Form and function in China's urban land regime: The irrelevance of 'ownership'

摘要

China's urban land is typically said to be owned by the state, with private parties "merely" permitted to own long-term use rights of up to seventy years. This regime has been praised by those who believe it embodies socialist values and criticized by those who believe it will hamper growth. This article argues that both views are mistaken; that the features of the long-term use rights are not significantly different from those attaching to full private fee simple ownership, and that the main features of China's system are shared by other jurisdictions such as Hong Kong where the existence of a well functioning real estate market and satisfactory economic growth have never been doubted. In short, ownership is a sufficiently elastic concept that something called "state ownership" can easily accommodate any number of specific institutional arrangements that serve different functions. There is thus no substitute for a fine-grained analysis of the specific details of any particular land tenure regime before reaching conclusions about its economic effects.