ABSTRACT
China has a unique land management system. Urban land is state owned and rural land is collectively owned by the villages, and only the state is given the power to convert rural land into urban land. After expropriating the rural land, the state transfers urban land through sales of land-use rights to developers for real estate development. Urban land-use regulations, including the required infrastructure contributions, are prescribed in the regulatory detailed plan, and specified in the transfer contract before tendering and without negotiations. Negotiable developer obligations also exist in limited cases. The southern metropolis of Shenzhen has recently used negotiable developer obligations to enable urban village redevelopment. With further land policy reform in China, it is expected that villages will be able to transfer the use rights of their rural construction land directly to developers for urban development without going through state selling of the use rights, and that negotiable developer obligations will have wider applications.
