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Abstract:
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"The author has written about shareholder association forestry before. He recently had an opportunity to revisit the institution in Fujian Province, and found the experience somewhat unsettling. It left him dissatisfied, with a sense that we know less than we thought (or a least than he thought he did!) about this institutional innovations and why it occurs.
"In China, the basic unit for management of community property is the village economic cooperative. In the reforms of rural production organization in the late 1970s and the 1980s, the large people's communes were broken into smaller units, units which had been smaller cooperatives that were consolidated to create the communes. These earlier cooperatives had commonly been based on pre-revolutionary village units. The administrative village generally became the unit for land administration. This administrative village may or may not be co-terminous with the "natural village", the pre-revolutionary unit, depending on the local history of consolidation and dissolution of collective production units. Often, the administrative village is a larger unit, consisting of two or more natural villages. The allocation of land for administration between these two units, when they are not the co-terminous, is again the product of local history and power relationships.
"Rural land, including land under forests, is owned by the village and is administered by the villages economic cooperative. This much is clear from the Land Administration Law of 1987, though the wording in that law does not distinguish between the natural and administrative village and this has caused some confusion. But national and local law give little guidance on how the village is to organise its forest production. The national Forestry Law, 1984, provides in Article 3 for forest ownership by co-operatives. The Forest Department helps rural village economic cooperatives draw up forest management plans. Article 22 makes it clear that it is the responsibility of collectives to help fulfil governments afforestation plans, and it is a specific legal responsibility of collectives to afforest barren hills and wasteland of the collective which are suitable for forestry. Article 23 sets out a system of property incentives to encourage afforestation.. Where state or collective land is contracted to the collective or individuals for afforestation, the trees planted belong to the tree-planting contractor, unless a contract provides the otherwise. The 1986 Implementing Regulations for the Forest Law say nothing further about how villages are to organize production in forestry. Art. 17 of the regulations refers to "privately-managed mountains", but just to make the point that cutting there must be brought into line with the annual timber production plan of the state."
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