Rural Collective Land Expropriation in China: Historical Evolution, Institutional Attributes, and Reform Pathways

Abstract

Land expropriation remains an important instrument for industrialization and urbanization in developing countries, but its extensive use often generates fiscal dependence, social conflict, and governance strain. This article argues that these outcomes are rooted in the political and economic logics embedded in land governance. Using China’s rural collective land expropriation as the principal case, it traces how a century of institutional change produced a system that serves both political consolidation and economic accumulation. This configuration has fostered path dependence on land-based revenue, expanded the scope of expropriation, distorted the distribution of land value gains, and marginalized affected farmers. The article further argues that reform requires coordinated adjustment in four dimensions: narrowing expropriation to genuinely public purposes, aligning it with the market entry of collectively owned commercial construction land, moving compensation toward a more market-relevant standard, and strengthening procedures around participation, disclosure, and review. Together, these reforms offer a more systematic path for transforming land expropriation from a development tool into a mechanism of sustainable governance.

1. Introduction

Land expropriation remains a key institutional instrument for industrialization, urbanization, and infrastructure development in many developing countries [1,2,3,4]. In countries such as South Africa, Sudan, and Bangladesh, state-led land conversion has played an important role in releasing the developmental value of land resources [5,6]. Yet, the extensive use of expropriation has also generated increasingly visible governance problems. Broad and elastic understandings of public purpose have often expanded the scope of compulsory acquisition and created room for rent-seeking [7]. In practice, phased expropriation carried out under broad pretexts such as economic development and urban growth has become a normalized trend [8]. This legal and discursive flexibility facilitates a distinctive model of “public capture of land value appreciation,” wherein permissive acquisition policies enable the state to convert land into public ownership and appropriate the resultant value increments for public finance [9]. Consequently, a self-reinforcing fiscal dependence on land conveyance emerges, perpetuating a vicious cycle in which developmental imperatives fuel reliance on land revenues, which in turn incentivize the overuse and expansion of expropriation powers. This model yields threefold unsustainable consequences: the expansion of expropriation scope distorts land markets while threatening food security [10]; the imbalanced distribution of land value increments, coupled with inequitable compensation mechanisms, erodes social trust and intensifies conflicts [11,12]; and the lack of stable integration pathways for farmers affected by expropriation exacerbates social inequality and instability [13]. Against this backdrop, land expropriation in developing countries presents a recurring institutional problem. It remains a necessary instrument for industrialization, urbanization, and infrastructure provision, yet it also generates governance risks through broad public-purpose claims, unequal distribution of land value gains, and unstable livelihood reconstruction for affected populations. In China, these tensions are intensified by the dual land ownership structure, under which rural collective land must in most cases be converted into state ownership before entering the urban construction land market. This article therefore asks two questions: how have the political and economic functions of rural collective land expropriation been formed and institutionalized in China, and how can reform reduce path dependence on land-based development and move the system toward more sustainable governance? Methodologically, the article adopts a qualitative, normative, and institutional-historical approach based on legal materials, policy documents, academic literature, and selected empirical and comparative sources, rather than on original fieldwork or newly constructed quantitative data.

These concerns are not merely theoretical. Existing empirical research on China shows that land expropriation has been closely tied to local fiscal and developmental incentives, especially under a land-conveyance structure in which governments acquire rural land at relatively low cost and transfer development rights at much higher values. Empirical and case-based studies also document recurring tensions in compensation and benefit distribution, including the mismatch between expropriation compensation and the subsequent appreciation of converted land, as well as the unequal allocation of development gains among governments, collectives, and affected farmers. In addition, published research has shown that land expropriation may generate grievance, protest, and long-term livelihood reconstruction pressures where compensation, participation, and post-expropriation incorporation remain inadequate. For this reason, the following analysis combines normative and institutional interpretation with selective empirical findings in order to ground the discussion of fiscal dependence, compensation, and social consequences more concretely in the Chinese case.

This article makes three contributions to the literature. First, it recenters rural collective land expropriation in China as a distinct institutional problem rather than treating it only as a subordinate issue within the broader narrative of land reform. Second, it develops a meso-level analytical framework that links four dimensions of expropriation—purpose, scope, compensation, and procedure—so as to connect debates that are often examined separately. Third, through a historical-institutional analysis of China’s century-long evolution and recent statutory reform, especially the 2019 revision of the Land Administration Law, the article explains how political consolidation and economic accumulation became mutually reinforcing within the expropriation system and why durable reform must proceed as a coordinated institutional project rather than as a series of isolated technical adjustments.

2. Literature Review

Scholarship on land expropriation in developing countries can be grouped into two main strands.

The first emphasizes procedural deficiency. This literature shows that the dilemma in the development of the land expropriation system lies in the inadequacy of the land expropriation procedures, which has led to the reality of administrative power dominating the practice of rural collective land expropriation and the virtualization of the private right of redress. From this perspective, scholars have conducted targeted reflections on the specific systems of land expropriation from various dimensions, including the lack of public interest identification procedures [14], the confusion of identification standards [15], the absence of public participation mechanisms [16], and the internal closure of the expropriation decision-making process [17]. They believe that land expropriation should ensure legality, procedural fairness, and equitable compensation, thereby guaranteeing the public’s sense of fairness in the process of expropriation [18]. The main contribution of this strand is to demonstrate that formal legality does not automatically generate practical legitimacy: when affected parties cannot effectively participate in, understand, or challenge expropriation decisions, even legally authorized takings are likely to be experienced as arbitrary and unjust.

