**1. Introduction**

To achieve the vision of fully building a modern country by 2050, the Chinese government is vigorously promoting agricultural modernization to make up for the shortcomings of modernization. The efficient use of farmland is the foundation of agricultural modernization, so the farmland rights system must always be geared towards achieving agricultural modernization [1]. However, historical experiences show that productive forces and production relations are not static. The productive forces can progress with the development of science and technology, thus generating the need to adjust production relations. Therefore, the farmland rights system reform has become a major way to adjust production relations. Through the adjustment of the rights relationship stipulated under the old farmland rights system, it builds a new farmland rights relationship that can meet the new needs of agricultural modernization and makes the production relationships compatible with advanced productive forces, which creates conditions for farmland capitalization and activates production factors in rural regions [2,3]. It underpins that farmland rights

**Citation:** Cai, L.; Chai, C.; Zhang, B.; Yang, F.; Wang, W.; Zhang, C. The Theoretical Approach and Practice of Farmland Rights System Reform from Decentralization to Centralization Promoting Agricultural Modernization: Evidence from Yuyang District in Shaanxi, China. *Land* **2022**, *11*, 2241. https://doi.org/10.3390/ land11122241

Academic Editor: Luca Salvati

Received: 30 October 2022 Accepted: 6 December 2022 Published: 9 December 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

system reform is an important prerequisite for agricultural modernization, so it is very necessary to explore the approach of farmland rights system reform for the study of achieving agricultural modernization.

Many scholars have carried out research on this issue. The academic community generally considers the farmland rights system reform in China to be an initiative system reform led by the government. It has some positive characteristics, including effective planning by the government based on prospects in advance, the promotion of grassroots exploration in coordination during the event, and monitoring of multiple subjects after the event [4]. These characteristics reflect the efforts made in institutional design to achieve the established reform goals. In this reform system, the government played a key role: by amending the law and redistributing land rights, it created favorable conditions for the optimal allocation of farmland, thus making up for the lack of market capability [5]. Meanwhile, village committees, as the implementers of policies at the grassroots level, have natural advantages in terms of integrating rural resources and communicating between the government and the farmer in view of their inherent characteristics of being born in the rural society, embedded in the rural relationship network, and maintaining close contact with the government [6]. These advantages help village committees play important roles in farmland rights system reform [7]. In China, the latest farmland rights system reform is based on the idle or inefficiently used farmland in rural regions and attempts to optimize the allocation of farmland by building a clear farmland rights system and a perfect farmland circulation market because reformers and experts believe that these attempts will help the market to play a decisive role in the allocation of farmland, and it is beneficial for improving the efficiency of agricultural land use [8–10]. For this aim, the Chinese government proposed that the rights of farmland should be transformed from the separation of two rights systems to the separation of three rights systems, and the task has become one of the key tasks in the farmland rights system reform in China [11]. The purpose of this task is to revitalize the right to use farmlands while protecting the right of farmers to earn by separating the households' contracted management right of farmland, in other words, achieving appropriate scale management of farmland while increasing farmers' property income [12]. At present, farmland rights system reform has achieved some good results in China. The rights of farmland in the vast majority of rural regions in China have been redefined, and the clear property rights relationship has significantly reduced the transaction cost of farmland circulation, which promotes the circulation of numerous farmlands into new agricultural business entities, and the appropriate scale management of farmland gradually emerges, which initially achieved the expected policy goals of the reform [13].

However, in practice, most of these circulation activities are still spontaneous transactions by farmers in the land market, which often occur between farmers [14]. It optimizes the allocation of farmland to a certain degree, but there are still two obvious drawbacks. Firstly, farmland demanders must reach an agreement with each farmer of the farmland they need in order to achieve the appropriate scale management of farmland. This not only involves high transaction costs in the process of signing the agreement, but some farmers may also be unwilling to circulate their farmland, causing the fragmentation of farmland, which means these farmlands cannot meet the needs of land demanders, so it is difficult to attract high-quality business entities and improve agricultural production efficiency [15]. Secondly, there is widespread informal land circulation between relatives and friends in rural regions. There is a lack of formal contracts, agreements, and other circulation credentials, and the circulation price of farmland is often lower than the market price, which aggravates the rights risk of farmland circulation [16,17], and when the actual circulation price of farmland is lower than the market price, it is not conducive to farmers to improve their farmland productivity [18]. Reading the existing literature, most studies still focus on the positive impact of farmland rights system reform on the realization of the market-oriented allocation of farmland, but few scholars pay attention to some of the issues that restrict the agricultural development after the farmland rights system reform. Therefore, this study is aimed to explore the effectiveness of the farmland rights system reform from decentralization to centralization and its impacts on agricultural modernization. Above all, this study will sort out the practice of farmland rights system reform in Yuyang District. Then, it will explore how to use theory to objectively and rationally prove that the practice is effective. Finally, it will discuss how to evaluate the reform performance in Yuyang District based on a method of quantitative analysis. In short, it tries to find a way to optimize the system based on the property rights theory for avoiding some potential challenges in the process of farmland rights system reform and introduces Yuyang's practice to verify the feasibility of this method.

#### **2. Theoretical Approach, Methodology and Data Sources**
