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Hong Kong Annual Administration Reports, 1841-1941
COLONIAL REPORTS-MISCELLANEOUS.
Titles.
23. Next as to the form of title. In my opinion it will be safest to keep at any rate for the present to the tenures which obtain and are well understood among the people.
A person who has a grant of land from the Chinese Government has in effect a perpetual lease subject to the payment of Crown Rent. If he converts the land to other uses than those to which it was put when he first took it up, his Crown Rent may be raised, but, subject to this, and perhaps to some reservation with regard to minerals, the land is his own, as long as he continues to pay the tax.
Such person need not, I think, be given ordinarily a Crown lease. He should be entered on a Register as a "Customary land holder" and be permitted to have an extract from this Register as evidence of his title upon payment of a small fee. The rights and liabilities incident to such tenure might be summarily defined in a short Ordinance which, however, we need be in no pressing hurry to draft. After a year or two's experience we shall know much more about New Territory customs than we do at present.
24. Such a certificate of title to be issued on payment of a small fee would be amply sufficient for the ordinary cultivator. It would not, however, satisfy the needs of Europeans who might wish to acquire land and it would probably be of little use to a registered company taking up land for industrial purposes. The proper course would be for them to make their own arrangements with the cultivator who would then surrender his rights to the Crown in favour of the purchaser and this latter would be granted a Crown Lease on such conditions as to the payment of Premium, Crown Rent and Fees as the circumstances might seem to warrant.
Under the Chinese régime, waste areas were frequently granted on easy terms subject, however, to an increase of Crown Rent, if the grantee converted the waste into agricultural land, or if he erected buildings thereon.
Land for which a Crown Lease might be issued would of course come under the ordinary law of the Colony as regards registration and so forth.
But the ordinary cultivator should, I think, be spared for the present the technicalities of English Law.
It is easy to see how the desire to avoid the expense of registration has complicated the land question in China by rendering unregistered transfers almost universal. Our aim should be to devise a system so simple and so cheap that the Chinese will find it more convenient to comply with the law than to evade it.
The Torrens System.
25. The best model is, I think, the system of Land Registration adopted in the Native States of the Malay Peninsula in the Settlement of Malacca, which is a modification of the well-known Torrens System, introduced by the late Sir WILLIAM MAXWELL. The peculiarity of this system is, that it makes the ownership of property pass by entry in the register, title by registration being substituted for title by deed.
Its main outlines are well described in the following quotation from Sir WILLIAM MAXWELL'S Essay on the Torrens System, paragraphs 4, 5, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, and 30:---
"4. Legal expenses incident to the sale and purchase of land were heavy, and every addition to the deeds forming the chain of evidence of title increased the cost of subsequent dealings.
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