The Impact of Land Property Right on China’s Rural-Urban Migration

Abstract

After the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC), private ownership of land in rural areas was abolished, and land was collectively owned. However, the Chinese government issued several policies to protect the rights and interests of farmers. The most representative of these are the Household Responsibility System (HRS) and the Rural Land Contracting Law (RLCL). In this paper, we study the impact of land management systems on population migration under market mechanisms (ability to rent land) and government mechanisms (land expropriation). And we used the Probit model to conduct regression analysis to verify the impact of land management systems on population migration and used robustness tests to ensure the stability and validity of the data. The results show that allowing land to be rented out has a positive effect on population migration, while land acquisition by the government has a negative effect on population migration. It proves that the Three Rights Division (TRD) system proposed and implemented by Chairman Xi Jinping, which forms ownership, contracting, and management rights to protect the rights of agricultural business entities, helps reduce urban-rural income inequality, helps upgrade the industrial structure of urban industries, and maintains economic expansion and increases China's long-term development potential.