Transcending the Boundaries of Urban Commons – Villages within the City in China

•Ting Xu and Wei Gong•School of Law, University of Sheffield•ting.xu@sheffield.ac.uk; w.gong@sheffield.ac.uk

British Academy International Partnership and Mobility Scheme ‘Diversifying Ownership of Land?: Communal Property in the UK and China’, 2014-2017http://www.communalpropertyresearchnetwork.org/

The trilogy of ownershipHeller, 2008, The Gridlock Economy, p.33. figure 2.4

A mixed property regime 

Eg, A Lehavi, the Construction of Property Norms, Institutions, Challenges, Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Private Property v. Communal Property?

• ‘the sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe’.

W Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Volume I, Of the Rights of Persons (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1766) 2.

• Emphasis: The right to exclude; individual ownership• Individual ownership equals private property? • ‘Private property is inclusive of individual property, but the

converse does not hold’ (Krier, 2009, ‘Evolutionary Theory and the Origin of Property Rights’, p. 145). • Communal Property as the opposite property regime? • Group access communal property also embodies the right to

exclude.

Open access commons v. group access commons

•Open access commons: everyone in the world has a right to use the resource; no rules regarding access/entry and exit•Group/limited access commons: a group of

commoners can exclude outsiders but cannot exclude each other within that group; rules regarding entry and exit; the right to exclude; strong homogeneity•Group/limited access commons as a hybrid property

regime where private property and communal property co-exist.

Definition of communal property

• ‘land and other resources owned and/or used and controlled by a self-interested and self-governing group of people defined by reference to some common characteristics such as kinship, locality, or common interest’. • A Clarke, ‘Integrating Private and Collective Land Rights:

Lessons from China’ (2013) 7 Journal of Comparative Law 177, 181.

Construction of Communal Property

Resources: used communally or collectivelyInstitutions governing the resource (communities at

different scales, held together by common characteristics eg, kinship, locality, or a variety of bonds eg, sense of belonging, values, ideologies, common interest); interactions between communities, individuals and the state; social interactions, bringing people in ‘property’)

Rules (access/entry, exit, use, control, conservation, sharing, self-governing; from the grassroots rather than simply imposed from the top)

Rights and claims to communal property

What if the rules regarding entry and exit are relaxed, and strong homogeneity is broken down…

Ownership in post-Mao China

•Civil law-making in the post-1978 era has to a significant extent returned to the German Civil Law framework•A tri-ownership system has evolved:state ownership collective ownershipprivate ownership

Public ownership

Collective ownership 

• Property Law (2007), Chap VArticle 59: ‘The immovables and movables collectively owned by the

farmers belong to the members of the collective.’• Article 10 of the Land Administration Law (2004) and Article 60 of 

the Property Law (2007) provide that collectively owned land should be managed and administered by the village collective economic organisation (not clearly defined in law), the villagers’ committee (administrative villages), villagers’ teams or a town or township.

The right to use

•Ownership and the right to use•The right to use: the right to access/not to be

excluded

Fragmentation of use rights to rural land

Collective ownership

Use rights

Attached to identity as farmers, members of the collectives

Rural households(rights to farming)

Individual farmers, Rural households, collective

economic organisations(rights to construction)Include: use rights to

Residential plots(rights to housing)

Transfer/lease?

Informal norms

Unintended consequences: the emergence

of de facto property

markets and villages within

the city

Conclusion

•urban commons as a hybrid property regime with open boundaries?

•Thank you!

•Comments and questions welcome!