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.
Authors and Publishers
Zhang, XimingLi, XiaoWang, Hui
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MDPI AG, a publisher of open-access scientific journals, was spun off from the Molecular Diversity Preservation International organization. It was formally registered by Shu-Kun Lin and Dietrich Rordorf in May 2010 in Basel, Switzerland, and maintains editorial offices in China, Spain and Serbia. MDPI relies primarily on article processing charges to cover the costs of editorial quality control and production of articles. Over 280 universities and institutes have joined the MDPI Institutional Open Access Program; authors from these organizations pay reduced article processing charges.