The State as Both Regulator and Player: The Politics of Transfer of Development Rights in China

Abstract

The conventional argument that the introduction of transfer of development rights (TDR) shifts the power of land use regulation from the state to the market is increasingly under challenge. In China, the state's grip on land is reinforced through TDR, in which the state is both regulator and player. This state-dominated form of TDR affects China in three ways. First, competing aspirations of different scales of government complicate how TDR is implemented. Although the central state promotes TDR to maintain a national balance of arable land, some local states instrumentalize it to expand their landed basis of accumulation. Secondly, TDR tends to benefit the state but not its people. It may increase the fiscal income of the sending government and lessen the land shortage of the receiving government, but sometimes at the expense of the interests of land users without land ownership. Thirdly, given the state's deep involvement in TDR programs, the key for China's TDR to protect arable land lies not so much in clear property rights or a fully fledged market as in effective checks and balances regarding the state's powers over TDR. These three observations attest to the embeddedness of TDR in the local political economy.

Tax pressure, farmland management, and agricultural carbon abatement: Empirical evidence from tax-and-fees reform in rural China

“…However, in the process of rapid industrialization and urbanization, the preservation of arable land is increasingly regarded as a heavy political and financial burden by local governments. The problem of substandard compensation land for occupied arable land is widespread, which affects the quality of China's arable land to a certain extent (Zhong et al, 2017;Yang et al, 2018;Shao et al, 2020). Thus, on arable land with relatively worse quality, peasants will adopt intensive farming methods and invest more fertilizers, farm materials, and cultivating labor to increase agricultural output per unit area, which objectively exacerbates agricultural carbon emissions and is not conducive to the improvement of agricultural carbon performance.…”

Restructuring the State: Policy Transition of Construction Land Supply in Urban and Rural China

“…By establishing the urban land market and housing market [25], the logic of market takes root in the urbanisation within various accumulation regimes at subnational scales (e.g., provincial, municipal, county level). Chinese cities are witnessing an avalanche of complicated state space reorganisation when states themselves involve the emerging market as players and regulators [25,28].…”

Integrating IPAT and CLUMondo Models to Assess the Impact of Carbon Peak on Land Use

“…Scholars often use predictive models to simulate land use, with the goal of improving policy effectiveness [15]. Many studies have found that realizing the carbon peak policy will impact land use changes [16][17][18][19]; however, the link between the policy and those changes have not yet been identified.…”

“…Due to the complexity and uncertainty of land use, prediction models can help improve the accuracy of policy simulations [15]. Key land use research methods include cellular automata models, CLUE-S and regression analysis, and the CLUMondo land use type simulation model.…”

“…Existing studies have noted that the energy mix and energy efficiency are important factors affecting carbon emissions [13,14,45]. However, most previous studies on the carbon peak policy have focused on predicting when the results of the policy will be realized [15]. However, limitations in carbon emissions created by the carbon peak policy may lead to different peak results.…”