The second strand focuses on distributive imbalance. At the vertical level, scholars argue that the core dilemma of the land expropriation system lies in the structural imbalance in benefit distribution, which manifests both in the vertical allocation of rights and interests between the state and individuals, as well as in the horizontal dimension of fairness among different groups. At the vertical allocation level, some scholars emphasize the need to reconstruct the mechanism for defining public interests, advocating for strengthening checks and balances on the expropriation process through judicial review to achieve a dynamic equilibrium between public needs and the protection of private property rights [19]. They also propose establishing a collaborative framework for public and private land interests, integrating national development strategies and individual rights protection into a unified governance logic [20]. Additionally, scholars have suggested that optimal compensation standards should guide the increase in expropriation compensation amounts [21]. In the horizontal dimension of fairness, research has revealed the lack of land rights protection for specific groups, such as rural women and landless farmers, advocating for addressing identity-based discrimination through the subdivision of property rights and innovation in compensation mechanisms [22]. Taken together, this literature shows that the legitimacy of expropriation depends not only on state authority, but also on whether the burdens and benefits of development are distributed in a justifiable way [23].

Current research nevertheless remains fragmented in three respects. First, the literature on developing countries is rich in country-specific studies but weaker at extracting shared institutional patterns across distinct property regimes. Second, targeted analysis of China’s rural collective land expropriation is still often subsumed under the broader narrative of land reform, which obscures its specific political-economic logic. Third, many reform proposals remain issue-specific because they do not connect public-purpose expansion, state discretion, compensation design, and livelihood reconstruction within a unified meso-level analytical framework. This article addresses that gap by using China as the principal case through which broader developing-country patterns can be identified, specified, and critically assessed.

Regarding the research subject, China presents a critical and paradigmatic case for examining the broader predicament of land-driven development in developing countries. Comparative evidence now makes it possible to summarize these tensions more explicitly. Country studies reveal several recurrent characteristics of development-oriented expropriation in developing countries. First, public purpose is often defined broadly or interpreted elastically so as to accommodate developmental projects; in Ethiopia, for example, public purpose for peasants and pastoralists has been framed in vague and expansive terms, while avenues to challenge expropriation remain weak [23]. Second, the state commonly retains strong discretionary power over land conversion, approval, pricing, and implementation; this is particularly evident in Vietnam, where state intervention in rural-urban land conversion remains pronounced [2,12]. Third, compensation frameworks in developing countries often remain inadequate in both substantive and procedural terms. Cross-national legal analysis of 50 countries/regions across Asia, Africa, and Latin America shows that most national compensation regimes still fall short of internationally recognized standards: 37 systems primarily rely on market value, 15 do not grant affected populations a right to negotiate compensation, and 16 do not require prior payment or payment within a specified timeframe [24]. This indicates that compensation frequently fails not only to reflect replacement cost, but also to provide sufficient procedural protection for affected landholders. Fourth, expropriation often generates displacement, protest, livelihood reconstruction pressures, and unequal distribution of developmental gains, as documented in India, Bangladesh, and Vietnam [6,25,26,27,28,29]. Taken together, these recurring tensions show that land expropriation in developing countries is not merely a technical means of land supply, but a governance arrangement shaped by the interaction of developmental goals, state power, compensation design, and social consequences.

China shares these broader tendencies, but its trajectory over recent decades has manifested them in a particularly intensive and institutionally distinctive form. This distinctiveness stems from China’s dual land ownership structure, under which urban land is owned by the state while rural land is collectively owned. Within this framework, collectively owned rural land cannot ordinarily enter the urban land market directly and must, in most cases, first be converted into state-owned land through expropriation [2]. As a result, the state-led practice of expropriating collectively owned land in rural and peri-urban areas—including farmland and homesteads—and converting it into state-owned urban land has been a central mechanism underpinning China’s rapid urbanization. This process has entrenched a path-dependent system characterized by state monopolization of land development rights, government control over the primary land market, and low-cost acquisition coupled with high-price conveyance, which has simultaneously fueled economic growth and generated social grievances and spatial inequalities [30]. Crucially, China is not merely a static example of these tensions. Rather, it functions as a live laboratory through its ongoing, top-down institutional experiments. Recent reforms aimed at narrowing the scope of expropriation, piloting the market entry of collective commercial construction land, and revising compensation mechanisms represent active attempts to move beyond this unsustainable trajectory. Among these reforms, the 2019 revision of the Land Administration Law is particularly important because it constitutes the latest and most systematic statutory expression of the new round of rural land reform. It has therefore become a central reference point in recent Chinese scholarship, especially in debates on the public-interest basis of expropriation, tract-development takings, compensation restructuring, and the front-loading of procedural protections. Therefore, systematic analysis of China’s experience can provide important insights into how the political and economic attributes of land expropriation interact, and into what kinds of structural adjustment may be required to achieve more sustainable land governance in developing countries.

Against these limitations, this article uses China as the principal case to examine how development-oriented land expropriation operates within a distinct dual-ownership structure while also illuminating broader tendencies in developing countries. The comparative discussion above suggests four recurrent institutional tensions in development-oriented expropriation: elastic public-purpose claims, strong state discretion over land conversion, compensation regimes that remain only partially protective, and continuing pressures of displacement and livelihood reconstruction. China does not represent all developing countries, nor are its legal solutions directly transferable to other contexts. Its analytical value lies instead in showing, in an intensified and institutionally distinctive form, how these tensions become path dependent and how reform across purpose, scope, compensation, and procedure may provide a more structured route toward sustainable land governance. On this basis, the article analyzes China’s historical evolution and reform trajectory not as a universal model, but as a paradigmatic case with broader implications for land governance debates in developing countries.

3. Materials and Methods

3.1. Research Design

This study is a qualitative, normative, and institutional-historical analysis of China’s rural collective land expropriation. It combines legal interpretation, historical–institutional analysis, and limited case-oriented comparison to explain how land expropriation has evolved as a state-led institutional arrangement in China and to explore the broader implications of this evolution for land governance in developing countries.

3.2. Analytical Framework

The analysis is structured around four interrelated dimensions of rural collective land expropriation: expropriation purpose, scope, compensation, and procedure. These dimensions are used to examine how public interest, developmental objectives, collective property rights, and procedural justice have been defined, balanced, and reconfigured across different historical stages. A historical–institutional perspective is applied to identify path dependence, critical reform junctures, and the legal consequences of major policy changes, including the 2019 revision of the Land Administration Law. Limited comparative reference to developing-country experiences is used not to establish direct equivalence, but to distinguish China-specific institutional features from broader tendencies in land governance.

