文档介绍：JULY–AUGUST 2006 85
The Chinese Economy, vol. 39, no. 4, July–August 2006, pp. 85–102.
© 2006 . Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1097–1475 / 2006 $ + .
DOI -1475390405
BRYAN LOHMAR
Feeling for Stones But Not
Crossing the River
China’s Rural Land Tenure After Twenty
Years of Reform
When China decollectivized agriculture in the late 1970s and early 1980s, leaders
established a unique rural land-tenure system. Under the household production
responsibility system (HRS) that replaced the people’mune, individual plots
of land were contracted out to individual farm households and these households
were extended some, but not all rights to their contracted plots. Rights to land not
extended to farmers were held by collective entities above the household level.
Important among the rights not extended to households is the right to reallocate
land among village households, introducing a unique form of tenure insecurity at
the household level related directly to land-tenure policy. Although China estab-
lished a national Land Contracting Law in 1984 and a Land Management Law in
1986, and has amended these laws periodically since then, the exact bundle of
rights extended to farm households and the general mechanisms by which the
tenure system worked continue to vary from village to village.
While much of China’s rural economy has undergone significant transition away
from state control, and gradual reform has been essful over the last twenty
years, land-tenure practices stand out as an area where reforms have lagged. The
reasons why land-tenure policy has not kept up the pace of reform is not the focus
of this Rather we examine the implication of slow reform over land-tenure
policies on China’s rural development, the distribution of rents and land-based
Bryan Lohmar is an economist at the Economic Research Service, United States Depart-
ment of Agriculture, and adjunct professor at The Johns Hopkins Univers