Redefining rural collectives in China: Land conversion and the emergence of rural shareholding co-operatives

As land conversion has led inevitably to socioeconomic dislocations in China, a variety of bottom-up reforms have been designed to mitigate and contain the resultant conflicts. This evolves the creation of a mechanism both to allow peasants to benefit from the increase of land value in the urbanisation process and also to redistribute interests to individual rural villagers. This paper focuses on on-going shareholding reforms which aim to clarify villagers' property rights under the current structure of collective ownership. Three cases best exemplify these issues: Wusha village in Guangdong, Qunyi village in Jiangsu and Daliushu village in Beijing. The comparison reveals divergent experiences of reform among landless farmers and how the adoption of property rights reforms has restructured the concept and organisation of rural collectives.