Record Item Year: 2007

Women are an important mainstay of agricultural production in China, though their access to land is characterized by even greater ambiguity than that of their male counterparts. As part of its path toward liberalization, China undertook agricultural land management policy reforms that were aimed at increasing the security of land tenure rights, but these reforms have paradoxically exacerbated the uncertainty surrounding women’s claims to land. Utilizing sample survey data collected from 412 rural households in Shaanxi and Hunan provinces in 2002, this paper documents and analyzes gender differences in land allocations. The findings of this study shed light on the […]

Since the mid-1990s, a new land-use rights regime has gradually come into effect in China. It follows upon a series of earlier changes — land reform, collectivization and the first wave of contracting land to households — that paid attention to women’s role in publicly recognized work and provided access to land. The new regime, which has gradually come into effect as previous (usually fifteen-year) terms expired, authorizes an adjustment in land allocation which is then normally frozen for thirty years. An apparently inadvertent effect of this policy is not only the exclusion of young people from direct access to […]

ABSTRACT: The government of China targeted conversion of farmland to industrial and residential uses, especially in the most productive agricultural regions, as the chief threat to the nation’s continued capacity to produce adequate levels of staple cereals. In response, it has introduced a number of measures aimed at protecting farmland, especially farmland with the greatest production potential. This paper reviews the existing evidence regarding the performance of China’s farmland protection policies in light of its food security goals. We summarize recent farmland protection measures. Despite administrative restrictions on farmland conversion, cropland continues to decline. The evidence suggests that a substantial […]

By the middle of the twenty-first century, China’s urban population is likely to have grown by about 500 million, to more than 1.1 billion people. This article applies Amartya Sen’s concept of capabilities to explore how the government of urban expansion is affecting the generation of rural women whose villages currently are being enclosed by cities and towns. Drawing on interviews, press reports and government and Women’s Federation documents from Zhejiang province, it illustrates how local governments’ economic growth strategies hinge, in part, on reconstructing gendered relations in the spatial organization, civic management, production and social reproduction in new metropolitan […]

Contains translated excerpts from the Rwandan Civil Code and other legislation related to divorce and legal separation.

Urbanization is an apparent and important dimension of modernization in China. One of the main problems in China’s urbanization process is the migration of farmers from the agricultural sector to the non-agricultural sector and the concurrent conversion of agricultural lands to non-agricultural usage. According to current practice, the conversion of agricultural land to non-agricultural use is carried out by the state through land requisitioning. In the past ten years, China’s urbanization in the name of ‘economic development zones’ has resulted in extensive requisitioning of agricultural land. Millions of villagers have lost their land and left farming, seeking new employment in […]