ABSTRACT
Granting land ownership to the natural village will create a shock (yinqi zhendong de). It is not beneficial for social stability. Such a proposal by that bunch of scientists in the Academy of Social Sciences is unrealistic. Their research is too remote from reality. 2
When the people’s communes were dismantled in the mid-1980s, the party and some international observers trumpeted this as the ‘second land reform’. After more than three decades, the use right to rural land was once more returned to the tiller through lease, although land ownership remained in state and collective hands. This hybrid tenure system of privatized land use, on the basis of state and collective ownership, attracted much international attention. Neo-liberal economists cautioned that an economy based on state ownership of the means of production could not sustain long-term, stable growth. In their view, privatization is a conditio sine qua non for the market economy. This premise, enshrined in the ‘Washington Consensus’ became the guiding principle for many of the social engineering programmes of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the former Soviet Union and the East-bloc countries.3
