The Beijing News
October 20, 2008

The top headline of today's The Beijing News announces a set of "decisions" on rural reform. The document includes the landmark statement that "farmers are allowed to lease their contracted farmland or transfer their land use right”.

The "decisions" were released during the Third Plenary Session of the Seventeenth Central Committee of the Chinese People's Congress earlier this month and were authorized for publishing and broadcast by Xinhua New Agency on Sunday.

Also in the decisions are plans to:
• Increase the number of People's Representatives from rural areas;
• Lower the barrier for the rural residents to live in small- and medium-sized cities and "gradually transform the farmers who live and work in cities to urban residents";
• Strengthen price regulation mechanisms for agricultural products;
• Increase the minimum price at which the government buys grains from the farmers;
• Increase the proportion of the land-transaction tax revenue which is used to invest in agriculture, etc.

Also on the front page of the newspaper:

• Premier Wen Jiabao proposed a property tax cut to encourage private investment in real estate on October 17.
• Lin Jili, the father of the Lin Songling, who was believed beaten to death by a group of six police officers in Harbin, said that unedited video showed that his son had been kicked by the policemen for more than five minutes.

  Lin Songling was a university student in Harbin, capital city of north-east Heilongjiang Province. He was found dead on October 11 on the street. According to security camera video clips broadcast by a local TV station, Lin started the fight by attacking one of the police officers. None of the officers admitted killing Lin.

• 150 citizens were invited to attend the appointment ceremony of nine Chinese ambassadors and had a chat with them, the first time that such a ceremony has been open to the public. The big photo on the front page shows the ambassadors taking their oath.

On other pages:

• An article reported that in an eye test for randomly-selected students from all over Beijing on Sunday, none of the students from the high schools of Xuanwu District met the standards of "normal vision". The article says that statistics show that the vision of students in Beijing as a whole is getting worse compared to the result of 2005.
• The former mayor of Beijing, Liu Zhihua, was found guilty of taking 6.96 million yuan in bribes and was sentenced to death "with a two-year suspension of execution" in his first trial on Saturday.