Land reforms in China

In another major step in its transition to a capitalist economy, the Chinese government has announced that it will permit farmers to to lease or transfer land-use rights on the small land plots assigned to them under the existing system of collective village ownership of lands. Under the new policy, the government will establish markets where farmers can 'subcontract, lease, exchange or swap' land-use rights or join cooperatives, thereby opening up the possibility of consolidation of farms and more efficient farm activity.

This comes on the 30th anniversary of the first generation of land reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping, that broke up the collective use, if not ownership, of land and created a household registration system that assigned land to individual families to use as they saw fit. Those reforms enabled farm incomes to rise sharply during the early 1980s, even as incomes of city dwellers remained mostly stagnant.