This article reviews China's land tenure system, which is featured with differential treatment of rural and urban citizens with respect to three types of land tenure: urban land tenure, arable land tenure and rural residential land tenure. With the urban residents fully participated in the...

The most notable, or at least the most noted, form of property evolution has been the transfer of exclusive rights from collectives to individuals and vice versa, such as the farm collectivization in Soviet Union and the establishment of the People's Communes in Mao's China and their reversals....

Chinese customs and law have traditionally prevented a land seller from conveying outright title to a buyer. The ancient custom of dian, which persisted until the 1949 Revolution, gave a land seller and his lineage an immutable option to buy back sold land at the original sale price. This...

During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, fixed-rent tenancy gradually replaced sharecropping as the dominant form of land tenancy in China. This paper posits that the shift in land tenancy was generated by the technological movement from annual cropping to multiple cropping. To test the hypothesis we...

We examine overarching themes in the contributions, including critiques of neo-liberalism, rural-urban linkages, the relevance of mixed methods and cross-disciplinary approaches, the need to engage social theory, and variation across space and time. At the same time, we provide an overview of...

The mainstream view that decollectivization significantly contributed to China's agricultural growth has recently been challenged by revisionists, who emphasize the positive effects of the socialist legacy, such as irrigation and mechanization. This study contributes to this debate by explicitly...

Although land law or “real property law” is but one of several branches of what scholars commonly call “economic law,” or laws that regulate everyday economic activity, its history has drawn, over the past several decades, an unusually large amount of attention from legal theorists,...

Urbanisation in China has long been held back by various restrictions on land and internal migration but has taken off since the 1990s, as these impediments started to be gradually relaxed. People have moved in large numbers to richer cities, where productivity is higher and has increased...

Lack of transfer rights for collectively-owned land has led to inefficient land use and rising urban-rural income inequality in China, which calls for property rights reform in the rural area. This paper studies the land titling experiment in Chengdu since 2008. Based on field surveys and...

This paper utilizes a natural experiment to examine the role of the protection of property rights in promoting investment. In order to explore a title-granting scheme in Shenzhen, China, I collect a sample of 83 listed SOE firms, with 32 of them holding about-to-be-entitled lands. Those...