Doctoral Dissertation Research----Negotiating Land Ownership: Property Relations and Legal Change in Rural Southwestern China

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This project studies how, and to what extent, property relations in contemporary rural China have been and are being restructured through the examination of land litigation, an arena in which the ownership of agricultural property has been redefined, negotiated, and contested among interest groups including the socialist state, the village collective, and individual households. This research combines an analysis of power mechanism with consideration of the cultural dimensions of property and law in China. Fieldwork will be conducted in Huangnihe, a rural township in southwestern China. The social histories of local land cases will be traced through participant observation and discourse analysis. This project will be conducted at a time in China when rural households and collectives are enjoying the widest latitude in land management since the 1950s. By exploring land ownership from the specific perspective of legal disputes, this project will add new dimensions to the current research on China's rapidly changing property relations in the post-Mao era. Moreover, this project will be the first anthropological study of local legal functioning the mainland China and it will be conducted at a time when nationwide concern with legal reform in most pronounced. Unlike most of the recent work on China's law, which overwhelmingly focuses on the urban area, this research will focus on the rural area where almost 80% of China's population lives.