Breaking the land monopoly: Can collective land reform alleviate the housing shortage in China's mega-cities?

Abstract

This paper engages with ongoing theoretical enquiries into the dynamism of housing shortage in many global cities. The research critically evaluates the recent Chinese practice of increasing the supply of the collectively owned land as a means to alleviate housing shortage in cities. Taking the four first-tier cities, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen as case studies, this paper analyzes their characteristics of land supply and housing price/rent change, and argues that increasing land supply through encouraging rental housing to be built upon collectively owned land did not contribute in any significant way the alleviation of housing shortage in China's megacities because of the manipulation and circumvention of the local governments that held strong vested interests in urban land monopoly. Findings of this research contribute new theoretical insights into the global dynamism of housing developments and call for special attention paid to the important effects of the land disposition regimes upon housing supply, the sophisticated central-local power relations internal to the state, and the spatiality of housing developments as well as their geographical contingency. The paper concludes with policy implications to facilitate the rental housing development on collectively owned land in Chinese cities.