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A China Books Review Best China Book of 2023 Leta Hong Fincher's landmark book Leftover Women shone a light on the resurgence of gender inequality in 21st-century China. Ten years on, women in China continue to experience a dramatic rolling back of rights and gains in the increasingly patriarchal political climate of the Xi Jinping era. Leftover Women explores the structural discrimination against women and the broader problems with China's economy, politics, and development that lie behind it. This updated edition includes a new preface exploring developments in China in the 10 years since the book's original publication, including the new'three child policy', the growth in online feminist and LGBTQ activism and the state's increasingly repressive moves against dissent.

Addressing fundamental questions surrounding the critical changes affecting China's urban landscape, social organization and community governance, Property Rights and Urban Transformation in China thoroughly reviews the reform of property rights in changing political and economic conditions.Zhu Qian presents a comprehensive study highlighting the key theories and practices in urban and social development processes and provides guidance on how to understand both the parallels and differences that these reveal. Utilizing a cross-sectoral and multi-scalar examination of property rights in a property-led urban environment, the book illustrates increasingly complex interactions between state and non-state actors and examines the characteristics and consequences of rural-urban land conversion. It further analyses the impacts of resettled villagers'adaptation to urban society and the role of property rights in China's recent high-profile urban-rural integrated development.This insightful book will ensure a thorough grasp of the pertinent issues for scholars, researchers and practitioners within the fields of urban planning, human geography and land economics. It will also provide a more general systemic understanding for graduate students interested in the recent challenges and strategies in a property rights regime with strong state intervention.

How have the development and redevelopment of China's cities since the early 1950s transformed the settlements and fortunes of a fifth of the world's population? Rapid urbanization since the 1980s has changed the nation from a rural society to an urban one, marking it as one of the most significant transformations in history. As a country with severe land scarcity, land resources are intensively contested for during urbanization under the new regime of marketization. This book focuses on the impact of the institution of land rights that have transitioned from private ownership to socialist state ownership, and subsequently to public land leasing in the urban domain, and to collective ownership in rural areas. In the context of defining the relationship between the state and the market, the gradualist transition of land rights gives rise to intriguing processes of place-making. The elaboration of these processes will engage several revealing conceptual notions: land as a means of production, land commodification, ambiguous land rights, incomplete land rights, trading land use rights for land development rights, institutional uncertainty, land rent seeking and dissipating, local developmental state, danwei-enterprises, and more. The newly created landed interests are embedded intricately within the urban spatial structure. This book would especially be of interest to scholars interested in developmental economics, urban planning, geography, public policies, public management, and sociology, and also practitioners focusing on development and planning.

Originally published in 1995 this volume examines and analyzes the factors that have made the township-village enterprise (TVE) such a driver of growth in the Chinese economy in recent years. The book analyzes the background of the TVE and discusses regional differences in TVE efficiency as well as examining the apparent contradiction of the success of the TVE despite the lack of well-defined property rights. Issues of rural-rural and rural-urban migration phenomena are discussed and the differences discussed between the Chinese economy and those of other developing nations.

This book presents a hotly debated issue concerning the ownership of trust property in China. The book describes various conventional interpretations of Chinese Trust Law submitted by legal scholars and compares diverse approaches regarding the ownership of trust property provided by jurisdictions globally. The book does not directly answer the question “Who is the owner of trust property in China?” Instead, using a social capital perspective, it develops a more practical perspective to explain why Chinese trust business has grown rapidly even in lack of legal certainty regarding the location of ownership of trust property. The book also further predicts under what conditions is the time ripe to clarify the location of the ownership of trust property in China.By employing those sociological concepts often used to depict and analyze society, this book outlines the structure of the Chinese trust business and related social relations in different stages, i.e., the current rapid development stage, and the possible transitional stage in the near future. The focus is on how the social network structure affects the behavior of actors (such as the settlor, the trustee, and the beneficiaries, and/or their potential candidates) within the relevant section of Chinese society. The book provides readers with an intensive analysis of the impacts of historical, cultural, and social elements on the legislation and development of trust law in China. It will appeal both to lawyers interested in the Chinese trust business and to comparative law researchers and social scientists.

Small property houses provide living space to about eight million migrant workers, office space for start-ups, grassroots police stations and public schools; their contribution to the economic growth and urbanization of a city is immense. The interaction between the small property sector and the formal legal order has a long history and small property has become an established engine of social and legal change. Chinese Small Property presents vivid stories about how institutional entrepreneurs worked together to create an impersonal market outside of the formal legal system to support millions of transactions. Qiao uses an eleven-month fieldwork project in Shenzhen - China's first special economic zone that has grown to a mega city with over fifteen million people - to demonstrate this. A thorough and detailed investigation into small property rights in China, Chinese Small Property is an invaluable source of new information for students and scholars of the field.

This timely book reviews the changes in legal reform around the constitutional protection of private property in China since 1949. Using a comparative approach, it analyses the development of property theories and the various constitutionalisation models and practices of private property in representative countries including the United States, Canada, Germany, India and China. It also explores the interwoven social forces that have been driving the evolution of the constitutional protection of private property in China. By comparing China with the United States, Germany and India, the author reveals the unfairness, unjustness and insufficiency in China's application of three constitutional doctrines – public use, just compensation and due process or procedure. The book concludes by predicting future progress and suggests feasible measures for gradual reform that will be compatible with China's existing political system.

