Property rights and urbanrural integrated development

Abstract

Chapter Six analyzes the role of property rights in China's recent high-profile urban-rural integrated development. It explains the rationale of the urban-rural integration strategy and elucidates the evolution and limits of rural land transfers in the market to help understand the unequal statuses of rural and urban property rights. The chapter postulates that one of the predicaments in urban-rural integrated growth is in clarifying the representatives of rural collective owned land and that there have been confusions about property rights versus administrative rights and public interests versus government interests. The practice of rural land expropriation in regions with better economic prospects has drawn policy and scholarly attention to demarcate fair compensation and over-compensation. The analysis in the chapter acknowledges that the recent marketization of rural business construction land has released the strong potential of rural construction land surplus in its contributive role in the urban-rural integrated development. However, rural business construction land ownership agents are diverse and cannot always be easily identified. Although one of the goals of the urban-rural integrated development is to achieve balanced urban and rural construction land consumption, structural barriers and policy limitations in rural land administration will have to be overcome. The chapter reviews the land voucher certificate system - one of the important initiatives for urban-rural integrated development. At the end, Hangzhou's urban-rural integrated planning and development and its four village development plans are portrayed to evaluate how the city's agendas have changed over time in responding to the state initiative of urban-rural integrated development.