Farmers' preferences regarding ownership and land tenure in post-Mao China: Unexpected evidence from eight counties

An unsubstantiated assumption of Western economic theory is that a land tenure system of exclusive private property rights is likely to induce efforts to be more productive on the part of the owner, not a system under which property rights are either poorly defined or, as with the case in post-Mao rural China, where land periodically gets redistributed among members of the village community. Our main finding, however, has revealed that, first, an overwhelming majority of the farmers do not hold a preference for private ownership and that close to two-thirds of the farmers surveyed do not want stable tenure for as long as 30 years, as has been recently demanded by the state. There are two reasons why farmers prefer common property rights over the policy of freezing land adjustments. First the passage of time during the Deng era has not eradicated the strong egalitarian spirit that underpins a preference for equal per capita land entitlements. Most importantly, farmers are aware that at those points in the family cycle when their family membership grows larger they will have inadequate land to farm should land adjustments be frozen for 30 years. Relatedly, farmers who want to search for off-farm employment outside their villages are only willing to give up land so that others may cultivate it when they are assured that there will be land available upon their return. Farmers largely prefer to re-adjust land on the margins from time to time to resolve the problem of household demographic change.