Abstract
This chapter offers an analysis of the institutional obstacles to adopting the local property tax in China, including the property right and use right to urban land. It traces the turnover from private to public ownership of land in rural and urban areas around the founding in 1949 of the People’s Republic of China and subsequent changes, which inspires insight into this problem unique to China. The chapter then taps into why local governments can capitalize on the state ownership of urban land to build infrastructure and how they did it within a two-decade period, as well as the problems involved in doing so.
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- 1.
Dr. Dong left mainland China in 1950 for Hong Kong, where he wrote several pamphlets on China’s land reform then underway. Later, he returned to the United States and died in 1984 after a long academic career.
- 2.
Zhang (2011) did an analysis of the letter and had it reprinted in the influential magazine Yan Huang Chun Qiu.
- 3.
This is translation from Chinese “小产权房”.
- 4.
Source: Shenzhen Municipal Center for Real Estate Assessment and Development 2016.
- 5.
This was called “公私合营” in Chinese.
- 6.
Interview of a descendant of a native Beijing household that used to own a courtyard in the downtown area.
- 7.
This is a widely circulated anecdote among high-ranking finance officials, though we cannot ascertain its official source. We believe it is highly credible.
- 8.
Bai (2016), “Review of opposing opinions to the real property tax in China,” in Hou et al., ed. (2016), pp. 186–201.
- 9.
For a strong defense of this high-ranking official group with related details, see Jia Kang (2015), The Real Property Tax is not Far from Us.
- 10.
This is from our interview of the owner of a medium-sized developer in a southern city.
- 11.
For example, Mr. Ren Zhiqiang, headquartered in Beijing, has long been an influential figure in social media with such opinions.
- 12.
Our fieldwork (interviews, formal and semi-formal, informal meetings) in Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing and several provincial capitals provides first hand evidence of many such cases.
References
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Hou, Y. (2019). Institutional Obstacles to China in Adopting the Real Property Tax. In: Development, Governance, and Real Property Tax in China. Politics and Development of Contemporary China. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95528-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95528-5_5
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