For analytical purposes, this article distinguishes between public interest and economic interest. Public interest refers to a legally reviewable justification for compulsory acquisition, rather than a general claim that a project may contribute to economic growth or development in a broad sense. Economic interest refers to developmental, industrial, fiscal, or land-value interests associated with land conversion. Such interests may accompany expropriation, but they cannot by themselves justify the use of compulsory power. The analytical question is therefore not whether economic consequences exist, but under what legal conditions they remain subordinate to a genuine public purpose and satisfy the requirement of necessity.

3.3. Data Sources

The study draws on four types of documentary materials: (1) primary legal and policy sources, including the Constitution, the Land Administration Law and its revisions, implementing regulations, State Council and ministerial documents, and judicial interpretations; (2) specialized academic literature on land governance, rural institutions, political economy, and development studies; (3) published empirical studies, official statistics, and representative case reports supporting claims on fiscal dependence, compensation disparities, social conflict, and local outcomes; (4) comparative literature and legal materials from other developing countries to contextualize China within the Global South. No original fieldwork, interviews, surveys, or newly constructed datasets were used. These materials are employed not to construct a new dataset, but to provide targeted empirical support for several load-bearing claims of the article, especially those concerning local fiscal incentives, compensation gaps, and the social consequences of expropriation.

3.4. Analytical Procedure

The analysis proceeded in four steps. First, legal and policy documents were assembled chronologically to reconstruct the institutional evolution of rural collective land expropriation from the revolutionary period to the post-2019 reform stage. Second, these materials were coded and interpreted according to the four analytical dimensions identified above. Third, academic literature, official statistics, and published empirical findings were used to assess the practical consequences of institutional change, especially in relation to the public interest requirement, compensation standards, local fiscal incentives, and the social incorporation of farmers affected by expropriation. Fourth, the Chinese case was placed in conversation with broader developing-country debates through structured qualitative comparison of institutional objectives, property-rights arrangements, review mechanisms, and compensation logic. Cross-source triangulation was used to reduce overreliance on any single source type and to connect doctrinal interpretation with institutional practice.

3.5. Research Scope and Limitations

This article is a normative and institutional-historical study rather than a systematic empirical test. Its main contribution lies in conceptual clarification, institutional interpretation, and reform-oriented synthesis, not in causal identification through primary quantitative evidence. Accordingly, the conclusions are analytically rather than statistically generalizable. The comparative observations are selective and are intended to illuminate similarities and differences in institutional design among developing countries, not to suggest that foreign arrangements can be transplanted directly into China without regard to differences in ownership structures, administrative capacity, and judicial review mechanisms.

4. Normative Evolution of Rural Collective Land Expropriation in China

The historical evolution of rural collective land expropriation in China is important not merely as an institutional background, but as an analytical basis for understanding how the current system was formed and why it has proven path dependent. In historical-institutional terms, the Chinese case may be read as a sequence of critical junctures through which expropriation was gradually transformed from a mechanism of ownership reorganization into a central instrument of state-led development, and later into a more legally constrained but still development-oriented system. This trajectory is closely linked to China’s distinctive “state–collective” dual land ownership structure. Because urban land is state-owned while rural land is collectively owned, the conversion of rural land for urban construction has long depended, in most cases, on expropriation as the legal bridge between the two sectors. The result is not simply a succession of legal reforms, but the gradual consolidation of a land supply regime that simultaneously serves political governance and economic accumulation. The following stages therefore matter not only chronologically, but analytically: each marks a shift in how expropriation was justified, institutionalized, expanded, and later subjected to legal restraint.

4.1. 1921–1949: Land Confiscation System: As a Precondition for Expropriation of Land

The period from 1921 to 1949 had yet to establish land expropriation as a modern legal institution. Its importance lies in creating the political and ownership foundations for its later institutionalization. From its inception, the Communist Party of China (CPC) tied agrarian transformation to the elimination of class distinctions and the abolition of capitalist private ownership [30]. This orientation was progressively expressed in the Party’s agrarian revolution policy after the 7 August Conference in 1927, in the institutionalization of “land to the tiller”, and in the Jinggangshan Land Law (1928) and Xingguo Land Law (1929), which provided an early normative framework for confiscation and redistribution. Although wartime conditions after 1937 led to the suspension of large-scale landlord land confiscation, this did not alter the underlying political logic of restructuring land relations through centralized authority. That logic was reaffirmed in the China Land Law Outline (1947), which again called for the abolition of feudal and semi-feudal exploitative land systems and the implementation of land to the tiller. From a historical-institutional perspective, this period constituted a critical juncture because it made land reallocation an instrument of regime-building and state-led restructuring of property relations. The result was not yet a mature expropriation regime, but a path-dependent political and ownership framework that would shape the post-1949 institutionalization of land expropriation.

4.2. 1949–1978: Preliminary Exploration of Land Expropriation Before Reform and Opening-Up

The Communist Party of China’s (CPC) pre-reform exploration of land expropriation can be divided into two phases: the Land Reform Movement period and the post-Land Reform era preceding reform and opening-up.

The “expropriation” during the Land Reform Movement differed fundamentally from its modern legal definition. The Land Reform Law of the People’s Republic of China (hereinafter referred to as “the Land Reform Law”), promulgated in 1950, introduced, for the first time, at the legislative level the concepts of confiscation and expropriation of land. Article 3 of the Law explicitly stipulates: “Expropriation shall be applied to land in rural areas owned by ancestral halls, temples, monasteries, churches, schools, and organizations, as well as other public land.” This marks the inaugural appearance of the term “expropriation” in formal Chinese legal texts. However, although the provision employs the concept of expropriation, it does not specify the core elements of a modern expropriation regime, such as the conditions for its application or the standards for compensation. The reason lies in the fact that the exploration of “expropriation” at this stage was profoundly shaped by the imperatives of the Land Reform Movement. In essence, the overarching objective of the Land Reform Movement was to abolish the feudal landlord ownership of land and to establish private land ownership by peasants. Against this backdrop, the primary task of land policy was to serve the fundamental goal of ownership transformation. Consequently, even though the Land Reform Law formally distinguishes between the “confiscation” of landlords’ land and the “expropriation” of land belonging to other institutions and individuals, the two measures are functionally indistinguishable—both serving as instruments for the conversion of land ownership, rather than embodying the modern concept of expropriation, which is predicated on public interest and characterized by just compensation.

