CRI听力:China Rolls out Regulations on Real Estate Registration

Reporter:
The new rules require all governments above the county level to designate special departments for property registration in their areas.

Land and resource authorities will also be tasked with setting up a platform to combine registration data submitted at the national, provincial, municipal and county levels.

This will make it easier for departments at all levels to gain quick access to information about how many properties an individual has, and so on.

Liu Baocheng is an associate professor with the Business School of University of International Business and Economics.

"For a market economy, the first thing is to clearly define the property rights. But due to the ambiguity in China's property rights system, we have seen a lot of problems. For example, a number of farmers have already moved out of the countryside. But the question of whether they still maintain their homesteads remains a question. This also poses obstacles in the transfer of land use rights. The rule changes are necessary to tackle these problems."

The new rules will cover the collective ownership of land, ownership of buildings and forests, contracted land management rights as well as the rights to use construction land, homesteads and maritime areas.

There's been a lot of discussion taking place suggesting the national real estate registration system is a step toward a nation-wide property tax structure.

"The system may facilitate policy changes in the real estate sector. However, the registration system itself isn't, unto itself, enough to bring in a property tax. The levy of any property tax needs changes to other polices. If a property tax is brought in, the government may need to cut other taxes to strike a balance. So such change will need a comprehensive plan."

Observers had been expecting the new registration system might have been used to crack down on corruption, as it was supposed to allow authorities to obtain property registration information by searching the name of the property owners so as to prevent officials from concealing the number of properties they actually own.

However, no such clause has been added to the new system.

Liu Baocheng says anti-corruption isn't supposed to be the main function of the registration system.

"The registration system is similar to providing an ID to real estate. How the authorities will use those data in anti-corruption is a different issue and should be carried out by other departments. Just like the ID card system, it can help the police to hunt down criminals but the system itself is not designed to that end."

The regulations, which include 35 articles, will take effect March 1st.

For CRI, I'm Wang Mengzhen.