Land reform from below: Institutional change driven by confrontation and negotiation

ABSTRACT

China’s collective landownership was created by the revolutionary land reform in the early 1950s. Economic reforms since the early 1980s have dismantled the collective farming, but the collective landownership remains unchanged. Nonagricultural economies have manifested collective land rent in the dynamic urbanizing regions. The rural collective vigorously challenges the notion of collective land as a means of production that denies villagers’ claim of land rent. The contest for land rent through confrontation and negotiation with the urban state demonstrates a process of bottom-up informal institutional change. Without certainty, informal institutional change gives rise to substandard built environment that is unsustainable to the high-density urbanization. Formalization to legitimize the informal institutional change comes to minimize land rent dissipation so as to enhance welfare to both the urban state and rural collective. Land reform from below show an evolutionary route of institutional change to the collective land.

KEYWORDS:

• Informal institutional change
• collective land rights
• land reform
• governance
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research has been funded by the Stable Support Program Project of Shenzhen Municipal Science and Technology Innovation Committee, Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Commission [GXWD20201231165807007-20200812133137001], and the Funding of the National Natural Science Foundation of China [41971205].

Notes on contributors

Jieming Zhu

De Tong is an Associate Professor in the Laboratory for Urban Future, School of Urban Planning and Design, Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School. She focuses on urban regeneration, informal housing studies, and land use policy and governance. Her work has been published in Urban Studies, Progress in Urban Planning, Land Use Policy, and Cities.

De Tong

Jieming Zhu, FAcSS, teaches at Tongji University and is Chief Planner of the Shanghai Tongji Urban Planning and Design Institute. He is Chief Commissioner, Committee of New Urbanization and Urban-Rural Integrated Planning, China’s Society for Urban Studies. His research interests lie in institutional analysis of land rights that condition state-market relations and thus are crucial for sustainable urbanization in high-density low-income Asian cities in general and in transitional China in particular.