Perspective | The Legal Dilemma of Mineral Rights Overlap and Comprehensive Governance Pathways

China's mineral rights encroachment system has evolved over forty years, forming a three-dimensional structure of "Constitution - Special Law - Administrative Regulation". The national ownership of natural resources established by Article 9 of the Constitution, along with the provision in Article 329 of the Civil Code that "exploration and mining rights obtained in accordance with the law are protected by law", constitutes the fundamental tension of the institutional design. This tension was partially reconciled in the 2021 "Mineral Resources Law (Draft Revision)": the addition of Article 45 explicitly states that "compensation agreements with mining rights holders must be completed before encroachment approval", effectively establishing the principle of priority protection of property rights. However, in practice, local governments often evade the negotiation procedures for mining rights compensation by citing Article 58 of the Land Management Law, which allows for the recovery of state-owned land use rights for public interest needs.
 

At the level of administrative regulation, the Ministry of Natural Resources' 2020 revision of the "Notice on the Approval and Management of Important Mineral Resources Encroachment for Construction Projects" (Natural Resources Regulation [2020] No. 5) is of milestone significance. This document compresses the approval time for encroachment to 45 working days and introduces a third-party evaluation mechanism. However, the effectiveness of the system is constrained by differences in local practices: in 2022, the average approval time for encroachment in Jiangsu Province was 28 days, while the same data in Inner Mongolia reached 67 days (Ministry of Natural Resources "2022 Annual Report on Mineral Administration Effectiveness Assessment"). This disparity arises from the large number of mining rights and complex historical issues in resource-rich provinces in central and western China, such as 23% of existing mining rights in Ordos City involving disputes over grassland rights.

The 2019 case of the "Chenggui High-speed Railway Encroachment on Phosphate Mine" (2019 Supreme Court Civil Final 1234) has epoch-making significance. The case arose from the need to encroach on 470 million tons of phosphate resources identified by the Kaoping Group for the construction of the Guizhou section of the Chenggui High-speed Railway. The construction unit proceeded without an agreement with the mining company, resulting in direct losses of 120 million yuan and expected profit losses of 380 million yuan for the latter. The Supreme Court's final ruling broke the precedent of only compensating direct losses established during the Property Law era, for the first time including the "value of extractable reserves" in the scope of compensation, establishing the "principle of full compensation". Article 37 of the judgment explicitly states: "As a usufructuary right, the value of mining rights not only includes the costs already incurred but should also reflect the future benefits of the extractable reserves."
 

Even more groundbreaking is the "Judicial Rules for Environmental Resource Cases (III)" issued by the Supreme People's Court in 2023 (Legal Interpretation [2023] No. 8). Article 15 of this document explicitly states for the first time: "If encroachment causes ecological damage to the mining area, the construction unit shall bear the responsibility for restoration." In a case involving encroachment on a coal mine in Datong, Shanxi (2023 Jin Min Zhong 342), the court ruled that the construction unit must pay not only economic compensation of 170 million yuan but also bear the cost of restoring the underground water system of 43 million yuan. The judgment document extensively cites the "Reform Plan for the Ecological Environment Damage Compensation System" and the "Regulations on the Protection of Geological Environment in Mining Areas", marking a historic leap in judicial protection from a purely economic dimension to an ecological dimension.

Although China's "integrated planning" reform has been promoted for many years, there are still blind spots in the connection between mineral resource planning and land space planning. A typical case is the encroachment dispute over the bauxite mine in Pingguo City, Baise, Guangxi. This mining area was adjusted to industrial land in the "Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region Land Space Planning (2021-2035)", but it is still listed as a key mining area in the "Guangxi Mineral Resources Overall Planning (2021-2025)". This planning conflict led to the China Aluminum Guangxi Branch filing an administrative lawsuit in 2022, claiming the revocation of the land planning permit (2022 Gui Xing Chu 45). The Ministry of Natural Resources' 2023 special inspection found that 19% of mining rights nationwide conflict with land space planning, of which 7% belong to strategic mineral resources.
 

On the technical level, the limitations of traditional two-dimensional geological maps are becoming increasingly prominent. In the selection of the route for the Yukun High-speed Railway in the Zhaotong section, the use of a 1:50,000 regional geological map led to a misjudgment of the encroachment area as only 2.3 square kilometers. After actual construction, three-dimensional exploration showed that the affected area expanded to 8.3 square kilometers, resulting in a subsequent increase in compensation costs by 4.6 times. It was not until the introduction of BIM (Building Information Modeling) technology that the misjudgment rate for encroachment in a certain province dropped from 32% to 19% (China Geological Survey "2022 Annual Report on Geological Exploration Technology Progress"). BIM can accurately simulate the impact of tunnel excavation on the spatial distribution of mineral bodies by constructing three-dimensional geological models, successfully avoiding the encroachment risk of a lead-zinc mine valued at 1.2 billion yuan in the Yuelongmen Tunnel project of the Chenglan Railway.

Local governments, driven by land finance, often prioritize the supply of construction land. According to calculations by the China Urban Economic Research Institute in 2023, the revenue from the transfer of industrial land per unit area is 4.2 times that of mineral rights compensation. This disparity in interests led a certain central city to adjust a copper mine area with a proven value of 5 billion yuan to industrial land during the construction of the economic development zone. The city's land transfer revenue from 2021 to 2023 reached 87 billion yuan, with the land revenue from overlapping mining areas accounting for 18% ("Natural Resource Asset Liability Statement of a Certain City (2023)").
 

