This paper considers the issue of local "land finance" in the context of China's fast urban expansion. In an analysis of China s land requisition and public leasing system we argue that low-cost land acquisition is the fundamental cause of land-related distortions that have occurred during China s urbanization. Granting farmers the power to negotiate directly with land users during urban expansion, combined with coordinated land tax reforms to consolidate local tax bases is the key to China achieving both equity and land use efficiency in urban expansion. Copyright (c) 2008 The Authors.

Drawing on a survey of migrants in 12 cities across four major urbanising areas in China, this paper analyses rural migrants’ intention for permanent urban settlement. We focus on one sizeable but often overlooked group of rural migrants, that is, the self-employed. Our hypothesis is that the self-employed migrants tend to have stronger intention for permanent urban settlement since they are usually more ingrained in urban economy and society. The empirical evidence supports our hypothesis. Moreover, the social and economic choices made by the self-employed migrants are consistent with their expressed intentions: they are more likely to migrate with spouses and to live with their family members, more likely to have a plan for house purchase in cities; they are also more integrated into urban society in terms of learning local dialects and making friends with local permanent residents.

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China has witnessed unprecedented urbanization over the past decades. The rapid expansion of urban population has been dominantly contributed by the floating population from rural areas, of which the spatiotemporal patterns, driving forces, and multidimensional effects are scrutinized and evaluated in this study by using the latest national censuses conducted in 2000 and 2010. Analysis based on the county-level data comes to conclusions as follows. The spatial pattern of floating population has remained stable over the first decade of the new century. The top 1% cities with the largest floating population received 45.5% of all migrants in China. As the rapid development of mega-city regions, the coastal concentration areas of floating population tended to geographically united as a whole, whereas the spatial distribution of migrants within each region varied significantly. The migrant concentration area in the Yangtze River Delta was the largest and its expansion was also the most salient. However, the floating population has growingly moved into provincial capitals and other big cities in the inland regions and its gravity center has moved northward for around 110 km during the study period. The spatial pattern of floating population has been formed jointly by the state and market forces in transitional China and the impacts of state forces have been surpassed by those of market forces in the country as a whole. The attractiveness of coastal cities and counties to the floating population comes mainly from the nonagricultural employment opportunities and public services, reflecting that long-distance and long-term migrants have moved coastward not only to gain employment but also to enjoy city life. By contrast, in the central and western regions, places with a higher economic development level and at a higher administrative level are more attractive to floating populations, demonstrating that the state remains to play an important role in allocating economic resources and promoting regional development in inland China. As the main body of new urban residents, the floating LIU Tao et al.: Spatial patterns, driving forces, and urbanization effects of China's internal migration 237 population has contributed substantially to the elevation of the urbanization levels of migrant-sending and -receiving places, by 20.0% and 49.5% respectively. Compared with extensively investigated interprovincial migrants, intra-provincial migrants have higher intention and ability to permanently live in cities and thus might become the main force of China's urbanization in the coming decades. The internal migration has also reshaped China's urban system in terms of its hierarchical organization and spatial structure.