ABSTRACT
Land is an area of policy-making that is of considerable concern to central and local authorities alike, making land policy a key arena in China where conflicting interests and policy agendas meet. This is particularly true in rural areas, where land is the main asset controlled by village committees and township governments. As Jean Oi has argued, in the collective period the “struggle of the harvest” was the main issue pitting farmers, the national government and local governments against each other (Oi 1989). In the reform period, this conflict over the fruits of the land has increasingly been superseded by the conflict over the land itself. Many of the key challenges that currently confront China, such as rapid urbanization and industrialization, food self-sufficiency, environmental degradation, or the balance of power between local and central government, crucially revolve around the issue of land rights and land use. In many rural areas land is the focal point of often intense conflict between farmers and local government. Farmers consider their use of land the one right that the government should not take away from them, accusing local cadres keen to appropriate agricultural or even residential plots for development of being estranged from the local people they are supposed to serve, or worse, of being self-serving, greedy, or even corrupt (Flower and Leonard 2002; Guo 2001; Zweig 2000).