Following the conclusion of the Land Reform Movement, China’s land expropriation system gradually entered a new phase of institutional exploration [31]. In December 1953, the Government Administration Council promulgated the Measures for the Expropriation of Land for National Construction, which explicitly stipulated, for the first time, that the state could expropriate land to meet the needs of national construction. Although the term “requisition” was still employed in this legal instrument, its institutional essence had already closely approximated the modern concept of expropriation. It can thus be regarded as the first legal norm in the People’s Republic of China to substantively establish a land expropriation regime. Thereafter, the 1954 Constitution of the People’s Republic of China elevated land requisition to constitutional status (Article 13 of the 1954 Constitution: The State may, in the public interest, requisition, expropriate, or nationalize urban and rural land as well as other means of production in accordance with the conditions prescribed by law). In 1958, the Measures for the Expropriation of Land for National Construction (hereinafter referred to as “the Measures”) were revised, further refining the institutional framework of land expropriation. This revision introduced, for the first time, foundational principles such as land conservation and provided for complementary measures, including expropriation compensation.

From a historical–institutional perspective, this period marked the first major post-1949 juncture in the evolution of land expropriation. Its significance lay not in the emergence of a mature rights-based expropriation regime, but in the gradual redefinition of land taking from an instrument of revolutionary ownership transformation into an instrument of national construction and state planning. Once land acquisition was linked to the needs of national construction, given constitutional recognition in 1954, and further refined through the 1958 measures, the institutional conditions were in place for expropriation to become a regular channel of development-oriented land supply. In this sense, the years from 1949 to 1978 did not complete the modern expropriation regime, but they established the legal and governance foundation upon which the post-1978 expansion of land expropriation would later build.

4.3. 1978–2004: Rapid Development of Land Expropriation Post-Reform and Opening-Up

Following the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, the national economy entered a period of comprehensive recovery, leading to a substantial increase in demand for construction land and, consequently, a phase of rapid development for the land expropriation system. In response to the practical requirements of economic development, the state enacted and implemented the Regulations on the Expropriation of Land for National Construction (hereinafter referred to as “the Regulations”) in 1982. Compared with the Measures for the Expropriation of Land for National Construction of 1958, the Regulations represented a significant advancement in both institutional depth and normative breadth. Specifically, on the one hand, building upon the principle of land conservation already present in the earlier Measures, the Regulations elevated land conservation to the status of a fundamental national policy (Article 3 of the Regulations of the State on the Acquisition of Land for National Construction stipulates: “Economizing on land constitutes a fundamental national policy. All construction projects must adhere to the principle of economic rationality and enhance land utilization efficiency. Where wasteland is available for use, cultivated land shall not be occupied; where inferior land is available for use, fertile farmland shall not be occupied, and particularly not land of high economic productivity, such as vegetable plots, orchards, or high-yield fish ponds.”). On the other hand, the Regulations significantly expanded the scope of expropriation. In addition to land required for national construction projects, it included within the scope of expropriation land for enterprises constructing “social public utilities.” This provision can be seen as a continuation of the principle established in the State Council’s 1980 Provisional Regulations on Land Use for Sino-Foreign Joint Ventures, which mandated that land for Chinese–foreign joint ventures be uniformly requisitioned by the competent authorities for construction land. This marked the formal legal recognition of land expropriation for enterprise construction, embodying the fundamental characteristic of China’s land expropriation system as serving economic construction.

Subsequently, the 1986 Land Administration Law ended the prolonged absence of a legal framework in China’s land governance, establishing itself as the foundational statute in this domain. While the system at this stage still conflated “expropriation” with “requisition”, the promulgation and revisions of the Regulations and Land Administration Law crystallized a legal framework for land governance. This period marked substantial progress toward standardization and legalization, propelling land expropriation into a phase of accelerated institutional maturation.

4.4. 2004–2018: Narrowing Grounds for Expropriation and the Initiation of Land Expropriation Reform

The 2004 constitutional amendment marked a new stage in the development of China’s land expropriation system. By formally distinguishing expropriation from requisition in Article 10(3) of the Constitution and expressly requiring compensation, the amendment provided a clearer constitutional basis for subsequent statutory reform. The corresponding amendment to the Land Administration Law in 2004 brought the statutory terminology into line with the Constitution and clarified the formal distinction between expropriation and requisition. This reform was important not only at the level of legislative technique, but also because it marked the beginning of a more explicit rights-based and constitutionally framed discourse on land expropriation.

After 2004, the main direction of reform gradually shifted toward narrowing the scope of expropriation and strengthening the protection of farmers’ rights. The No. 1 Central Documents in 2006 and 2008, together with the subsequent reform agenda on rural land institutions, repeatedly emphasized the need to narrow expropriation scope, improve compensation, diversify resettlement measures, and standardize expropriation procedures. At this stage, however, the reform was driven mainly by policy documents and pilot exploration rather than by a comprehensive statutory restructuring. In other words, the period from 2004 to 2018 was characterized by constitutionalization in form and policy-driven adjustment in substance. This policy accumulation prepared the ground for the more systematic statutory reform that followed.

4.5. 2019–Present: Statutory Consolidation Through the Revised Land Administration Law

A further turning point came with the 2019 revision of the Land Administration Law. As the latest and most systematic statutory formulation of the new round of rural land reform, this amendment significantly reshaped the legal framework of land expropriation in China. Its importance lies not only in updating individual rules, but also in reorganizing the relationship among public interest, development needs, compensation, and procedural protection within a more coherent legal structure. For this reason, recent Chinese scholarship has generally treated the 2019 revision as the central legislative achievement of the post-2013 reform agenda and as an essential reference point for evaluating the current direction of land expropriation reform.

