ABSTRACT
China’s household responsibility system (HRS) created a hybrid property rights system. While it decisively individualized residual income rights, land use, transfer and reallocation rights were divided between the individual land users and their villages that remained the legal custodians of land. 1 As Peter Ho points out in the Introduction to this volume, the result of the HRS reforms was a socially credible land tenure institution that apparently managed to successfully mediate between competing equity and productivity goals.
