New geography of land commodification in Chinese cities: Uneven landscape of urban land development under market reforms and globalization

This study examines the popular practice of land commodification as a means of local revenue generation in Chinese cities and identifies the uneven landscape emerging as a consequence of land-financed urbanization. Land commodification in Chinese cities has generated a revenue of one to three trillion yuan each year equivalent to 40–50 percent of local municipal budgetary revenue. A striking unevenness is observed in the practice of land commodification characterized by a large gap between coastal and inland cities in the generation of land conveyance revenue and an outstanding position held by provincial capital. The importance of land income in municipal budgetary revenue stood out initially in coastal cities and then diffused into the interior. A significant relationship in an inverted-U shape is found between the ratio of land conveyance traded price to municipal budgetary revenue and the level of urban economic growth. Contrary to the popular theoretical perception of a state “hollowing out” to make room for the market under neoliberalization, the Chinese state is found to have reshuffled and transformed itself to embrace and take advantage of the market. Land commodification has not weakened the power of the state but instead strengthened the fiscal capacity of local governments to contest with changes in central-local fiscal relations made in the 1994 “tax sharing system.” The Chinese case is theoretically significant as it sheds important light over the sophisticated state-market relations contingent upon different social, economic, and political conditions and the distinct developmental landscape emerging in a rapidly urbanizing country of the global south in the era of neoliberalization.