Characterizing the Land Shareholding Cooperative: A Case Study of Shanglin Village in Jiangsu, China

Yi Ren,Tao He,Yang Bian

doi:10.3390/su9071175

Abstract

The land tenure reform is the key to sustainable development in rural China. Without challenging the collective ownership of land, the land shareholding cooperative (LSC) system came into being and is being strongly endorsed by the authority: It re-collectivizes the contracted land from peasants and enables better regional planning and large-scale modern agricultural production. This paper studies a specific LSC (Shanglin LSC in the Sunan region of the Yangtze River Delta) based on our fieldwork. We found that the LSC system is a bottom-up institutional innovation towards sustainable land use in China. Both village cadres and ordinary peasants’ decision making contributes to its successful establishment and development. This shareholding system increases peasants’ income through dividends and employment opportunities. The concentrated land enables ecological farming. Acting as a quasi-government agency, the LSC also provides public service and social security to the village community. On the other hand, the LSCs’ success depends on certain prior conditions and the LSCs’ multiple missions may contradict each other from time to time, and lead to loss of efficiency. We argue that this approach to land tenure reform may not be universally applied to any regions in China.

Highlights

After more than thirty years of rapid economic growth, the Three Rural Issues, problems of peasantry, rural areas, and agriculture) in China still persist and are of major concern to the government [1]
The development trajectory of the land shareholding cooperative (LSC) shows that despite the prominence of incentives for individual rural household in their agricultural production and allocation of resources, village cadres are still responsible for many village-wide political activities and economic decisions
The LSC system is an institutional innovation in an era of transition and its establishment depends on certain prior conditions

Summary

Introduction

After more than thirty years of rapid economic growth, the Three Rural Issues (sannong wenti), problems of peasantry, rural areas, and agriculture) in China still persist and are of major concern to the government [1]. One of the most important factors in agricultural production, rural land stands as peasants’ greatest fundamental asset and remains their best guarantee of social security, yet in China’s current legal system, land remains the only factor of production without private ownership. Crucial for poverty reduction and social welfare improvement, the land tenure reform is the key for future sustainable development in rural China. The present household responsibility system, an agricultural production system adopted in the early 1980s, separates land-use rights from ownership rights. It allows rural households to contract and farm the land which is collectively owned by the village. Since every village member has equal claim on the land due to collective ownership, the norm for distributing land-use rights was based on the size of the household. With abundant rural population and limited land, the amount each household can contract was very small [2]

Methods

Results

Conclusion