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.

No abstract

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.

Since the mid-1980s, the conversion of land to nonagricultural use in China has been arguably the most widespread in the country’s history, and in no region has the process been more intense than in China’s coastal provinces. Among the more important factors that have contributed to the conversion of land to nonagricultural use are rural-urban migration, rapid economic growth, and increased investments in roads. A study of Landsat photographs of one south Jiangsu region reveals that because rural settlements are scattered and use a large amount of land and because urbanization and industrialization have occurred in a decentralized fashion, the shift in land use has not been restricted to a few major cities but has been widely dispersed. The article concludes by arguing that while the conversion of land to nonagricultural use in the coastal provinces is bound to continue, its pace will be slower than in the recent past.

Since the early 1980s the conversion of land to non-agricultural use has been arguably the most widespread and intense in China's history. The recent increase in non-agricultural land use has been caused largely by the rapid expansion of urban settlements and the construction of roads and stand-alone industrial sites. Among the factors contributing to these changes, rural–urban migration, urbanization and accelerating development are among the most important. Analysis of land use data from three coastal provinces suggests that variations in the share of land occupied for non-agricultural use among county-level administrative units can be explained largely by differences in population density, urbanization and level of development. While the conversion of land to non-agricultural use is bound to continue in the coming decade, recent institutional changes make it likely that future changes, particularly the encroachment on cultivated land, will be more restricted and better controlled.