The Causes And Governance Strategies Of Land Expropriation Conflict

With the rapid development of urbanization,land acquisition conflict has become an important social problem which is widely concerned.China implements the dual land ownership system that the urban land ownership belongs to the state and the rural land ownership belongs to the collective of farmers.Therefore,China’s land expropriation just means collective land being expropriated by the state.In order to explore the mechanism of the occurrence and evolution of the land expropriation conflicts,this paper first analyzes the evolution of the land expropriation system and the characteristics of the land expropriation conflicts from the planned economy period to the reform and opening up since 1978.In the period of planned economy,the state arranges the distribution of all social welfare in a unified way.Collective farmers have always gained more urban welfare after land expropriation than before,so the phenomenon of land expropriation conflicts rarely happens.However,after the reform and opening up,the market elements in the social economy are highlighted,and the compensation for land expropriated farmers is seriously unbalanced with the land sold after the land expropriation,so the phenomenon of land expropriation conflicts is increasing.After summarizing and sorting out the cases of more than 50 land expropriation in Wuhu,we take five places of land expropriation conflicts as the empirical research material.By comparing the reasons of land expropriation,the occurrence of conflict,the intensity of the conflict and the specific behavior of the stakeholders,it is found that the government,the landless peasants and the village collectives have different interests in the process of land expropriation,and the difference in interest demands induces the emergence of land expropriation conflicts.After further analysis,it is found that the different standard or non-standard interest demands in the process of land expropriation related parties originate from some special institutional environment in China,including the dual track system of urban and rural land transfer,the tax system,the unique basic democracy system and the legal rights protection system and so on.These institutional factors jointly lead to the fundamental internal logic of the land expropriation conflicts in China:In the process of transition from planned economy to market economy,the three cforces of government,market and society are unbalanced,which makes the distribution of interests among the relevant social subjects in the process of land marketization uneven.On the basis of this fundamental reason,we put forward the design logic and concrete path of land expropriation conflict governance which lies in seeking the balance between the government,the market and the society in the course of continuous urbanization in the next twenty or thirty years.The governance mechanism mainly includes:Delineate the boundary of the government’s behavior through the redesign of the legal elements of the right to expropriate;Expand the market border through the promotion of the collective construction land direct marketization;Strengthen the social main force of communication between the government and farmers by re shaping the democratic mechanism in the village level.