so that land use can transform from a pattern of blind growth to a model of high-quality improvement.

At present, property rights and interests concerning land that is already in use are more complicated. These problems pose new challenges to land management, requiring more skilled collaboration. Du called for a more comprehensive land evaluation system to measure land conservation and intensive utilization from macro and regional perspectives. Low-efficiency land in central urban areas deserves more attention.

Holistic planning is essential. When government departments aim to redevelop and use low-efficiency land in urban areas, it is necessary to make plans for each zone and appropriately balance the demands of various land use types, including the land for industrial production, residence, public service facilities and urban open space.

 

This article was translated from Economic Daily.

​edited by MA YUHONG