Why Do Farmers Support Stable Land Ownership? Marketization with Chinese Characteristics

Recent debates regarding marketization have focused on the relationship between the state and the market, while the grassroots and their everyday experiences have arguably been understudied. In this paper, we study marketization with the example of land marketization in China. Out of concern for the grassroots’ perspective, we investigate Chinese farmers’ perceptions with regard to stable land ownership of farmland, which are essential for land marketization in the backdrop of intensive land use conversion in China’s urban periphery. Approximately 1200 farmer households were interviewed around 12 cities in mainland China. An ordered probit regression analysis of the survey results reveals a series of factors that explain the individual farmers’ preference for stable land ownership. Among others, the decreasing size of farmer household and rural women’s insecure property rights in farmland are identified as two grassroots-based characteristics underpinning China’s ongoing transition to a more market-based farmland use institution. An important theoretical implication of our research is that the mainstream literature perhaps over-attributes China’s marketization to the state and the market, while under-evaluating the spontaneous support from bottom-up.