In the era of state socialism under Mao, land in China was treated as a means of production and was allocated administratively by the state free of charge. To accommodate the interests of foreign investors without violating the socialist principle of public ownership, the Chinese state has, since the 1980s, separated land use rights from land ownership and opened up a new market track for the conveyance of land use rights to commercial users. The result has been a distinct dual-track land system in the new political economy, characterized by significant asymmetry for arbitrage. Discrepancy between the state's intention and actual outcome has been a consequence of the internal diversity of power relations concerning land development. Our data analysis reveals that the loss of farmland to nonagricultural developments has slowed down in recent years, that the state's intention to increase land use efficiency has been severely compromised by the socialist legacy, and that illegal activities are pervasive. The Chinese socialist state is better seen as a dynamic, complex, heterogeneous, and self-conflictual institutional ensemble in and through which the forces and interests of different levels of the state are contested, negotiated, and mediated.

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China's spaces of urbanisation in the 1980s and early 1990s were occupied primarily by the interests of rural industrialisation and town development. Since the mid 1990s, China's urban spaces have been reproduced through a city-based and land-centred process of urbanisation in which large cities managed to reassert their leading positions in an increasingly competitive, globalising and urbanising economy. This study analyses changes in China's nonagricultural land in relation to the growth and structural changes of Chinese cities. A systematic analysis of three sets of data reveals a high intensity and great unevenness of non-agricultural land use in the country. China had 29.5 million hectares of non-agricultural land in 1996, which accounted for only 3 per cent of the national land mass. Over 80 per cent of the recent increase in non-agricultural land use was caused by the expansion of urban and rural settlements, industrialisation and numerous 'development zones'. A comparative analysis of land use data and Landsat images identifies two concurrent processes of urbanisation and non-agricultural land use change. Rapid urban sprawl of large cities, driven by the expansion of ring-roads and setting up of 'development zones', has contributed to the conversion of farmland into nonagricultural uses. At the same time, rural industrialisation and a housing boom have given rise to a dispersed pattern of non-agricultural land development all over the country. Given the pervasive influence of the forces of continuing urbanisation and globalisation, the state's attempt to protect China's dwindling farmland will not reverse the trend of increasing non-agricultural land use, but are likely to slow the pace of land conversion. Anecdotal evidence such as 'hollow villages' and idle land in numerous encircled 'development zones' suggests that there exist ways for China to use its non-agricultural land more efficiently and economically than hitherto.

This article examines the evolution of China's land system in the past two decades. Since the early 1980s, China has altered its land use arrangements and introduced new regulations to manage land use changes. In the process the administrative allocation of land to users has been transformed into a complex hierarchical system of primary and secondary markets for land use rights. The changes in China's land system were adopted primarily for two reasons: to develop land markets to allocate land more efficiently and to protect agricultural land. An analysis of available data suggests that the development of land markets is still at an early stage, that the conversion of land to non-agricultural use continues but at a slower pace, and that illegal land use is pervasive. The article concludes with an assessment of the new land system and a discussion of some likely future changes.

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