First, the revised law clarified the public-interest basis of expropriation and further narrowed the scope of takings. The most notable institutional innovation was the introduction of tract-development expropriation. Rather than permitting non-public development projects to justify expropriation in a general way, the law confined such expropriation to tract development organized by county-level or above local governments within the urban construction land area determined by the land-use master plan and subject to approval by the people’s government at or above the provincial level. According to the legislative explanation submitted to the National People’s Congress, this design was intended to confine tract-development expropriation to a limited spatial scope and to leave room outside that scope for the market entry of collectively owned commercial construction land. Subsequent standards on tract development further concretized this control logic by requiring tract-development schemes to be prepared on the basis of local economic and social development planning and territorial spatial planning, incorporated into the annual economic and social development plan, and submitted for provincial approval. In this sense, the 2019 reform did not eliminate development-oriented expropriation, but sought to restrain it through planning-based and internally reviewed legal controls.

Second, the revised law improved the compensation regime by emphasizing fair and reasonable compensation and replacing the former output-value multiplier model with area-based comprehensive land prices. This reform introduced stronger location-based and market-related factors into compensation calculation and was intended to increase compensation transparency within a given region. At the same time, the new model remained an administratively determined compensation mechanism, because the comprehensive land price continued to be formulated and published by provincial-level authorities rather than directly determined through open market valuation. It therefore moved the system closer to market logic, but did not transform compensation into full market-value compensation in the strict sense. The same amendment also strengthened housing protection and required the arrangement of social security expenses for farmers affected by expropriation, thereby expanding the structure of compensation and protection beyond the earlier land-output formula.

Third, the revised law reformed expropriation procedures by strengthening pre-approval requirements. Before applying for expropriation, the local people’s government must conduct a land status investigation and social stability risk assessment, publicly announce the scope, purpose, compensation standard, resettlement method, and social security arrangements, hear the views of the rural collective economic organization and other interested parties, organize a hearing when legally required, complete compensation registration, ensure that relevant funds are in place, and in principle conclude compensation and resettlement agreements before the application for expropriation is submitted. Compared with the earlier model of relatively closed internal approval, this reform shifted the procedure toward greater front-end investigation, disclosure, consultation, and negotiation. Even so, as some scholars note, the revised procedure still remains largely embedded in an administrative approval structure and does not fully resolve the problem of limited external review.

Viewed in this way, the post-2004 evolution of rural collective land expropriation in China was not a simple linear process of rights protection. Rather, it was a process in which development-oriented land supply continued to be preserved, while the legal system gradually imposed stronger constraints through public-interest formulation, compensation restructuring, and procedural front-loading.

Seen as a whole, this historical sequence reveals three broader institutional features. First, the earliest stage did not yet create a modern expropriation regime, but it established the political and ownership preconditions for later state control over land conversion. Second, from the 1950s through the reform era, expropriation was progressively embedded in a development-oriented system of national construction, industrialization, and urban expansion, which made it a central mechanism of land supply rather than an exceptional power used only in narrowly defined circumstances. Third, the post-2004 and especially post-2019 reforms did not displace this developmental function, but sought to discipline it by introducing stronger legal limits on public purpose, compensation, and procedure. The significance of this historical evolution therefore lies not simply in showing that the law changed over time, but in explaining how China’s land expropriation system became simultaneously development-enabling and conflict-generating, and why subsequent reform has taken the form of constrained restructuring rather than institutional replacement.

5. The Essential Nature of Rural Collective Land Expropriation in China

The foregoing historical evolution shows that rural collective land expropriation in China has not been shaped by a single institutional logic. Rather, it has developed through the continuing interaction between state governance objectives and development-oriented land supply. Against this background, two attributes are particularly salient: a political attribute and an economic attribute. Under the “state–collective” dual land ownership structure, the political attribute lies in the use of expropriation to reorganize land rights, maintain state governance, and preserve social order, whereas the economic attribute lies in the use of expropriation to convert collectively owned rural land into state-controlled construction land for industrialization, urban expansion, infrastructure provision, and fiscal accumulation. These two attributes do not exist in isolation. They overlap and interact within the same institutional framework: when governance and stability concerns become more prominent, expropriation tends to rely more heavily on administrative control and procedural centralization; when development and fiscal objectives become more prominent, the system places greater weight on land supply and limited market-oriented adjustment in compensation. The following analysis examines these two attributes in turn.

5.1. Political Attributes of Rural Collective Land Expropriation

First, the compulsory nature of rural collective land expropriation manifests its essential political attributes. As a legal means of depriving private property, rural collective land expropriation serves as a necessary mechanism through which political states reconcile private interests with public benefits within civil society [32]. This political attribute is manifested through land acquisition practices. In other words, rural collective land expropriation does not depend on the subjective will of affected landowners, reflecting instead the unilateral will of expropriating authorities to meet urban development needs. Thus, its political nature becomes evident as an administrative instrument for coordinating urban construction and economic development. Furthermore, judicial institutions leverage this compulsory characteristic to define rural collective land expropriation as a political act, maintaining that the land expropriation system constitutes institutional arrangements established through state political power.

