Land Use and Rights Based Development in Rural China

An open seminar organised by the NCHR China Programme

Time: 21 September, 2006, 9:00-12.30
Venue: Håndverkeren Kurs- og Konferansesenter, Rosenkrantzgate 7
Participation is open for all, but please register your participation in the seminar and the lunch (included) to Maria Henoch (maria.henoch at nchr.uio.no, replacing “at” with @) by 18 September.

Land use issues are one of the major grounds of social unrest in today’s China. The majority of the many large protests in the rural areas as well as in the urban areas can be attributed, directly or indirectly to land disputes. For a large part of China’s 210 million agricultural households, the right to use the land is still the major prerequisite for providing a livelihood. In a rapidly urbanizing China, where over 40million farmers have been deprived of their land since the 1990s, the Chinese leadership’s ability to solve the issue of land tenure is therefore believed to be a key-factor for maintaining economic growth as well as social and political stability in the country.

A new draft of China’s much delayed new Property Rights Law will be deliberated at the 5th Session of the 10th National People’s Congress next March and especially the chapter concerning rural land rights has been widely discussed. Whereas many experts are advocating that giving peasants marketable ownership rights would fuel economic growth and narrow the income gap between rural and urban China, opponents point to the lack of social-security provisions for Chinese farmers and fear a scenario where many Chinese farmers could loose their only secure source of income if given the right to sell or mortgage their land.

At this seminar, four international experts from different disciplines have been invited to present their research projects which are focusing on land tenure and development in rural China from different angles.

Programme

9.00: Welcome and introduction
Koen Wellens, Researcher at the China Programme, Norwegian Centre for Human Rights

9.15: The Right to Land and Basic Services: Toward a Secured Livelihood in Rural China
Professor Li Xiaoyun, Director, Center for Integrated Agricultural Development, China Agricultural University

10.00: From Land Rights to Rural Economic Boom: Selective Findings of a 17-province Survey in 2005
Zhu Keliang, Attorney, Rural Development Institute, Beijing office

10.45: Coffee Break

11.05: Enclosing the Gendered Subject: Land Requisitioning, Women’s Property Rights and Agency in Urbanising China
Dr Sally Sargeson, Senior Lecturer, Contemporary China Centre, University of Nottingham

11.50: Land to the tiller - A Study of Land Use in a North China Village
Dr. Zhao Xudong, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, China Agricultural University

12.30-13.30: Lunch for all participants

Brief introduction to the invited speakers:

Professor Li Xiaoyun has been the Director of Center for Integrated Agricultural Development (CIAD) at China Agricultural University since its start up in 1989. CIAD is the first non-profit institution in China with integrated functions of rural development research, training and consultancy. In the past 14 years, CIAD has developed a participatory, development need-oriented and multi-disciplinary methodology package and built up a very good professional reputation in the field of rural development in China and abroad. Located on the campus of China Agricultural University CIAD has close contact and cooperation with university faculties. At the same time, the Centre has also built up a broad cooperation and partnership with many international development organizations, such as the World Bank, UNDP, WFP, UNICEF, German GTZ and CIDA.

Zhu Keliang is an attorney at the Rural Development Institute’s Beijing office from where he manages the institute’s program work in East Asia. After joining RDI in 2004, Keliang has accumulated substantial experience in conducting rural fieldwork, preparing research and policy memos, drafting laws and regulations, and designing programs and solutions for land reforms in China and other Eastern Asian countries such as Cambodia. His legal and policy expertise concerns land tenure, tenure security, and land-related institutions (e.g., land valuation, resettlement, land expropriation, land registration, and legal aid). At the seminar Zhu Keliang will present selected findings from RDI’s nationwide surveys in China in which nearly 2000 rural households in 17 major agricultural provinces were interviewed.

Dr. Sally Sargeson is a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests includes: Gender and property rights in rural China, Local governance in China and Public policy and collective goods provision in China. She is currently working on a research project on Gender dimensions of rural institutional change in globalising China', with the Centre for Agricultural and Rural Development, Zhejiang University.

Dr. Zhao Xudong wrote his PhD thesis on dispute resolution in rural China under the supervision of renowned anthropologist Professor Fei Xiaotong He is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology at China Agricultural University. His research interests include legal transformation and pattern of dispute resolution in rural China, the post-Maoist legal construction in China and the relation with modernity, especially the rural legal institution performance, for example, the one of rural community courts. At the seminar, Dr. Zhao will present the findings from his recent field work in Zhaoxian County and Anxin County in Hebei province.