Govt must enact land reform

Individual farmers should have the right to sell, lease or transfer their land, according to the research paper. Today, a village owns the farmland and while farmers are the owners of their own plot, they are not entitled to sell or manage it.

To ensure that farmers can exercise these individual rights, the central government must establish unified land markets throughout the country. They should also directly supervise the markets, which would measure each farmer's plot of land, issue deeds, register the land and affix real estate values to the land, the report said.

Tong Zhihui, a professor of agricultural development at Renmin University in Beijing, told China Business News: "Farmers should certainly share the rise in the value of land. But once the farmers' land is traded in a unified market, the government should levy taxes on transactions to make up for not previously imposing land transfer fees."

One reason land reforms were not implemented earlier is because of the financial crisis that began in 2008. In fact, the Third Plenum of the 17th Central Committee of CPC claimed that year that it had implemented all of its land reforms. Reforms weren't put into effect until late 2011 when several ministries jointly issued guidelines in issuing deeds to farmers. A pilot land reform program was carried out in Chengdu soon after.

There has also been little progress because of "the resistance and difficulty in measuring the land and negotiating with farmers", said a researcher of the pilot land reform led by Professor Zhou Qiren at Peking University.

Resistance has mainly come from local governments, which rely on land transfer fees to pay for the rising demand in public services and to pay off debts.

The Ministry of Finance said land transfer fees in the first three quarters of 2013 amounted to more than 2 trillion yuan (about $323 billion), an increase of 49.6 percent from the previous year. According to Caijing magazine, the overall debt of provincial, city, county and town governments hit 14 trillion yuan by the third quarter of this year.

It is expected that this year's Third Plenum will make greater strides in fine-tuning land reforms and implementing them on a broader scale.