Second, the developmental trajectory of rural collective land expropriation remains intrinsically linked to the policy orientations of the Communist Party of China (CPC). The Party’s policies have evolved into a guiding compass for land expropriation practices, materializing through normative instruments such as the annual “No. 1 Central Document” and statutory frameworks like the Land Administration Law. As of 2022, the Central No. 1 Document had consecutively prioritized “agriculture, rural areas, and farmers” for nineteen years, with its policy directives on rural land expropriation mechanisms serving as critical navigational markers for institutional evolution. For instance, the Opinions on Pilot Reforms of Rural Land Expropriation, Market Entry of Collective-Owned Commercial Construction Land, and Homestead Systems (hereinafter referred to as the Opinion), approved at the 7th Meeting of the Central Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening Reforms and the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau in December 2014, initiated the landmark “Three Land Reforms” and continues to shape contemporary land expropriation practices. Furthermore, the CPC’s policies steer land expropriation institutionalization through legal internalization. The legislative process exhibits inseparability from Party decisions, as legal codifications represent standardized embodiments of the Party’s land policy orientations. The Land Administration Law exemplifies this dynamic: its 1988 amendment incorporating constitutional revisions that removed prohibitions on land transactions directly reflected the CPC Central Committee’s prior constitutional amendment. Similarly, the Party’s foundational principle of “land to the tiller,” established since its founding, guided the historic land ownership reforms. Throughout the expropriation processes, the CPC’s commitment to “protecting farmers’ rights and controlling expropriation scales” manifests through comprehensive compensation mechanisms covering land compensation fees, resettlement subsidies, compensation for above-ground attachments, and young crop damages. These measures epitomize the Party’s “people-centered” governance philosophy in land policy. Notably, such policy imperatives attain operational validity through legislative enactment and revision, whereby legal frameworks have become both instrumental mechanisms and foundational safeguards for policy implementation.

Third, the dispute over rural collective land expropriation has risen to the level of a political issue. In addition to being closely related to party policy and other political factors, the political issue attribute of rural collective land expropriation disputes is also an important manifestation of the political attributes of rural collective land expropriation. As scholars say, “land disputes only cause social disorder on the surface, but if they are not effectively resolved for a long time, they will weaken the legitimacy of the government and cause more serious conflicts, which will result in local political instability.” [33] Land is central to farmers’ livelihoods because it directly affects their ability to secure basic subsistence. In this regard, some scholars have pointed out that the reason why the expropriation of collective land in rural areas is politically relevant is “because of the social instability that may be triggered by unfair compensation” [34]. Empirical evidence supports the proposition that land expropriation disputes have broader governance consequences. A spatio-temporal study of land expropriation conflicts in China from 2006 to 2016 shows that conflict intensity was concentrated in the south and southwest and declined only after 2013 [35]. Another recent empirical study notes that more than 65% of Chinese farmers’ petitions concern land issues and that 73.2% of those petitions are related to land expropriation. These findings indicate that rural land expropriation disputes are not isolated compensation controversies but recurrent governance conflicts with implications for rural stability and state legitimacy [36].

5.2. Economic Attributes of Rural Collective Land Expropriation

From a doctrinal perspective, the economic attribute discussed in this article does not mean that commercial profit can independently justify compulsory acquisition. Under the Constitution and the Land Administration Law, land expropriation must still be grounded in public interest. Rather, the economic attribute refers to the institutional function that rural collective land expropriation has long performed within China’s dual land ownership structure and Party-led development strategy: it converts collectively owned rural land into state-controlled construction land, reallocates land resources through state planning, and enables the state to organize land supply for industrialization, urbanization, infrastructure construction, and related development objectives. In this sense, the legal justification of expropriation remains public-interest-based, whereas its institutional operation has long carried a strong developmental-economic orientation.

This developmental-economic orientation can be observed in both policy and legal evolution. In the early years of the People’s Republic, the 1953 Measures for the Expropriation of Land for National Construction and the 1958 revised measures explicitly connected land acquisition with the needs of national construction. After reform and opening-up, the 1982 Regulations on the Expropriation of Land for National Construction and the 1986 Land Administration Law continued to preserve expropriation as the principal legal channel through which collectively owned rural land could be converted for state-led industrial, infrastructural, and urban development. In this respect, expropriation was not designed merely as a narrow emergency power, but as a core institutional mechanism for development-oriented land supply under state planning.

At the policy level, the evolution of the system also reflects a continuous effort not to eliminate this developmental function, but to discipline it. The No. 1 Central Documents of 2006 and 2008 called for narrowing the scope of expropriation, improving compensation, diversifying resettlement, and standardizing procedures. The 2013 Decision on Comprehensively Deepening Reform and the 2014 Opinions on rural reform further promoted the reform of rural land institutions while preserving the state’s capacity to organize land supply for economic and social development. The 2019 revision of the Land Administration Law continued this logic. It strengthened the public-interest requirement, compensation rules, and pre-approval procedural safeguards, yet it also retained tract-development expropriation within planned urban construction areas. As the legislative explanation made clear, the purpose was to restrain development-oriented expropriation through legal and planning controls, not to abolish it in a manner that would unduly disrupt economic and social development.

Taken together, this policy and institutional trajectory shows that the economic attribute of rural collective land expropriation in China is not a contingent by-product of local practice. It is structurally embedded in the way the Chinese land system has mediated between public ownership, state planning, and development-oriented land supply under Party leadership. Precisely for this reason, the key legal question is not whether economic consequences exist at all, but how the legal system can keep such developmental considerations subordinate to a genuine public purpose and subject them to clearer limits, compensation rules, and procedural constraints.

This structural embeddedness is also visible in the concrete role that rural collective land expropriation has consistently played in national economic development. During the planned economy period, it served as an instrument for achieving economic growth through national economic construction. Under the market economy system, land’s driving effect on the economy remains evident, as sufficiently demonstrated by the “land finance” phenomenon. Land has long transcended its basic function as an agricultural production medium, becoming intertwined with local real economies and serving as a tool for local governments to regulate economic activities and expand fiscal revenue. It can be said that land plays a pivotal role in China’s current economic growth and urban development model [37]. Taking tract development expropriation as an example, Article 45(5) of the new Land Administration Law establishes it as a fundamental scenario for land expropriation. However, due to the economic factors involved in tract development expropriation, two distinct academic viewpoints have emerged [38]. While pure public interest has always been regarded as the red line in land expropriation, we must question: Can land expropriation truly not coexist with economic development? Is there no legitimate space for economic interests in land expropriation? The answer is clearly negative, with tract development expropriation being a typical example. From a comparative legal perspective, United States takings jurisprudence—especially Berman v. Parker, Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff, and Kelo v. City of New London—shows that expropriation may satisfy the public-use requirement even when it forms part of a broader development plan that generates economic benefits. German constitutional law is more restrictive: under Article 14(3) of the Basic Law and the Federal Constitutional Court’s Boxberg judgment, expropriation benefiting a private entity is not categorically excluded, but it is permissible only when a sufficiently concrete public good exists and the statutory basis is clear and specific [39]. In reality, completely eliminating economic factors from land expropriation is neither practical nor necessary. This is because public interest and commercial interest essentially maintain an interactive relationship [40], jointly constituting the dual attributes of land expropriation. Overall, land expropriation and economic development maintain an interdependent relationship: land expropriation can drive national economic progress, while changes in national macroeconomic strategies conversely influence the direction of land expropriation development. This interaction genuinely reflects the economic attributes of the rural collective land expropriation system under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

