Empirical evidence from Hangzhou's urban land reform: Evolution, structure, constraints and prospects

Abstract

China's urban land reform is a gradualist process of transforming a planned land allocation system to an open land market system, while the ownership of the land remains under the control of the state. Through a series of reforms in institutions and policies, urban land markets have emerged rapidly. This study aims to analyse the evolution of urban land reform in Hangzhou, one of the spearhead cities in China's urban land reforms, to discuss its emerging structure of urban land market—its legal, institutional and financial frameworks, to identify the current urban land management characteristics and the principal constraints, and to propose relevant recommendations for urban land reform with emphasis on rural land rights and expropriation, interactions between central and local governments, and non-government sector's participation in urban land use management. Besides the policy implications, the study concludes that urban land reform in Hangzhou has been actively interacting with economic reforms in other fields in a variety of ways; that a monopolized supply mechanism of urban land is not necessarily a detriment to the development of a market system in the urban land economy; and that a government-led land use management model with little civil society and public participation is one of the most significant constraints in China's urban land reforms.