Values in Land: Fiscal Pressures, Land Disputes and Justice Claims in Rural and Peri-urban China

This paper explores justice claims and legal recourse in disputes over land rights—a major source of unrest—in rural China. Local governments’ search for fiscal revenue and the concomitant fiscalisation of land create the context for the recent wave of land disputes. The types of dispute and the contexts in which disputes arise shape the ways in which citizens seek recourse to threats to their property rights and shape the kinds of justice claim they make in the process. Citizens whose land rights are threatened by land takings orchestrated by local governments and outside developers are more likely to pursue both distributive and procedural justice claims in court than are citizens whose land rights are threatened by reallocation of land within the community. In the latter case, citizens are more likely to pursue distributive but not procedural justice claims through mediation. These patterns hold in both case study and survey evidence. Distributive justice is associated with the fairness of outcome of a dispute, while procedural justice is associated with fairness of the process of dispute resolution.