ABSTRACT
State land tenure, widely presumed to be a defining feature of state socialism, was, in fact, never formally legalized during the Mao era. The stipulation that “all urban land belongs to the state” did not enter China’s Constitution until 1982 at the outset of the country’s market reforms. With the establishment of the land lease market in 1988, the state’s control over land tenure rights was further reinforced through its monopolistic authority over land acquisition and land circulation. The legalization of the state’s land tenure and the state-monopolized process of land commodification were followed by accelerated urban growth and skyrocketing urban land prices in the 1990s. The combination of state land tenure and a state-controlled land market gave rise to a new form of urban politics in China. The new politics includes a variety of state actors, such as large state-owned enterprises, military units, functional government agencies, and territorial governments all competing against one another to represent the state and exercise the state’s land rights in the expanding urban land market. The urban government gained the upper hand in this battle over land between state actors. By the late 1990s, land-dependent regimes of local accumulation organized by urban governments had taken shape in China’s rapidly growing cities.1
