Property rights and ruralurban land conversion

Abstract

Chapter Four examines the characteristics, determinants, and consequences of the property rights regime in rural to urban land conversion and assesses how rural property rights are disposed in the process. The property rights institution of rural land expropriation has been criticized for the ambiguity of rural property rights and the uneasy relationship between those with vested interests in rural property rights and the local state who aspires to their aggressive urbanization agenda. The discussions in this chapter assert that possible institutional changes to property rights arrangements for market logics in rural-urban land conversion have to face inherent limitations in a state-dominated property rights regime and a public land ownership system. The chapter also traces the evolution of China's rural land institution to contextualize how the conflicts and differences in the rural and urban land systems have been gradually accumulated and entrenched over time. The analysis in this chapter categorizes hybrid land expropriation compensations and critically reviews recent polices for monetary compensation, social security assurance, employment arrangement, rural collective retained land, and property rights shareholding. An empirical study of Hangzhou illustrates how the local government's campaign-style strategies ensure the success of rural land expropriation and investor recruitment in the property market but leave affected rural villagers with limited options. Over the years, Hangzhou has to regularly modify its rural land expropriation and compensation approaches to respond to the changing property rights contexts and align with compensation and resettlement directives of the central government.