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Abstract:
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"As the reform process towards a mixed economy proceeds in China, there have been a variety of approaches to local management of forested lands, including common property arrangements. In China, incremental reforms towards a mixed economy began in 1978. The reforms have been carried out under the auspices of the communist party, but the party has allowed considerable local experimentation with organizational form and property rights for resource management. This has produced a rich body of experience that must be considered within the context of an unusual approach to law and social change where law is seen as the capstone of the change process by which the state finally approves and consolidates successful social and economic experiments. In the reforms of rural production organization in China during the late 1970s and the 1980s, the agricultural sector was the main focus of attention. Large communes were broken into smaller units, often corresponding to the smaller cooperatives from which they had been formed in an earlier consolidation. The smaller cooperatives, in turn, had often been based on pre-revolutionary village units. The reforms retained land as a public good, but they clarified the nature and locus of public ownership and management authority over land and associated resources. The 1982 Constitution (art. 10) and the National Land Administration Law which came into force in 1987 (arts 8 and 12) confirmed that the new "administrative villages" had succeeded to ownership of the land and that land might be assigned to smaller units or households for management. The land included all house sites, private plots of cropland and associated wasteland and mountain land."
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