There has been growing debate about whether the changing demographic composition due to rural labor migration could potentially threaten China's agricultural productivity. The Chinese Government is promoting the “three rights separation system” to consolidate agricultural land through the land rental market with the explicit intention of fostering new agricultural management subjects and improving agricultural productivity. The present paper estimates the effect of rural labor migration on households' participation in land renting in and renting out activities based on a unique dataset from three rounds of nationally representative surveys. Our results indicate that rural labor migration has a significant negative effect on households renting in land and has a positive effect on households renting out land in rural China. Therefore, the government should adopt targeted policies to effectively encourage farmers with higher agricultural capacity to rent in land to alleviate the negative effect of rural migration on households renting in land. Supporting policies should guarantee that rural migrants enjoy the same welfare services as urban residents.

China's agricultural sector faces challenges because most farms are still small scale. China's policy is to encourage the consolidation of farms and promote farms that are larger in scale. A question that arises is: Are China's farms growing? The goal of the present paper is to determine whether large farms in China have emerged or if farms remain small. To meet this goal, we systematically document the trends in the operational sizes of China's farms and measure the determinants of changes in farm size. Using a nationally representative dataset, the study shows that in 2013 China's farming sector was still mostly characterized by small‐scale farms. However, at the same time, there is an emerging class of middle‐sized and larger‐sized farms. Most large farms are being run by households but there is a set of large farms that are company/cooperative‐run. Today, farmers on larger farms are younger and better educated than the average farmer.

Through two rounds of land contracting, rural households have been allocated a bundle of rights in land. We observe significant differences across villages in the amount of land to which villagers retain a claim and the institutional mechanisms governing the exchange of land rights. This study reveals the perpetuation and expansion of non-market mechanisms accruing to the benefit of village cadres and state officials and only limited emergence of market mechanisms in which households are primary beneficiaries. It identifies factors in economic, political and legal domains that incentivize and enable state officials and local cadres to capture returns from use of land. Relatedly, the study finds differences in conflict over property-rights regimes. Drawing on a pilot survey carried out by the authors in November of 2011 in Shaanxi and Jiangsu provinces (192 households in 24 villages), this paper seeks to explain heterogeneity and change in property-rights regimes over time and across space.

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