Legal and institutional analysis of land expropriation in China

China has a bifurcated land system, with clear distinctions between urban and rural land-use rights. While state-owned land in urban areas has become commercially transferable, rural land cannot be transferred. This discrepancy has been exploited by property developers, investors, village heads, and local governments, which has caused widespread, large-scale malpractice in relation to expropriation of land. Thus, conflict over expropriation of land has been, and continues to be, a simmering hotpot of social unrest in China. It has been claimed that land disputes over expropriation is one of the most common ways of provoking grass-roots resistance and undermining public confidence in the government. The last two decades have witnessed exponential growth in China’s property and construction sectors, which has also brought about social tensions and innumerable complaints of inequitable treatment. Peasants are perceived to be weak and vulnerable to infringement of their property rights by the local government and property developers. Land expropriation (and the subsequent sale of land to property developers) has become a major source of lucrative revenues and financing for local governments, as peasants are drastically undercompensated for their expropriated land. More disturbingly, there is increasing media coverage of forced evictions and demolition cases involving violence, sometimes even resulting in death, which have highlighted underlying social tensions and raised public awareness and concern. All in all, most of these problems can be attributed to the dysfunctional bifurcated land tenure system. This chapter argues for the introduction of clearly defined property rights by way of legislation, in view of the mounting number of infringements of property rights via expropriations (formerly known in urban China as “demolition and reallocation”).