Who Owns China's Land? Policies, Property Rights and Deliberate Institutional Ambiguity

"In many cases land leases are issued by the administrative village, while the land belonged to the natural village in the past. It is like the ownership rights to land have been silently stolen from the natural village and vested in a level higher. [...] Yet, to date there are not many conflicts, because farmers are not well imbued with the idea of “property.” But problems are sure to arise in the future ..."This statement by a senior official within the Ministry of Agriculture aptly captures one of the most sensitive issues confronting the Chinese state: rural land ownership. Around the time that the Revised Land Administration Law came into effect on 1 January 1999, a stream of writings about rural land policies and management have been published by Western social scientists. These can be divided into categories of research on the loss of agricultural land and investigations into the relation between land tenure and use (in terms of cultivation, management and investment)