ABSTRACT
Despite rapid industrialization and urbanization of the Chinese economy in recent decades, the utilization and distribution of agricultural land remain critical issues that have greatly concerned top Chinese leaders and also the general population in their pursuit of sustained economic growth and social stability.1 This is easily understandable given the fact that nearly two-thirds of China’s land resources and more than half of its population are still preoccupied with various agricultural activities.2 The persistent importance of agricultural land use does not mean that its changes are not as rapid and phenomenal as its industrial and urban counterpart. On the contrary, the utilization of China’s agricultural land has over the past several decades experienced some staggering changes that are arguably more pronounced, extensive, and invariably earlier than what has happened in other economic sectors.3 Moreover, changes in agricultural land use have been so dramatic, their influence so widely felt, and their pattern and processes so complex and elusive that they warrant a special investigation however partial and incomplete it might be.4 A scrutiny of the re-utilization of agricultural land may also help understand how changes in land use have been shaped by a fabric of political and social forces such as the strategic concern over food security, the socialist ideology of ownership transformation, peasants’ interests in tenure security and equitable land entitlement, and the state’s imperative in primitive capital accumulation.
