The Social Logic Of Land Property Right

In order to meet the requirements of land space in urban development andexpansion as well as advancing suburban farmers’ urbanization, urban and ruralconnecting areas and some villages are rapidly involved into a wave of removingvillages to built houses. Thus, the survival of farmers begins its transition along withthe process of land lost. Farmers are no longer the villagers in the traditional sense,for they lost their land which they depend on. However, they still retain thecharacteristics of traditional farmers in their patterns of thinking. They have to facedifficulties in employment, unfair treatment, and city life to which they are bothfamiliar and unfamiliar. Treatment of landless farmers are not really realized after thereform, while the remaining land and village collective properties run off due tolack of proper management. Villagers are separated from a huge amount of villagecollective economic configuration. With the establishment of family-contractresponsibility system and the advances and retreats of State executive power since thereform, traditional village community appeared depopulation and atomic phenomena.In this context, a local country elite group which makes money around country land(Huang, Duara) seems to be developing. And ordinary farmers seem to be the largestlosers in this "negotiation of selling land" during urbanization.When we focus on the contemporary transition of China’s rural social situation,we should admit that village movement which is mainly based on administrativeentwines too many interests of land ownership. And this movement becomes the coreof the game among local governments which face great pressure in keeping socialsteady, developers which aim to maximize economic benefits, rural elites who havebasic administrative power or on the village public affairs, and ordinary villagers whoadopt various strategies to gain favorable position. As for the issue of land ownership,according to the traditional subject classification, it mainly belongs to the scope of thestudy of economics. However, since the rise of neo-institutionalism, this concept isalso increasingly used in the analysis of the socio-economic phenomenon in China.Economic property rights theory which rise in1980s played a major role in guidingeconomic reform in Chinese market. Nevertheless, this theory is faced with manypractical problems in the real life. Therefore, enquiry in practice of property rightssystem is not only a need in theoretical level, but also an inevitable choice to explainthe problems in real life.Our problem is: besides the explanations from government and market, howthe social logic carries out in the definition process of the property rights,inc luding how the social networks and informa l system make impact on thedefinition of property rights in the real life. From the "social perspective ofproperty", this paper takes the variation of a village community in the suburbanarea of City C as an example, considers the definition of land property rights inreal life, carry out it based on Webb Understanding Sociology Methodology, analyzes how to build land property rights by the interactions among ind ividuals,and analyzes what kind of system or culture restricts this process.Talking of China’s rural collective land ownership, people are used to quoting theconcept of "collective property right", but there are rarely in-depth discussion on theunderstanding of its concept and what kind of the society form it exists in the countrylife. This paper aims to reveal the rural collective land property rights is deeplyembedded in the social relations of public life, collective ownership seemingly fuzzyis clear in fact,"collective property rights" is actually a kind of "social contract"similar to hidden rules. In the spontaneous constructed contract, the social capital,social networks, social custom, and traditional local knowledge with taking propertyrights as the main body has significant influence on the definition of property rights.Of course, this kind of "social contract" can’t get legal verification and supportbecause it is under the openness of text, so the formed pattern of interests will befurther constructing and deconstructing with the changes of the main body of propertyright and the environment. On the basis of case study, the author is trying to analyzefrom the changes process of a village, to discuss how the social logic of land rightsdevelops under the existing system.