《38 Who own#39;s china#39;s land - ho》.pdf

Who Owns China’s Land? Policies, Property Rights and Deliberate Institutional Ambiguity* Peter Ho In many cases land leases are issued by the administrative village, while the land belonged to the natural village in the past. It is like the ownership rights to land have been silently stolen from the natural village and vested in a level higher. […] Yet, to date there are not many conflicts, because farmers are not well imbued with the idea of “property.” But problems are sure to arise in the future …1 This statement by a senior official within the Ministry of Agriculture aptly captures one of the most sensitive issues confronting the Chinese state: rural land ownership. Around the time that the Revised Land Administration Law came into effect on 1 January 1999, a stream of writings about rural land policies and management have been published by Western social scientists. These can be divided into categories of research on the loss of agricultural land2 and investigations into the relation between land tenure and use (in terms of cultivation, manage- ment and investment).3 The latter is an extension of the scholarly studies following the introduction of the Household Contract Responsibility System for rural land lease in the early 1980s. Initially the government allowed for a lease *I would like to thank Eduard B. Vermeer, Mark Selden, Jeroen de Kloet, Zhao Heng and the land rights jurist Ellen-Roos Kambel for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article, together with Shi Wenzheng, Liu Jinghai, Buhe Chaolu, Lai Cunli and Li Sheng for their unlimited support and advice during the fieldwork. I take full responsibility for the opinions expressed and all possible errors. This research was funded by the European Union-Chi