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BEIJING, Oct. 31-- China's top legislature is mulling a revision to the law on rural land contracts in the face of fast urbanization and increasing demand to transfer rural land-use rights. "The revision aims to better define the use rights to rural land so that farmers can enjoy 'sufficient and guaranteed protection over their land rights,'" said Liu Zhenwei, deputy director of the Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), at the bi-monthly legislative session of the NPC Standing Committee Tuesday. Since the country adopted the household responsibility system in the early 1980s, the property rights of rural land have been divided into two layers: the ownership right that is collectively owned by a rural community, normally a village, and the use right, which is held by an individual household that contracts a piece of land from the village. The draft revision further separates the use right into "the contract right" and "the management right," according to Liu. Separation of the ownership rights, contract rights and management rights of rural land will allow farmers to retain the contract right over their allotted land and only transfer the management right if they choose to lease the land to others, mortgage it to banks or invest it in a cooperative in exchange for shares. The law, enacted in 2003, has failed to keep up with reality as industrialization and urbanization have required faster and smoother circulation of key resources, particularly land. | 
