China's High Standard Farmland Program Grows Bureaucracy & Corruption

China's creation of "high standard farmland" is harder than expected. Users of the land don't have money for improvements and couldn't reap a return on investments if they did. Responsibility for improving and maintaining land falls to an army of bureaucrats who have their own set of interests. 

Last week China's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA) launched a campaign to root out abuses and dysfunction in the high standard farmland construction program. At a meeting last week officials were ordered to "take decisive action to "address and rectify prominent issues" and "squarely face existing problems" with the massive farmland construction program that is endorsed by Xi Jinping and viewed as essential to national food security. 

The first in a series of plans for building high standard farmland was issued in 2013 by China's State Council. The program funds construction projects to level fields, consolidate fragmented plots, build access roads, irrigation canals and electric lines, and improve soil as a means of hitting grain production goals. In 2025, China's leadership decreed that all "permanent cropland" would be transformed into "high standard farmland" while upgrading past projects. Since then scrutiny of the program has revealed that it is rife with fraud, mismanagement, shoddy construction and lack of maintenance that has left many fields abandoned or necessitated reconstruction. 

For example, last November a district in Jiangxi Province reported its project to fix problems with high standard farmland projects that had been built during 2017-21 covering about 1500 acres in 3 villages. "Orderly, rectangular fields, interconnected roads, and linked irrigation canals" constructed within the last 4-to-9 years had fallen into disuse and some fields were abandoned due to aging and damaged facilities, silted canals, farm roads and canal banks overgrown with thick weeds, and damaged irrigation facilities. 

A worker repaired a "high standard field" in Jiangxi Province last year.

In April this year, the Central Commission for Disciplinary Inspection released its investigation of the high standard farmland program that found widespread corruption and malfeasance, such as diverting and misappropriating funds, rigged bidding, failure to supervise construction, and insufficient post-construction maintenance. In May, Shanghai-based news outlet The Paper's investigation of the program in a district of Jiangxi Province found empty pump houses, rusted irrigation pipes not connected to anything, missing pumps that had allegedly been stolen, irrigation canals that were clogged or dug uphill from the water source, a transformer discarded on a roadside, and dry rice fields used to grow peanuts. 

Last week's MARA meeting echoed the CCDI report as it demanded intensified efforts to address the misappropriation or diversion of funds, delays in issuance of funds, unpaid bills, illegal bidding and tendering practices, and identification of quality defects in infrastructure projects.

An official inspected high standard farmland in Yulin District of Shaanxi Province on July 10. Source: Yulin TV. 

Corn growing under plastic mulch in extremely sandy soil of Yulin District's high standard farmland.

Local officials have been holding their own meetings and inspections to conduct remediations. A document describing the Qingpu District of Shanghai's remediation program includes a catalogue of problems that include theft, embezzlement, shoddy work and materials, lack of oversight, rigged bidding processes, failure to audit, inspect or maintain projects, and a prioritization of construction while neglecting maintenance:

• Project funds are misused for non-essential ancillary facilities or "vanity projects"
• Finance departments refused to release funds because agricultural departments did not complete inspections of the projects
• Funds are cut during budget reviews, after bidding or audits
• Funds are siphoned or acquired fraudulently by falsifying the area of the project, material requirements, or services, or by listing fictitious companies as vendors who received payments.
• Contracts are split into units that are too small to attract competent contractors and standards are lowered
• Bidders submit inaccurate bid documentation, lack qualifications, and borrow, steal or forge certificates and other documents
• Bidding is rigged, bidders submit identical bid documents, or collude to inflate the winning bid
• Leading officials predetermine the selection of specific bidders
• Site surveys and designs are inadequate, noncompliant sites are selected. Local residents are not consulted in the process
• Contractors cut corners during construction and fail to meet standards for structural dimensions, configurations, or strength
• Substandard raw materials are used, and no quality testing is conducted
• Tasks are illegally subcontracted with no supervision
• Construction is approved without actually visiting the site
• Responsibility for maintenance is not assigned
• Repairs are neglected or left unaddressed

Besides mismanagement and theft, authorities do not actually know how much high-standard farmland exists. The Qingpu document states that completed farmland areas are overreported due to the falsification of data mapping and database entry. The document says local officials fail to enter data in the national database for supervising farmland construction or they enter data that is inaccurate or false, with incorrect units, logical inconsistencies, mismatched information, and falsified construction progress. 

Large amounts of resources and management are required to check up on and correct problems with high-standard farmland construction. The Qingpu District set up a task force led by two deputy directors with members from the Construction Management Section, Crop and Livestock Section, Finance Section, Agency Party Committee, Rural Construction Management Center, and Rural Economic Management Station to conduct inspections of all projects and comb through documents. Key leaders from sub-districts, towns, and "modern agriculture parks" are joining the inspections and will manage rectifications of items one by one. Qingpu plans to establish a monthly coordination mechanism to stay abreast of the remediation, including spot checks by third-party professional agencies. 

In its promise to discipline those responsible for misconduct or violations, the Qingpu document says officials will be summoned for warning or discipline if they detect "serious problems" or "major negative public sentiment."

Of course, land management creates annoying bureaucracy everywhere. However, the alienation of land users from land ownership, denying users capital gains, requirements to use land for producing grain that yields no profit, and offering fat contracts that can enrich bureaucrats bloats the bureaucracy and creates a dangerous separation of the interests of land users from "owners." Don't take the miraculous stories reported in Chinese news media at face value.