Land Development In China Research Articles

The Role of Villages and Townships in Informal Land Development in China: An Investigation on the City Fringe of Beijing

The past decades have witnessed a number of informal land developments on the urban fringe in China although many strict state regulations have been made to control this. The dual urban rural land system is widely believed to be one major determinant of informal developments in the existing literature. However, the important role of local villages and townships are often neglected. This paper aims to shed light on this by looking at the gated informal housing communities in Beijing as a case study. It investigates the role of villages and townships in informal land development and the conflicts of interest that arise with state regulations in the context of political decentralization. The results of analysis show that township governments have an ambivalent attitude or even give tacit approval to informal land development in villages since these informal developments actually bring economic benefits to local villagers and themselves. The situation seems to be worse as townships have poor fiscal capacity and a growing administrative responsibility for improvement of local development in the context of decentralization. Villages are keen to capture economic benefits from informal land development with help from private developers. As a result, a local, informal coalition between townships, villages, and private developers emerged at the grass roots level. This presents a major challenge to the state regulations designed for sustainable urban growth management.

Construction land expansion and cultivated land protection in urbanizing China: Insights from national land surveys, 1996–2006

The remarkable construction land development in urbanizing China has been rarely investigated within the context of the multi-track urbanization process and its relationship with farmland protection has remained vague because of the lack of accurate and reliable data. To fill these gaps, this research analyzed systematic data from the 1996 land survey and the land use change surveys that were conducted annually in the subsequent decade. Driven mainly by the widespread establishment and continuous expansion of economic development zones (EDZs), construction land in China expanded by 2.04 million hectares in 2001–2006, which was approximately twice of that in the previous half-decade. Cities have not grown faster than towns until recently. In rapidly urbanizing China, rural construction land did not shrink but expanded rapidly, especially in the western provinces with a decreasing rural population. Spatially, the eastern coast has maintained its leading position in the construction land distribution and expansion in China; however, the inland regions have contributed an increasing share of national land development. Land survey data did not support the prevailing view that closely connected farmland loss with construction land growth, but showed that only less than 20% of the lost farmland was converted to construction sites. Moreover, this farmland was occupied mostly by EDZs, followed by transportation and rural settlements, whereas the most frequently criticized city and town expansion contributed the least. In this sense, the real challenge of urbanization to farmland protection lies not in the necessary growth of urban areas, but in the irrational expansion of rural settlements that carry increasingly fewer people. Chinese land polices that aim to control construction land growth and prevent cultivated land loss were proved to be a double failure. The control–protection relationship is not simply “control for protection,” as claimed in official discourse; rather, farmland protection is also a slogan and excuse used by the government to restrain the excessive land expropriation in the urban fringe to avoid or mitigate farmland degradation, urban land waste, and social unrest. After reexamining the Chinese urbanization model dominated by the massive floating population and strict and rigid control over urban expansion, we call for more efforts to develop a trans-regional linkage between urban and rural construction land management, which may be a reasonable and effective means for sustainable land development in China.

Assessing the differences in net primary productivity between pre- and post-urban land development in China

Urban land development substantially alters the terrestrial carbon cycle, particularly the net primary productivity (NPP), from local to global scales. However, limited attempts have been undertaken to elucidate the differences in NPP between pre- and post-urban land development in China. In this paper, the terrestrial NPP after urbanization in China was assessed by using the Carnegie-Ames-Stanford approach (CASA), toward which a calibration was conducted for adapting this model on the fine-scale application. In addition, a method of neighborhood proxy was applied to acquire the NPP in the absence of urban land development, assuming that non-urban lands can represent their nearby urban lands before they were transformed. Our analyses indicate that urban land development had overall negative effects on terrestrial NPP. They reduced the NPP at an accelerating rate of 0.31×10−3PgCyear−1, approximately 5.88% of the annual reduction during the period of 2000–2006 in China. Furthermore, these effects of NPP variations exhibited obvious differences in the amounts and spatial distributions. However, the NPP showed a slight increase around some regions that experienced rapid urbanization, as well as the arid regions in northwest China. These were probably caused by the effects of Urban Heat Island (UHI) and Urban Rain Island (URI), an introduction of faster growing exotics, various resource augmentations and so on.

The impacts of mass transit on land development in China: The case of Beijing

Land development impacts of mass transit have long been studied in the developed economies. Yet relatively little is known by the outside world about the Chinese experience due to China's rather short history in the development of modern mass transit and land/property market. This paper attempts to fill the gap by presenting evidence from China, with a detailed case study of Beijing. Selecting three newly built suburban transit lines in Beijing, the study examined land development context and estimated hedonic housing price models to measure the proximity premiums associated with these three lines. The empirical evidence in Beijing, one of the first tier mass transit cities in China, shows that investments in mass transit can have significant and positive impacts on land development. Properties with transit proximity enjoy sizable price or value premiums. The study also confirms the international experience: transit impacts on land development are unlikely to occur automatically; they rely greatly on supportive regional and site conditions. Integrated planning and design for mass transit and land development are critical to expand and maximize the return of transit investments.

Housing, Taxation, and Urban Land Development in China

This paper provides an overview of land and housing market developments in modern China since 1949. Key milestones in China’s land allocation system are documented along with a description of the amazing transformation that has taken place. In particular, with the advent of transferable development rights and long-term land leases real estate markets have emerged and supported phenomenal urban development. In addition, the paper employs a standard dynamic model of urban land development and uses that model to analyze several current policy issues in China. Those issues include: improper pricing of land use rights, optimal development, agricultural land conversion, threats to development, development fees, and ad valorem taxes. In each policy case, the model is used to gain insight regarding both the timing of urban development and the optimal capital intensity of development. Model insights are used to inform the policy debates.

A game-theoretic approach to urban land development in China

The property rights approach to urban development has recently been proposed in the planning literature to explain how urban systems self-organize spatially and institutionally. The land-tenure system is one of the key factors affecting land use and thus urban development. It is not clear, however, how such a factor affects the process of urban development. This research aims to provide reasonable explanations as to how the land-tenure system in China in general affects urban development, by building game-theoretic models which include plans as a manifestation of informa- tion and property rights as a manifestation of land-use rights. Viewing regulated development as a collective good, the model is based on the prisoner's dilemma game, where the local government regulates and the developer makes development decisions. Preliminary results show that land rights in the transitional economy of China are of paramount importance and must be clearly specified in order to make the land development process efficient at reducing transaction costs.

Land Rights in Rural China: Facts, Fictions and Issues

China's rural economic reforms radically altered land tenure in rural China. With the granting of land use rights and residual income rights to farming households between 1979 and 1983, agriculture shifted from a collective-based to a familybased system. Land was not privatized, however. Ownership remained "collective", with local officials, typically at the village level, exercising a major influence over the allocation of land and the way households could use land. The initial land allocations to families were typically based on household size, household labour supply, or both. The central government's policy was that these allocations were supposed to be for 15 years. In some villages, land use contracts have been respected; in other villages, however, local leaders have periodically redistributed land among households and have intervened throughout the reform period to determine how farmers are able to use the land. The initial reforms triggered an unprecedented acceleration of agricultural growth in China. From 1979 to 1984, the gross value of agricultural output increased in real terms at an annual rate of 7.6 per cent, and grain production rose by 4.9 per cent annually.' Empirical studies attribute a significant part of this increase to enhanced incentives, as farmers were able to keep the output and

The Culture of Guanxi in a North China Village

The Culture of Guanxi in a North China Village