Capital Reconstruction and the Beginning of Modern Land System in Nationalist China

When the Nationalists came into power in 1927, they vowed to protect private real property rights. Nevertheless, this assurance was challenged by the need to obtain land for an ambitious planning project to reconstruct the war-torn city Nanjing into a modern capital of international standard. The project, involving mainly a new zoning plan and a new road system, had not only caused a profound spatial restructuring in Nanjing but also massive property dispossession. Thousands of houses were torn down by the authority to make ways for new roads and all forms of public works. This, inevitably, caused intense protest from affected residents. At a time when the imperial land system had already been abandoned, how did the Nationalist Government legitimize the requisition of land and property for the reconstruction of Nanjing?

The pressing needs to obtain land for capital reconstruction, and at the same time to channel people’s discontent to dispossession, had directly led to the formation of the modern land and property system. This paper traces the origin of the new system to Sun Yat-sen’s policy of “equalization of land rights,” which was inspired by the American political economist Henry George’s single tax system and unearned increment theory. It also discusses the role of an urban institution, the College of Land Economics (dizheng xueyuan), in the modernization of China’s land administration. In sum, this paper points out that the modernization efforts during the Nationalist era had rendered land and property in China governable.