The Rural Community Stock Cooperative System
is adopted in economically advanced areas as a new system to clarify collective
property rights. Since the system was implemented, it has gained a lot of
attention in China. Compared to traditional collective ownership, the design of
the Community Stock Cooperative System is to satisfy the interests of three
parties: rural villagers, village organizations and local government. It
improves resource distribution within communities, and moves them towards Pareto Optimality.
From the perspective of rural women, Community Stock Cooperative
System is very beneficial. First, it changes the joint possession of collective
property to several possessions, which has clarified women’s ownership. Second,
it has embodies a modern corporate governance structure, which could effectively
eliminate the kind of gender discrimination that is prevalent in the old
collective income distribution system. Third, the new system distributes mainly
monetary assets instead of more substantive assets, such as land. It directly
allocates stock shares to individuals, and highlights individual rights. The
stock cooperative system clearly gives stock rights to female individuals
through a process of shareholder verification, public announcement, and stock
share certificate issuance, to prevent any potential violations of women’s
rights by household joint possession.
The
Stock Cooperative System is innovative not only for recognizing farmers’
economic income rights by contracting land under collective ownership, but also
for guaranteeing collective members’ right to share profits from the added value
of non-agricultural land. The benefit of non-agricultural land is higher than
agricultural land, and the rights to it are based only on identity, therefore,
the recognition of villagers’ stock share qualification is stricter than that of
household contracting rights.
The
Community Stock Cooperative System is more advanced because it has clearer
property rights than traditional collective economic organizations. But, the new
system’s flaw still lies in it’s imperfect property rights clarification, and
incomplete, inefficient governance structure. The new system still has features
of joint possession, and its distribution is still based on collective
membership, thus it is still possible for the collective to exclude women. The
Community Stock Cooperative System strictly confines shares in the community
boundary; if you want to have stock shares of this village, you must have
collective membership in this village community. The system separates collective
stock shares into "individual stock shares" in order to reflect that "everyone"
has the right of membership under collective ownership. The system divides the
profit sharing classes by different years of working, or farming experience, to
comply with traditional quota of collective ownership. It regulates membership
changes caused by population migration by adjusting the stock shares quota. This
process of distribution and allocation in the new stock share system still
maintains the basic structure and contents of collective ownership, which could
prove to be problematic. As an expert pointed out, “Women’s land rights are
violated because their collective membership is constantly challenged,
therefore, individualization of rights becomes the optimal measure for
protecting women’s rights, so as to realize the change from social
identification to social contract”.
Quasi land ownership has also seen many changes. It was once obtained
freely by membership, but now it is bought. In addition, the land obtained by
the members was not transferable, but now it is, making the property rights of
rural landowners gradually more complete. The new shareholding system changed
from an old, closed, community form of system to a new, open, enterprise form of
system. Although the current reform of stock cooperative system is not complete,
the measures taken have improved it, and helped to get rid of the influence of
an informal system of collective income distribution, which was more often than
not discriminatory to women.
Rural Community Stock Cooperative System is a completely new system
with many new conditions and problems. Due to various reasons in the past and
present, rural women’s rights are sometimes violated in the new Stock Reform
System. In some parts of Jiangsu province, about 20% of women were not treated
equally mainly in the four aspects below:
1.
Some rural women did not get land in the second round of land contracting, thus
they could not receive equal treatment when collective assets were
quantified.
2.
Illegal village rules have violated women’s rights. For example, some village
rules permit only 25-50% of land acquisition compensation for married women. In
a city in southern Jiangsu, the municipal government’s documents and the share
cooperatives charter states “when married women migrate, their household
registration is moved to their husbands’ village, but if they have not migrated
within 5 years, they shall not get stock shares.” This kind of proclamation is
against law.
3.
Some rural women are forced to migrate when they marry urban husbands. Under the
former household registration system, rural married women could not move their
household registrations to the city, so they just leave the registrations with
their parents in the countryside. The new household registration system has
lowered the threshold, which enables farmers to gain urban registrations. As a
result, some villages force women who have married urban men to migrate out of
the village, then cancel their relevant economic rights and interests. However,
things have changed over recent years. Some villages enjoy a very favorable
collective welfare, as a result, there is no pressure on women to marry urban
men, and even if they do, they would not migrate.
4.
The long-existed “live with your husband” pattern still stops rural women and
their children from fully enjoying shareholding interests from stock cooperative
system reform.
III. The Impact of the
Community Stock Cooperative System Reform on Rural Women’s Economic
Rights
The
reform system’s design and implementation has both advantages and disadvantages
for rural women’s economic rights:
1.
There are no clear rules identifying members of collective economic
organizations, thus leaving the rights of married and divorced women
unprotected. In economically advanced areas, a key issue in women’s land rights,
especially stock rights, is how to distribute property to “married out women”.
“Married out women” are those women who did not marry residents of their own
villages, and have to leave their household registration, as well as their
children’s, in their original villages.
“Married out women,” and children are usually excluded from the
category of identified shareholders (villagers) during a stock reform. Because
there is no theory or law concerning the identification of membership, household
registration is used as the first step of identifying village membership. The
next step is to ensure that the villager has fulfilled their obligations to the
community, such as complying with the family planning policy. It is also
important that the villager resides in, and has a contract to operate land in
the community. Other informal elements influence membership as well, such as
traditions, family influence, and the village authorities.
The
system of Identity-based collective profits distribution, combined with the
difficulty in identifying village membership, has allowed the collective will of
the villagers to selectively exclude “married out women”. According to the
survey of Professor Lu Ying from Sun Yat-sen University, 80.1% “married out
women” have lost their stock dividends after married, while divorced women are
also unprotected, because with their stock share cancelled, and household
registration repelled, they are left with nothing.
2.
Periodic adjustments of stock rights have encouraged people to move into the
community, like new wives for example. A community periodically adjusts stock
rights by retrieving stock rights from those who passed away or moved out, and
reallocates them to the new community members. Such adjustments have protected
the rights of the new population, but also brought many conflicts. First, as
population increases, dividend per share drops and affects every shareholder.
Second, as only villagers can get a stock share, people do not move out, and
village population explodes, putting a heavy burden on collective economy.
Third, complicated population flow has made it increasingly difficult to
identify village (collective economic organization) membership, giving rise to
more disputes. Since 2003, some villages have allowed no change in stock rights
allocation.
3.
Fixed stock rights allocation has varied influence on rights of the new
villagers. A innovation in the Stock Cooperative system fixes down shareholders,
and the total number of stock shares in order to prevent disputes over resource
allocation. However, if a married woman and her children changed their household
registration in recent years, before the stock rights distribution was fixed,
they would not receive stock shares.
4.
Clarifying women’s stock share ownership helps to get rid of the potential
infringements, which existed under the system of household joint possession. In
the past, the family unit distributed and managed the household land, and the
land rights were subject to the joint possession of family members. Joint
possession by family members meant that individual property rights were not
clearly divided between husband and wife. When there was a divorce the woman’s
claim to her land would often be overshadowed by that of her husband. “Family is
a double-edged sword. It can both protect and jeopardize women’s land
rights.”
