ABSTRACT
In recent years, China’s fast economic growth and urbanization have been accompanied by an increasing number of cases of infringement and deprivation of land rights of rural women. This chapter offers an in-depth overview of many of these legal cases to demonstrate the complex yet pervasive means by which rural Chinese women are being discriminatorily deprived of their land claims. As land claims can often be legally overruled even when protected by national law due to the allowance of the government to protect a villages’ right to self-governance, many women have lost their rights to contract and use rural land, to use their homestead, to receive land compensation funds, and to receive revenues from collectively owned economies. This chapter discusses six types of deprivation women commonly experience and explores the practical legal approaches that have been employed to successfully combat these deprivations and what the limitations of these methods are towards mitigating land rights claims for Chinese rural women in the future.
