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

本课题通过土地诉讼这一竞技场来研究当代中国农村的财产关系是如何以及在何种程度上已经和正在被重构的。在土地诉讼中，包括社会主义国家、村集体和个体家庭在内的利益集团对农业财产的所有权进行了重新定义、谈判和争夺。 本研究将权力机制的分析与中国的财产和法律文化维度相结合。 田野调查将在中国西南部的黄泥河乡进行。 透过参与式观察和话语分析，追踪当地土地个案的社会历史。 该项目将在中国农户和集体享有自1950年代以来最大的土地管理自由度的时候进行。 通过从法律的纠纷的特定视角探讨土地所有权，本项目将为当前对后毛泽东时代中国迅速变化的财产关系的研究增添新的维度。 此外，本计画将是中国大陆第一个地方法律的功能的人类学研究，并且将在全国关注法律的改革最明显的时候进行。 与最近大多数关于中国法律的研究主要集中在城市地区不同，这项研究将集中在中国近80%人口居住的农村地区。

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.