Property rights in China are moving in two different directions. In some villages, private rights are secure and to some degree marketable; in other villages, individual rights are increasingly restricted and suject to more regulation and reallocation. Administrative reallocation tends to promote...

In China, where collectives own farmland but farmers may hold "use rights" to the land, a case can be made for a property rights system with incomplete security of tenure but with strong transfer rights, which permit "specialization without regret"-- so farmers can recoup the value of an...