The General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China ("CPC") and the General Office of the State Council have recently released the Guiding Opinions on Making Overall Arrangements for Advancing the Natural Resource Asset Ownership System Reform (the "Opinions").
The Opinions set out requirements from such perspectives as improving the natural resource asset ownership system and clearly defining natural resource asset owners. The Opinions call for efforts to properly deal with the relations between the natural resource asset ownership and the right to utilize natural resource assets and innovate ways of turning the all-people ownership and the collective ownership of natural resource assets into a reality. Efforts will also be made to put into effect the "separation of the ownership, contract right and management right of land" and initiate the use of the management right to acquire shares or create a pledge. Ways to separate the ownership of, the entitlement to and the right to use, rural residence land will be explored. In addition, actions will be taken to speed up the creation of separate rights to utilize the aboveground part, the surface and the underground part of construction land, in order to boost proper space development and utilization. Moreover, the Opinions state that research will be conducted by the competent authority of natural resources under the State Council to work out a list of resources and an administrative regime regarding the excising of the all-people-held natural resource asset ownership.