Acceptance or resistance?—Explaining local reactions to land titling in three Chinese villages

ABSTRACT

The Chinese government’s recent scheme to issue land certificates to rural households was embraced by some villages but opposed by others. This is puzzling to economists and policymakers who propose that formal property rights are essential for investment, economic growth, and income generation. Why did some Chinese villages accept and others resist land titling? Based on my fieldwork in three Chinese villages, I argue that two important factors explain different local reactions to land titling – the impact of urbanization and the level of congruence between statutory and customary land tenure systems.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• urbanization
• land titling
• land tenure systems
• property rights

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Meina Cai, Michael Levien, Jean Oi, Sally Sargeson, Fubin Su and participants in the China–India Land Dispossession Workshop at Singapore Management University and the 2018 annual conference of the Association for Asian Studies for their valuable comments and suggestions. A debt of gratitude is owed to Joel Andreas and the three anonymous reviewers for their careful reviews and very helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 According to China’s 1982 Constitution, suburban and rural land is collectively owned unless state ownership has been proved. Every Chinese villager is allocated an average of 1.7 mu land. One mu equals one sixth of an acre.

2 Like India, China’s economic development has been centering on industrialization, infrastructure, special economic zones and real estate expansion. See Da Silva et al.’s article in this special collection for details on the Indian case.

3 Income from land sales has become the primary source of financing for local governments. ‘Between 2001 and 2012, land sale revenues as a component of local fund revenues in China increased from ¥129.6 billion to ¥2841.9 billion, an average YOY increase of 32.4 percent’ (Liu 2017, 56).

4 This is not to deny that in most cases peasants were under-compensated for land expropriation. See Zhan (2019) for more information on land expropriation, compensation, and peasant resistance.

5 See Liu (2014, 2–29) for more details on China’s Land Reform and Collectivization. As will be discussed later in the paper, today’s HRS is very different from the HRS in the early 1980s.

6 The household registration system was implemented in China in 1955. It identifies a person with a specific location and a status, either urban or rural, with rural hukou holders receiving considerably fewer social welfare benefits than urban hukou holders. For more details, see Cheng and Selden (1994), Knight and Song (1999), Whyte (2010), Andreas and Zhan (2016).

7 Villagers small groups were former production teams [生产队], the basic accounting and farm production units, in the Chinese people’s commune system from 1958 to 1984. In the administrative hierarchy, the team was the lowest level, the next higher levels being the production brigade [生产大队] and people’s commune [人民公社]. Typically production teams owned most of the land and were responsible for income distribution among team members. After the completion of decollectivization in 1984, villagers small groups replaced production teams, administrative villages replaced production brigades, and townships replaced people’s communes.

8 The impact of land dispossession on future members is similar to that of gender asset inequalities on women analyzed by Sally Sargeson (2012).

9 Ownership and contracting rights of land cannot be inherited, as the former belongs to the collective and the latter rural households.

10 Village economic associations in Village GD are equivalent of villagers small groups in Village FJ, but they mainly play economic management functions for the collective, such as accounting, resource exploration and utilization, assets control and management, and service provision. Because many village economic associations in Guangdong province have sizable collective assets, their members, in many cases, were turned into shareholders of village economic associations. The village economic associations are similar to village shareholding cooperatives. For more information on village shareholding cooperatives, see Su, Tao, and Wang (2013), and Sargeson et al.’s article in this special collection.

11 See Sargeson, Jiang, and Tomba’s article in this special collection for an excellent analysis of various compensation arrangements for land taking in China and their governance impacts of compensation on the lives of land-losers.

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Notes on contributors

Jin Zeng

Jin Zeng is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University. Her primary research interests are political economy of development, state-society relations, and rural land reform, with a focus on China. Her book, State-Led Privatization in China—The Politics of Economic Reform (Routledge, 2013), offers a comparative study of China’s privatization processes at the local level by examining how the complex interplay of the central leadership, grassroots officials, and state-owned enterprise managers and workers shaped the contour of privatization in China. She is currently working on a book project on land reform in rural China, focusing on land commercialization and land titling.