China has selected four pilot locations for testing large-scale land-use operations. They are Shunyi in Beijing, Nanhai in Guangdong, Pingdu in Shandong, and Wuxi in Jiangsu. Each place is employing a different method, and each has its own merits. We hope these experiments will succeed, but we also allow them to fail, since failure is the mother of success. Any failure has tried out a certain path and found that it leads nowhere, thereby saving others the trouble of taking that roundabout course. Last year, Nanhai reported new results in its attempt to carry out large-scale operations based on cooperative shareholding arrangements. Preliminary results indicate that this path might lead somewhere. Since it touches upon what would be major transformations in how land is operated, as well as ways to protect the rights and interests of farmers, further experiments and work on all aspects must be done. In the following, I just want to point out some theoretical issues and some ways we might go about understanding these things.