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Abstract
Based on trends in land development and real estate speculation in coastal south China, this paper assesses the contradictions in China's evolving land use regime from the perspective of regulation theory. During 1987–1997, from the first sale of land use rights to the national moratorium on arable land conversion, land use transformations exceeded state guidelines and were of ten implemented informally. Regulation theory, in its emphasis on the social embeddedness of economic activity, informs the contradictions between plan and practice by focusing analysis on local and regional characteristics of the evolving land use regime. The paper treats large-scale land use transformations as ‘spatial surfaces of regulatory regimes’ to ground the theoretical analysis.
