ABSTRACT
Second, it is now commonly understood that the ‘reforms and opening up’ (gaige kaifang) of the Chinese economy near the end of the 1970s laid down the baseline for its subsequent dramatic growth and structural change. The reforms of the agricultural sector, essentially a spontaneous and bottom-up initiative, has resulted in improved productivity, a surplus rural labour force, and increased labour mobility. On the other hand, the opening up of selected regions and cities on the eastern coast has been conducive to the influx of foreign capital investment
and increased exports. China is now the largest recipient of foreign capital in the less developed world. With a total migrant population of 144.39 million in 2000, China is also a nation with possibly the largest number of migrant workers and largest labour market on earth.1 The phenomenal growth and structural changes of the Chinese economy, particularly the inflow of foreign capital and the emergence of a new labour market in town and country, have therefore been the subject of extensive scholarly documentation and competing interpretations.2 In contrast, much less has been written on China’s land. The relative shortage of documentation on land can be attributed in part at least to the striking imbalance existing in the empirical base. There have been by now five national population censuses that yielded voluminous data on China’s population and migration. There are also abundant data on the growth and structural change of foreign investment in China since the 1980s. By comparison, there is a dearth of systematic information on the pattern and process of land use change. Available land statistics had always been piecemeal and full of discrepancy because local cadres often underreported the land they actually had for the reasons of tax evasion and performance inflation. Even the central authorities in Beijing had no clue of how much land China actually had and how much land has changed its use. It was not until fairly recently that the first national land census was conducted to yield systematic, consistent, and relatively reliable land use data which became available after the year 2000. The recent release of the results of the first national land census, coupled with the promulgation of a series of important laws and regulations on land in recent years including the Land Management Law, Rural Land Contract Law, and Real Property Law, has provided a valuable historical moment for a systematic documentation of the pattern and process of China’s land and its change – a challenging task this book was intended to take.
