ABSTRACT
It is a puzzle that China has both maintained its socialist commitment to public land ownership and created individual land rights which eliminated famine in rural China and ushered in the biggest urban real estate market in the world. To make it even more puzzling, all these were done without legal authorisation at the beginning and were driven by farmers, entrepreneurs, and local officials on the ground. Chinese law eventually catches up with and sanctions practices that have proven effective, but has never been able to regulate or ossify the dynamic and ever-changing practices. That is why we see the coexistence of the socialist public land ownership, the civil law principle of numerus clausus, and the common law practices of bottom-up, continuous reconfiguration of the bundle of sticks. They are not always in harmony with each other. Instead, they are in constant conflict with each by nature, creating frictions and bumps on China’s road to economic and social development. In combination, China’s hybrid system has managed to get by, striking a balance between development and stability.