Neo-Socialist Property Rights: The Predicament of Housing Ownership in China examines how urban dwellers'practices of acquiring and defending property rights reshape state-property-family relationality in China. Ubiquitous housing ownership has emerged together with a pervasive yet particularized rights discourse and practice in the past two decades. Cheuk Yuet Ho considers them to be a condensation and vindication of the principles of family values and emergent “neo-socialist” governance. However, there are manifested and latent contradictions between rights as interests and rights as a moral principle. The book concludes that private property rights are at once enabling and disabling when understood in the light of both the rigorous pursuit of well-being in a market economy and the contestation by those who resist forced eviction or the infringement of owners'rights. In this book, Ho provides rarely available ethnographic record of the encounters between evictees and evictors engaged in housing demolition and approaches the topic of urban housing ownership from the investing perspective in contrast to most anthropologists'consumption-focus analysis. Neo-Socialist Property Rights links property rights practice to the broader human rights discourse as both a working hypothesis and a historical question.

The Chinese leadership anticipates that one hundred million people will move from rural areas to China's cities between 2014 and 2020-perhaps the greatest migration in human history. Property ownership and use rights, compensation for when rural land is taken for urban development, and who should receive the increment in value (betterment) are among the most contentious policy issues facing China today. Property rights in China vary from place to place, are often ambiguous, and are changing rapidly. In this remarkable book Tongji University professor Li Tian provides a comprehensive description of China's property rights, betterment, and compensation landscape. Tian reviews Western property rights, betterment and compensation theory and practice and offers her own synthesis and policy recommendations. This is a must-read book for land economists, urban planners, policy makers, and anyone interested in China's development.'- Richard LeGates, San Francisco State University, USLand value capture has long been a hotly debated topic, and it has influenced a wide variety of land ownership regimes. Property Rights, Land Values and Urban Development examines the role and impact of government intervention on land markets in China. It reveals that the state has taken selective advantage of the ambiguous definition of property rights in pursuit of the objective of rapid urban growth.Through detailed empirical analysis and case studies, the book develops approaches that are specifically designed to assess the extent of issues engendered by government activities at both macro and micro levels. It also presents a comprehensive and international review on betterment and compensation. Taking the land market of China as an example, it applies the theoretical framework of New Institutional Economics to analyze institutional arrangements at the national, municipal and project levels. It concludes with the implications of property rights reform to promote the sustainable development of land markets.The issues discussed in this book will be of particular interest to academics and researchers in land economics, Asian studies and development studies.

In the early years of the People's Republic, the Communist Party sought to transform gender relations. Yet those gains have been steadily eroded in China's post-socialist era.Contrary to the image presented by China's media, women in China have experienced a dramatic rollback of rights and gains relative to men.In Leftover Women, Leta Hong Fincher exposes shocking levels of structural discrimination against women, and the broader damage this has caused to China's economy, politics, and development.

Das chinesische Sachenrechtsgesetz von 2007 ist richtungweisend für die zukünftige Entwicklung der chinesischen Eigentumsordnung. Im Zuge seiner Entstehung trat der Widerspruch zwischen kommunistischer Staatsform und privatwirtschaftlichem Wirtschaftssystem offen zutage. Das Gesetz bot den chinesischen Rechtswissenschaftlern Gelegenheit, zu diesen verfassungsrechtlichen Fragen Stellung zu nehmen und sich mit eigenen Vorschlägen in die Gesetzgebung einzubringen. Die Arbeit analysiert die fachöffentlich geführte Diskussion und ihre Auswirkung auf die verabschiedete Regelung.

China's urban sprawl has led to serious social cleavages. Unclear land and property rights have resulted in an uneasy alliance between real estate companies and local authorities, with most willing to strike illegal deals over land. The results have been devastating. Farmers live in fear that the land they till today will be gone tomorrow, while urban citizens are regularly evicted from their homes to make way for new skyscrapers and highways. These shocking incidents underscore the urgency of the land question in China. The recent conviction of the Chinese Minister for Land Resources and the forced evictions that have led to the injury and death of ordinary Chinese citizens highlight the case for land reform. Against this backdrop, many scholars criticize China's lack of privatization and titling of property. This monograph, however, demonstrates that these critically depend on timing and place. Land titling is imperative for the wealthier regions, yet, may prove detrimental in areas with high poverty. The book argues that China's land reform can only succeed if the clarification of property rights is done with caution and ample regard for regional variations.

1997 saw a major reform in China which signaled the move away from its traditional economy, when Jiang Zemin called off the debate on public versus private ownership. However, none of the existing theories can fully explain the transformation of the property rights system during the post-Mao reforms. The first part of this volume will reconceptualize the property rights reform in post-Mao China to provide a political economy explanation of why the transformation of property rights in China appears piece-meal.The success of the post-Mao reforms can be attributed to China's ability to integrate the experience of a variety of transition models. The second part of the paper investigates two distinct transition models, in light of the lessons from current Vietnamese reform. It explores the dynamics of political actions and analyzes the political reasons for economic reform.