Emerging Land Markets in Rural and Urban China: Policies and Practices

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.

Securing property rights in transition: Lessons from implementation of China's rural land contracting law

“…Such acquisition provided considerable advantages by giving owners the ability to participate in the secondary market, use the land as mortgage, and rent it to others. It has led to a rapidly growing land market: Between 1993 and 1998 the amount transacted annually increased from about 11,000 to almost 1.1 million ha and the amount of land mortgaged rose from about 1,000 to 884,000 ha (Ho and Lin 2003).…”

Uneven land reform and urban sprawl in China: the case of Beijing

“…The first group focuses on institutional and political forces behind China's land reform. For example, a systematic study by Ho and Lin (2003) investigates the evolution of land use system in China, from socialist era to current market economy. Deng (2003a,c) explored the role of public land leasing in mitigating the uncertainty from a non-democratic state and its beneficial impact on local public finance.…”

Deepening Reform for China's Long-term Growth and Development

“…It is alleged that the policy of allocating one piece of residential land for every rural household, but disallowing trading beyond the village, helps secure farmers' housing rights in an egalitarian way while at the same time protecting the country's limited arable land resources. Given the sheer size of rural residential land in China and the rural house-building craze in the reform era, both the Government and academia have continually expressed worries that rural residential land and its expansion 'may have contributed greatly to the loss of farmland in China' (Ho and Lin 2003). Since village housing accounted for about 5-6 per cent of the total area forfeited and the area lost to new housing was greatest in the central eastern provinces-traditionally a highly productive agricultural region (Sargeson 2002; Ash and Edmonds 1998)-these worries seem reasonable.…”