China’s Changing Property Law Landscape

This chapter proceeds as follows. Section I recounts the history of Chinese land law from the founding of the People’s Republic up to the present including the constitutional and statutory emergence of private property and the framework of contemporary land law with a focus on the separation of land into urban and rural regimes. Section II explains the doctrinal framework for the annexation of farmland into growing cities and explores the financial, political, and social roles of the expropriation process within local governments and how disputes over land have become the greatest source of social conflict in China today. Section III presents and explains possible government responses to the development of an illegal market known as “small property rights” in which rural individuals and collectives ignore legal prohibitions and transfer or directly develop agricultural land for urban uses. Section IV reviews the prospects for rural land reform in China, addressing the three most pressing issues: the transfer of agricultural land, the expropriation of rural land, and the possibility of granting individual farm households and/or village collectives the legal right to develop and sell their real property for non-agricultural use. Section V concludes by re-visiting the theoretical and comparative issues raised by the changing landscape of Chinese property law