In the era of state socialism under Mao, land in China was treated as a means of production and was allocated administratively by the state free of charge. To accommodate the interests of foreign investors without violating the socialist principle of public ownership, the Chinese state has, since the 1980s, separated land use rights from land ownership and opened up a new market track for the conveyance of land use rights to commercial users. The result has been a distinct dual-track land system in the new political economy, characterized by significant asymmetry for arbitrage. Discrepancy between the state's intention and actual outcome has been a consequence of the internal diversity of power relations concerning land development. Our data analysis reveals that the loss of farmland to nonagricultural developments has slowed down in recent years, that the state's intention to increase land use efficiency has been severely compromised by the socialist legacy, and that illegal activities are pervasive. The Chinese socialist state is better seen as a dynamic, complex, heterogeneous, and self-conflictual institutional ensemble in and through which the forces and interests of different levels of the state are contested, negotiated, and mediated.

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China's spaces of urbanisation in the 1980s and early 1990s were occupied primarily by the interests of rural industrialisation and town development. Since the mid 1990s, China's urban spaces have been reproduced through a city-based and land-centred process of urbanisation in which large cities managed to reassert their leading positions in an increasingly competitive, globalising and urbanising economy. This study analyses changes in China's nonagricultural land in relation to the growth and structural changes of Chinese cities. A systematic analysis of three sets of data reveals a high intensity and great unevenness of non-agricultural land use in the country. China had 29.5 million hectares of non-agricultural land in 1996, which accounted for only 3 per cent of the national land mass. Over 80 per cent of the recent increase in non-agricultural land use was caused by the expansion of urban and rural settlements, industrialisation and numerous 'development zones'. A comparative analysis of land use data and Landsat images identifies two concurrent processes of urbanisation and non-agricultural land use change. Rapid urban sprawl of large cities, driven by the expansion of ring-roads and setting up of 'development zones', has contributed to the conversion of farmland into nonagricultural uses. At the same time, rural industrialisation and a housing boom have given rise to a dispersed pattern of non-agricultural land development all over the country. Given the pervasive influence of the forces of continuing urbanisation and globalisation, the state's attempt to protect China's dwindling farmland will not reverse the trend of increasing non-agricultural land use, but are likely to slow the pace of land conversion. Anecdotal evidence such as 'hollow villages' and idle land in numerous encircled 'development zones' suggests that there exist ways for China to use its non-agricultural land more efficiently and economically than hitherto.

This article examines the evolution of China's land system in the past two decades. Since the early 1980s, China has altered its land use arrangements and introduced new regulations to manage land use changes. In the process the administrative allocation of land to users has been transformed into a complex hierarchical system of primary and secondary markets for land use rights. The changes in China's land system were adopted primarily for two reasons: to develop land markets to allocate land more efficiently and to protect agricultural land. An analysis of available data suggests that the development of land markets is still at an early stage, that the conversion of land to non-agricultural use continues but at a slower pace, and that illegal land use is pervasive. The article concludes with an assessment of the new land system and a discussion of some likely future changes.

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In recent years, the phenomenon of global warming and its implications for the future of the human race have been intensively studied. In contrast, few quantitative studies have been attempted on the notable effects of past climatic changes upon human societies. This study explored the relationship between climatic change and war in China by comparing high-resolution paleoclimatic reconstructions with known war incidences in China in the last millennium. War frequencies showed a cyclic pattern that closely followed the global paleo-temperature changes. Strong and significant correlations were found between climatic change, war occurrence, harvest level, population size and dynastic transition. During cold phases, China suffered more often from frequent wars, population decline and dynastic changes. The quantitative analyses suggested that the reduction of thermal energy input during a cold phase would lower the land carrying capacity in the traditional agrarian society, and the population size, with significant accretions accrued in the previous warm phase, could not be sustained by the shrinking resource base. The stressed human-nature relationship generated a 'push force', leading to more frequent wars between states, regions and tribes, which could lead to the collapse of dynasties and collapses of human population size. War frequencies varied according to geographical locations (North, Central and South China) due to spatial variations in the physical environment and hence differential response to climatic change. Moreover, war occurrences demonstrated an obvious time lag after an episode of temperature fall, and the three geographical regions experienced different length of time lags. This research also shows that human population increases and collapses were correlated with the climatic phases and the social instabilities that were induced by climate changes during the last millennium. The findings proposed a new interpretation of human-nature relationship in the past, with implications for the impacts of anomalous global warming on future human conflicts.

Prevailing theories of uneven development see the growth of cities and regions as the spatial outcome of either the functioning of intrinsic agglomeration economies or the intrusion of global neoliberal market forces. Emphasis is placed on human resources and technology with land and capital usually taken for granted. This study of the growth of two leading Chinese metropolises-Beijing and Guangzhou-identifies a distinct strategy of urbanization financed by land commodification and actively pursued by Chinese municipal governments to contest with state power reshuffling in the era of neoliberalization. Contrary to popular notions, land commodification, rather than human capital or advanced technology, has played a role instrumental to the growth and transformation of China's metropolises. The popular practice of landed urbanization owes its political origins more to domestic state power reshuffling than to the intrusion of the global neoliberal agenda. State and market do not function as two diametrically opposing and self-contained entities but are characterized by their diverse and conflictual internal dynamics. Local states are found to have embraced and manipulated market forces for their political agenda. Theorization of global urbanism needs to go beyond the Euro-American comfort zone and to take seriously alternative practices and struggles found in the Global South.

This paper examines the new dynamism of China’s urbanization in which urbanism has been actively pursued by municipal governments as a strategy to negotiate and contest with the new power relations established by the post-reform regime in the era of neoliberalization. The research identifies the salient features of urbanization and urban land development since the 1990s, probes into their social and political origins, and evaluates the effects of Chinese urban revolutions from above on economic growth, regional inequality and social volatility. The data analysed include those gathered from the national level and from the Guangzhou metropolis in southern China. The interwoven processes of state power reshuffling, urban land development and municipal finance in contemporary China are believed to have constituted a significant and controversial case for critical evaluation of the political origins of urban revolutions in the age of global urbanism and their uneven socioeconomic consequences.