6. Future Directions for China’s Rural Collective Land Expropriation

The fundamental purpose of reflecting on the normative evolution and essential attributes of China’s rural collective land expropriation system lies in providing reference support for its future development and adjusting its institutional trajectory. Accordingly, this section aims to reveal the dilemmas and developmental pathways of China’s expropriation system through four dimensions—expropriation purposes, scope, compensation, and procedures—while fully considering the unique characteristics of rural collective land expropriation in China.

6.1. Expropriation Purpose: Keeping Economic Considerations Legally Subordinate to Public Interest

Regardless of future reform, compulsory acquisition of rural collective land must remain grounded in public interest. In this article, public interest refers to a legally reviewable justification for compulsory acquisition, rather than every project that may contribute to economic growth, industrial upgrading, or fiscal expansion. By contrast, economic interest refers to the developmental, industrial, fiscal, or land-value interests associated with land conversion. Such interests may accompany an expropriation project, especially in cases of infrastructure-led development or tract development, but they cannot by themselves justify the use of compulsory power. The legal issue, therefore, is not whether economic factors can be completely excluded from land expropriation. Rather, the key question is whether such factors remain subordinate to a genuine public purpose and whether expropriation remains necessary after feasible market alternatives have been considered. On this basis, a clearer distinction should be drawn among three types of projects: core public-interest projects, mixed public-development projects, and purely commercial projects. The first may justify expropriation; the second requires stricter review of necessity, proportionality, planning conformity, and the availability of market alternatives; the third should, in principle, be addressed through market transactions rather than compulsory acquisition.

A limited comparative perspective may still be useful here, but only with caution. Different jurisdictions vary substantially in property-rights structures, judicial review, compensation regimes, and the legal intensity with which public purpose is scrutinized. Comparative reference therefore cannot serve as a direct model for Chinese institutional design. Its value is more modest: it shows that modern expropriation law does not always treat economic consequences as wholly irrelevant, but it does not follow that any development-oriented practice should be accepted as normatively justified in China. The relevant legal question remains whether compulsory acquisition is supported by a sufficiently clear public purpose and whether it remains necessary once feasible non-compulsory alternatives have been considered.

For this reason, the institutional task is not to recognize economic considerations merely because they exist in practice. It is to subject projects with mixed public and developmental features to more demanding legal review. In the Chinese context, this means that mixed public-development projects should be required to satisfy a written necessity assessment, planning-conformity review, and market-alternative review before expropriation is initiated. Where those conditions are not met, the existence of developmental or fiscal benefits cannot by itself justify the use of compulsory power. In this sense, comparative observation serves only as a boundary-setting reference, while the normative conclusion of this article rests on China’s own legal structure, the distinction between public interest and economic interest, and the requirement that economic considerations remain legally subordinate to a genuine public purpose.

6.2. Scope of Land Expropriation: Coordinating Rural Collective Land Expropriation with Market Entry of Collectively Owned Commercial Construction Land

The policy requirement to narrow the scope of land expropriation has been explicitly stipulated in Party policy documents. Currently, as the market entry system for collectively owned commercial construction land progresses vigorously, practical implementation reveals mutual constraints between market entry and rural collective land expropriation in terms of spatial scope. Coordinating their boundary relationship has become crucial for implementing the Party Central Committee’s policy to reduce expropriation scope.

As a new institutional arrangement, the market entry scope of collectively owned commercial construction land demonstrates significant regional variations due to differences in local economic development levels and cost–benefit considerations of institutional reforms. Current practices show three main approaches to defining market entry scope: First, the “outside-the-zone” theory restricts market entry to areas beyond urban construction land boundaries defined in land use planning. Second, the “within-the-zone” theory allows market entry expansion into urban construction land areas while complying with planning requirements [41]. Third, the “compromise theory” permits land circulation through expropriation-purchase of collective land under constitutional compliance (Article 10(3) of the Constitution) [42]. This paper argues that given China’s current reality of numerous urban villages, expanding the market entry scope into urban construction land areas would better implement the central policy of narrowing expropriation scope.

After the market-entry scope is defined, the sequencing between expropriation and market entry should be coordinated more clearly. Article 45 of the Land Administration Law requires both public interest and necessity. This means that expropriation should not be used where land demand can be satisfied through the market entry of collectively owned commercial construction land. In cases of tract development, local governments should first consider market-based land circulation. Expropriation should be used only when public purposes cannot be achieved through that route. This sequencing would give practical effect to the requirement of necessity and help narrow the scope of expropriation.

6.3. Expropriation Compensation: Balancing Market Price Harmonization with Gains Distribution from Market Entry

The standard of land expropriation compensation remains the most pressing concern for farmers. In the law of expropriation, whether compensation is fair and reasonable directly affects both the legitimacy of expropriation and the protection of farmers’ property rights. For this reason, the compensation standard for rural collective land expropriation should, in principle, be based on market value [43,44]. The traditional compensation method centered on agricultural output or original use can no longer fully satisfy the requirement of fair and reasonable compensation. From the perspective of expropriation law, compensation standards should primarily address the objective value loss caused by the taking of land and related property rights. Accordingly, the compensation standard should be gradually adjusted from the original-use model to a market-value model, so as to better reflect the actual value of the expropriated land. This is also consistent with the view in Chinese legal scholarship that land expropriation compensation should move toward a system in which market-price compensation is the general rule. At the same time, the determination of compensation standards should be clearly distinguished from the protection of long-term livelihood. The latter should mainly be realized through social security, housing security, employment support, and other resettlement measures, rather than being incorporated into the compensation standard itself.