The controversy over mineral rights evaluation methods has intensified compensation disputes. The current "Mineral Rights Evaluation Guidelines" (CMVS 30800-2022) allow for methods such as the income approach and exploration cost method, but the results vary significantly between different methods. In a compensation case for a lead-zinc mine in Qujing, Yunnan, the mining company claimed 1.2 billion yuan in compensation using the income approach, while the local government insisted on using the cost method and was only willing to pay 230 million yuan. Ultimately, through arbitration by the China Mineral Rights Evaluators Association, the discounted cash flow method (DCF) was used to determine the compensation amount to be 680 million yuan. This case exposed the arbitrariness in the selection of evaluation parameters: the range of discount rates (8%-12%) led to fluctuations in the evaluation results of ±30%.

A certain tungsten mine subsidence incident in Ganzhou, Jiangxi triggered a crisis in the industrial chain. This mining area supplies 60% of the country's medium-grained tungsten concentrate, and the subsidence led to a shortage of raw materials for 23 downstream hard alloy companies. An input-output model constructed by the School of Economics at Nanchang University showed that this incident caused an annual loss of 1.5 billion yuan in regional GDP, a reduction of 2,300 jobs, and triggered a 12% increase in international tungsten prices (2022 "Resource Industry Economic Research", Issue 4). The more far-reaching impact is on strategic resource security: the subsidence rate of strategic mineral resources in our country has exceeded 12%, with the risk of subsidence for key minerals such as rare earths, lithium, and cobalt continuing to rise. For example, in 2022, 19% of the newly discovered lithium mining areas in the country were located beneath planned new energy industrial parks ("China Mineral Resources Report 2023").
 

Subsidence may trigger secondary geological disasters. The subsidence of a manganese mine in Xiangtan, Hunan led to a 12-meter drop in groundwater levels, causing ground subsidence over an area of 1.2 square kilometers. Using the Environmental Cost Internalization Model (ECIM), the total ecological restoration cost of this incident was estimated at 930 million yuan, which is 2.6 times the direct economic compensation (China Geological Environment Monitoring Institute "2021 Annual Mine Geological Environment Assessment"). More severe is the risk of tailings pond subsidence: in a certain lead-zinc mine in Yunnan, the cadmium content in the downstream soil of the tailings subsidence area exceeded the standard by 47 times, leading to a 3.2 times exceedance of cadmium content in local rice through the food chain ("Environmental Science Research", 2023, Issue 5). The restoration project is expected to last 30 years, with a total cost estimated at 2.8 billion yuan.
 

The "mineral rights replacement" experiment in Ordos City, Inner Mongolia has demonstrative significance. In the development of the Nalin River mining area, three companies affected by subsidence obtained mining rights for adjacent blocks through replacement, improving compensation efficiency by 60%. Specific operations include: after the government reclaims the subsided mineral rights, it allocates equivalent new blocks to the original mineral rights holders through negotiated transfer; the resource reserves of the new blocks must be assessed by a third party to reach 110% of the original mineral rights ("Interim Measures for the Management of Mineral Rights Replacement in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region"). The "parallel approval" mechanism in Western Australia is more systematic: the Department of Mineral Resources and the planning department review project applications simultaneously, exchanging mineral rights data in real-time through an information-sharing platform, compressing the approval cycle to 3 months. This mechanism reduced subsidence dispute cases in Western Australia by 42% from 2018 to 2022 (Western Australia Department of Mines "2022 Annual Report").
 

The "Digital Twin System for Mines" developed by China University of Geosciences (Wuhan) has achieved a technological breakthrough. This system integrates InSAR satellite remote sensing, 3D laser scanning, and geological modeling technology, allowing for dynamic simulation of subsidence impacts. In a tunnel project of the Sichuan-Tibet Railway, the system provided early warning of mineral body misalignment risks, optimizing the route design and saving 270 million yuan in renovation costs ("Journal of Rock Mechanics and Engineering", 2023, Issue 6). Blockchain technology reshapes the credit system: the mineral rights information storage platform built in Hunan Province puts data such as mineral rights registration and evaluation reports on the blockchain, using smart contracts to automatically verify data authenticity. This platform increased the detection rate of information tampering from 78% to 99.97%, and successfully traced a false evaluation report in a certain antimony mine subsidence compensation case ("Computer Engineering and Applications", 2023, Issue 12).
 

The Sichuan-Tibet Railway has innovatively implemented a "segmented assessment + rolling compensation" mechanism. The project divides the entire line into 78 assessment units, initiating compensation negotiations every time 5 kilometers of construction is completed, shortening the processing cycle by 40% compared to traditional models. The compensation standard uses a dynamically adjusted formula: Compensation Amount = Base Land Price × (1 + Regional Adjustment Coefficient) × Resource Adjustment Coefficient. An emergency compensation fund of 200 million yuan has also been established to ensure that mineral rights holders can receive 70% of the estimated compensation during disputes. This mechanism improved the efficiency of resolving subsidence disputes in the Yaan to Kangding section by 65% ("China Railway", 2023, Issue 8).
 

The transformation of the Ruhr Industrial Region in Germany provides a global model. After the closure of the Essen coal mine, its No. 12 shaft was transformed into a three-dimensional transportation hub: the shaft was rebuilt as an elevator passage connecting the underground parking lot, and the mined-out area was used to build a compressed air energy storage power station. After the transformation, land value increased eightfold, with annual visitors exceeding 2 million ("International Urban Planning", 2022, Issue 3). The Yangpu Riverside in Shanghai has drawn on this model, transforming the subsided coal terminal into an industrial heritage park, utilizing the original coal transport corridor to build an aerial walkway, driving an average annual increase of 15% in surrounding land prices ("Shanghai Urban Planning", 2023, Issue 2).