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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2003

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.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© The China Quarterly, 2003

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Footnotes

This article is part of a project on rural change in the People's Republic of China at the UBC Centre for Chinese Research and was carried out with the aid of grants from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada, the Hong Kong Research Grant Council, and the University of Hong Kong. The authors are grateful to Qu Futian for his support, participants at a workshop in Nanjing in October 2000 who helped clarify many of the issues discussed in this paper, Edgar Wickberg for helpful comments, and Chen Jianglong, Chen Haiqiu and Feng Shuyi for research assistance.