The practical importance of this issue is also reflected in existing empirical studies. Research on land value distribution and land-development conflicts in China has repeatedly shown that one of the main sources of grievance is not expropriation as such, but the visible gap between the compensation received at the time of taking and the much higher value later realized through land development or market transfer. Earlier policy and local practice concerning the market entry of collectively owned commercial construction land further made this contrast more salient, because they revealed that the same or comparable land could generate substantially different returns depending on whether it entered development through expropriation or through market-oriented circulation. This does not mean that expropriation compensation should mechanically replicate all market gains, but it does show that compensation reform must respond to a real and repeatedly documented distributive tension rather than to a merely abstract doctrinal concern.

However, a market-value-oriented compensation principle does not mean that compensation mechanisms should be uniform across the country. Given China’s pronounced regional disparities in land value, development intensity, market maturity, and post-expropriation livelihood conditions, the compensation regime should distinguish between a nationally unified baseline of rights protection and regionally differentiated implementation mechanisms.

In the eastern coastal and peri-urban regions, where the appreciation potential and development value of land are relatively high, compensation may combine monetary payment with retained land, retained property, equity participation, or other benefit-sharing arrangements, so that affected rural collectives and farmers may continue to share in the value appreciation generated after development. In such regions, planning instruments such as floor area ratio incentives may also be used, where legally permissible, to improve the realization capacity of retained interests.

By contrast, in the central and western regions, where the market value and development value of retained land are often more limited, it would be inappropriate to mechanically replicate the eastern model. In these areas, the main objective should be to ensure that monetary compensation is effectively linked with social insurance, housing security, employment support, vocational training, and subsistence assistance, so that the protection of long-term livelihood does not depend on weak or uncertain land-development returns.

Accordingly, the appropriate reform path is not to differentiate the standard of fair compensation itself, but to differentiate the institutional means through which compensation and long-term protection are realized. A nationally unified market-value-oriented baseline should therefore be combined with flexible local implementation mechanisms calibrated to regional development conditions. Only in this way can the compensation system respond both to the requirement of equal property-rights protection and to the reality of uneven regional development in China.

6.4. Expropriation Procedures: Centering Affected Parties

Procedural reform should focus on making rural collective land expropriation more transparent, participatory, and reviewable. The current problem is no longer the complete absence of procedure, but the limited practical effectiveness of existing procedures. Although the revised Land Administration Law and its implementing regulations have introduced front-end investigation, public announcement, consultation, and compensation arrangements before approval, important weaknesses remain. In particular, participation is still vulnerable to formalization, and key decisions on public purpose and expropriation scope continue to be embedded mainly within an administrative approval structure.

Two improvements are especially necessary. First, a more standardized public-interest determination procedure should be established. Before an expropriation application is submitted, the local government should identify the legal basis of the claimed public purpose, explain the necessity of compulsory acquisition, and state why feasible market alternatives cannot reasonably satisfy the same objective. This would make the public-purpose requirement more concrete and more open to review. Second, existing consultation and hearing mechanisms should be strengthened. Public consultation should be accompanied by a written response requirement so that the main views expressed by affected parties and the corresponding handling measures are disclosed in a timely manner. Hearings should also be available for major disputed matters, including the determination of public purpose, the delimitation of expropriation scope, and significant resettlement arrangements, rather than being confined too narrowly to objections concerning compensation alone.

Procedural reform, in this sense, is not a secondary issue. It is the institutional means by which expropriation can become less closed, less discretionary, and more consistent with due process. A procedure-centered approach would therefore improve not only the protection of affected parties, but also the legal credibility of the expropriation system itself.

7. Conclusions

This article has argued that the historical evolution of China’s rural collective land expropriation system is best understood through the interaction of two institutional attributes. Politically, expropriation has functioned as a means of reorganizing land rights and sustaining state governance. Economically, it has served as a mechanism for supplying land to industrialization, urban expansion, and fiscal accumulation. Under China’s dual land ownership structure, these two attributes have become mutually reinforcing, producing a development-oriented expropriation model that simultaneously supports growth and generates tensions in public-purpose definition, benefit distribution, and the protection of affected farmers.

On this basis, the article suggests that reform must be approached as a connected institutional project rather than as a set of isolated technical adjustments. Narrowing the justification for expropriation to its genuinely public core, coordinating expropriation with the market entry of collectively owned commercial construction land, moving compensation toward a more market-relevant and rights-protective standard, and recentering procedures on participation, disclosure, and review are not separate reforms. They are interdependent mechanisms for reducing path dependence on land-based development and for constraining the use of compulsory power within a more balanced governance framework.

At the same time, the scope of these conclusions should be stated carefully. This study is a normative, textual, and institutional–historical analysis based on legal materials, policy documents, and selective comparative discussion; it is not a systematic empirical test based on original fieldwork, surveys, or econometric identification. Its conclusions are therefore analytically rather than statistically generalizable. Some findings are closely tied to China’s specific institutional conditions, especially the dual land ownership structure, the administrative organization of land conversion, and the current stage of reform in collective construction land. What may travel more broadly to other developing countries is not a ready-made model for transplantation, but a set of analytical propositions: development-oriented expropriation tends to be shaped by the interaction of public-purpose claims, state discretion, compensation design, and livelihood consequences, and durable reform requires these dimensions to be addressed together. In this sense, the Chinese case is most valuable not as empirical proof of a universal pattern, but as a historically dense and institutionally revealing case through which broader land-governance tensions can be clarified [7].