Abstract:
Abstract: This article takes as its starting point the recent spate of unrest in rural
China over government takings of rural, agricultural land. Though the popular and
scholarly press has paid a great deal of attention to this issue, few analyses have explored
in depth the institutional and legal framework surrounding it. This piece first attempts
such an exploration and concludes that the underlying issues have as much to do with
China's national land use regulatory system as they do with the behavior of local
governments that seize privately-farmed land for other uses. In fact, it is more productive
to see this as a regulatory takings issue than an eminent domain issue. With that analysis
in mind, the article proceeds to explain why commonly-presented proposals for solving
the rural takings problem are inadequate and then offers a novel solution based on the
regulatory takings analysis: granting individual farmers transferrable, monetizable land
development rights that will be separable from the land use rights that are the basis of the
current rural land ownership regime.
