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Dialogue
ABSTRACT China has inherited a unique dual system of land tenure, in which urban land is essentially commercialized and rural land belongs to village communities guaranteeing access to all community members. The Chinese government has launched a major reform of this system, enabling the privatization of rural land use rights. Guus van Westen argues that while this reform may serve to remove institutional obstacles to agricultural modernization as well as urban development, it will also increase the risk of the rise of a landless rural proletariat. KEYWORDS land rights; governance; land grabbing; urbanization; agricultural modernization; privatization
Introduction
Land rights in China have become an arena for conflicting interests and struggle among various stakeholders. Media coverage is discouraged, but numerous reports of farmers protests indicate that unease is widespread. In 2007, the issue of a nail house in Chingqing managed to reach a rare iconic status worldwide thanks to stark pictures of a lone remaining house on a pinnacle in the midst of a huge construction pit. Most land problems, though, receive far less attention. In October 2008, China announced important changes in its tenure system for rural land. The stated reasons for reform were, first, concern for widening rural-urban income gaps in the wake of the countrys massive transformation from an overwhelmingly rural society to an urban-industrial giant, and second, the need to boost agricultural productivity (The Economist, 2008). While the reforms reflect Chinas impressive economic performance in recent decades, there are also reasons for concern about the socio-economic consequences for especially rural populations.
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Conclusion
The explosive growth of Chinas cities would arguably then, not assume such a massive scale in a unified tenure system ^ be it a free market model or a fully socialized system. Others, however, challenge this view. Peter Ho (2005), amongst others, sees Chinas land tenure system as a case of deliberate institutional ambiguity, enabling the state to respond to a variety of pressures. The vague definition of collective ownership in rural areas is an example. In this perspective a certain ambiguity in land tenure arrangements is an instrument of the state to reconcile competing and conflicting interests in a pragmatic way. As a result of this pragmatic response, tenure arrangements vary somewhat from one context (area) to another. Thus, land rights do not always constitute auniform and consistent arrangement throughout China (Lin and Ho, 2005). Property rights vary from region to region in response to differences in local conditions.
References
Ho, Peter (2005) Developmental Dilemmas: Land reform and institutional change in China, London: Routledge. Lin, George C.S. (2009) Developing China. Land, Politics and Social Conditions, London: Routledge. Lin, George C.S. and Samuel P.S. Ho (2005) The State, Land System, and Land Development Processes in Contemporary China, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95(2): 411^36. McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) (2009) Preparing for Chinas Urban Billion, Shanghai: McKinsey & Company. Payne, Geoffrey (2004) LandTenure and Property Rights, Amsterdam: Elsevier. The Economist (2008) Land Reform in China, 23 October. Wu, Fulong, Jiang Xu and Anthony Gar-On Yeh (2007) Urban Development in Post-reform China. State, Market and Space, London: Routledge. Yang, Hong (2004) Land conservation campaign in China: Integrated management, local participation and food supply option, Geoforum 35(4): 507^18.
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