ALSA 2025 meeting

In rural China, farmland is not privately owned but collectively owned by villages and contracted to individual households. Since the early 2000s, the Chinese state has strengthened legal protections for farmers’ land rights. The 2002 Rural Land Contract Law (RLCL) was a key milestone, guaranteeing that land contracts would remain stable for 30 years and prohibiting local authorities from adjusting land allocations without strong legal justification.
However, a traditional practice known as farmland reallocation still persists in many villages. In this system, village authorities periodically redistribute farmland based on household size—taking land from families with fewer members and giving it to those with more. This practice, rooted in the collective era before land reform, is officially illegal under the RLCL. Yet it continues to take place in ways that often appear legally ambiguous.
This paper investigates why such a clearly restricted practice continues. Prior research suggests that village elites—such as local cadres—sometimes use vague or exceptional legal clauses to justify the reallocation of land. But legal maneuvering alone is not enough; the practice also relies on the support or at least acquiescence of ordinary farmers. This raises an important question: does the persistence of farmland reallocation reflect a lack of awareness or understanding of legal rights among villagers?
Using original survey data from a rural township, the paper tests the hypothesis that weak legal knowledge among farmers contributes to the continuation of this practice. Although the hypothesis was not confirmed directly, the results reveal a deeper problem: for many villagers, state law is not part of their daily frame of reference. Legal rights feel distant, abstract, and disconnected from the realities of rural governance. As a result, village norms and collective decisions continue to shape land use more strongly than formal law.