China has for the first time clarified a closely watched issue of land rights that has caused uncertainty for the millions of Chinese who park their wealth in their homes.
Chinese officials said that a group of homeowners in the eastern city of Wenzhou would not have to pay a fee to extend the rights to the land under their residences.
Homeowners in China own their dwellings, but not the land under them. All land in China is owned by the government, which parcels it out to developers and homeowners through 20-to-70-year leases.
In Wenzhou, the local government had told some homeowners whose 20-year leases had expired that they would have to pay a large fee to renew, and the situation was being monitored closely across the country.
Many Chinese homeowners, a bedrock of the country’s economy and growing consumer sector, worried that they would have to pay dearly to keep using the land under their homes.
The decision, announced on Friday last week by Chinese Land and Resources Vice Minister Wang Guanghua (王廣華), stops short of providing homeowners nationwide a clear legal framework on land ownership rights. Nevertheless, it could pave the way for similar moves in other cities.
At a news conference, Wang said that the measures were temporary and that the government was working on “relevant legal arrangements” for those holding 70-year leases, according to a transcript of the briefing on the ministry’s Web site.
Much of China’s residential land is covered by 70-year leases.
Land ownership rights became a focus in Wenzhou in April when the local government demanded that homeowners whose land-use rights had expired after 20 years pay fees of up to a third of the value of their homes before they could sell them. The decision provoked protests from property owners in Wenzhou, a coastal city of 8 million that was one of the first areas to establish private enterprise after the Chinese government opened the economy in the late 1970s.
Xinhua news agency hailed the government’s decision as “one small step for Wenzhou, one giant leap for China.”
The Global Times, a nationalist tabloid owned by the People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper, called it “the biggest news of the year.”
Land-use rights are set to expire in Qingdao, Jinan and Shenzhen, Xinhua said.
The measures “conform to the expectations of the masses,” it said in a commentary on Saturday. “For all citizens, it is transmitting spring’s first glow of warm air.”
The number of residents affected by the 20-year land-use rights in Wenzhou is relatively small. The China Youth Daily, a state-run newspaper, said about 600 households had 20-year leases expiring next year and 1,700 others had such leases expiring by 2019.
However, their property transactions have been in limbo because of the uncertainty over the land-use rights.
In 2007, China moved to reassure homeowners by requiring that local governments renew 70-year leases automatically. Yet the law did not make clear whether homeowners would have to pay for the renewal or what would happen to those with shorter leases.
China has one of the highest rates of homeownership in the world, about 90 percent. Many people see it as a good investment in a country that has not had a sustained housing slump. Homeownership also plays a social role: Buying a home is widely seen as part of getting married.
In the past two decades, since the government has allowed private homeownership, many people have rushed to buy homes without considering the legal issues governing their limited land-use rights.
A majority of them expected the government to grant them full ownership of their homes without repossession or a huge fee to renew their land rights. Those moves could hurt the Chinese property market and anger the middle class, which is an important constituency of the ruling Chinese Communist Party and is richer, larger and more aware of its rights than ever before.
Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) yesterday said the DRAM supply crunch could extend through 2028, as the artificial intelligence (AI) boom has led the world’s major memory makers to dramatically reduce production of standard DRAM and allocate a significant portion of their capacity for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips. The most severe supply constraints would stretch to the first half of next year due to “very limited” increases in new DRAM capacity worldwide, Nanya Technology president Lee Pei-ing (李培瑛) told a news briefing. The company plans to increase monthly 12-inch wafer capacity to 20,000 in the first half of 2028 after a
Taiwan has enough crude oil reserves for more than 100 days and sufficient natural gas reserves for more than 11 days, both above the regulatory safety requirement, Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) said yesterday, adding that the government would prioritize domestic price stability as conflicts in the Middle East continue. Overall, energy supply for this month is secure, and the government is continuing efforts to ensure sufficient supply for next month, Kung told reporters after meeting with representatives from business groups at the ministry in Taipei. The ministry has been holding daily cross-ministry meetings at the Executive Yuan to ensure
Property transactions in the nation’s six special municipalities plunged last month, as a lengthy Lunar New Year holiday combined with ongoing credit tightening dampened housing market activity, data compiled by local land administration offices released on Monday showed. The six cities recorded a total of 10,480 property transfers last month, down 42.5 percent from January and marking the second-lowest monthly level on record, the data showed. “The sharp drop largely reflected seasonal factors and tighter credit conditions,” Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房屋) deputy research manager Chen Chin-ping (陳金萍) said. The nine-day Lunar New Year holiday fell in February this year, reducing
New vehicle sales in Taiwan plunged about 37 percent sequentially last month as the long Lunar New Year holiday and 228 Peace Memorial Day holiday cut short the number of working days, along with the lingering uncertainty over import tax cuts on US vehicles, market researcher U-Car said in a report yesterday. New car sales last month totaled 22,043, slumping from 35,073 units in January and down 19.89 percent from 37,515 in February last year, U-Car data showed. Sales of imported luxury cars, led by Mercedes-Benz, plummeted about 45 percent to 3,109 units last month from 5,663 units in the previous month,
RSS