China's Land Reform Will Be Neither Quick nor Clean

The Chinese government is slowly moving forward with efforts to create rural land markets and to strengthen farmers' legal control over the land they work — control that has historically belonged to the state and state-run rural collectives. On March 4, a day before opening its annual session, the National People's Congress announced that the government would launch a rural land reform pilot program. The initiative covers 33 of China's nearly 3,000 county-level regions and comes amid sustained declines in housing markets nationwide. It also comes as China tries to reduce local government reliance on revenue from the sale of rural land for urban development.

Beijing is set to push through a number of local government fiscal reforms in the coming months, and a window may be opening to initiate broader rural land reforms. As China's leaders have acknowledged, successful rural land reform will be critical for taming social unrest tied to local government expropriation of rural land and long-term agricultural modernization. It will also be central to driving the next major phase of rural-to-urban migration, which is key to Chinese economic growth.