Central-Local Relations & the Origins of China’s State Urban Land Monopoly

Establishing the capacity to extract revenue is a key component of state building. While the scholarship has long focused on the extraction of tax revenue, the Chinese state is highly dependent on revenue from a series of state monopolies, most especially the state urban land monopoly. This talk examines how the Chinese government built up its capacity to monopolize and extract revenue from urban land, beginning with early land sales and the nationalization of urban land in the 1980s and continuing through the turn to monopoly pricing in the early 2000s. I argue that the central government played a key role in pushing local governments to monopolize the urban land supply, helping develop the institutions necessary to extract revenue from state-owned land.

The ANU China Seminar Series is supported by the Australian Centre on China in the World at ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.