Emerging Urban Village and Legitimacy Debates: A Supply-Side Institutional Analysis

This chapter is a policy review of the multiple stages of Beijing’s urban village redevelopment. In an emerging stage, while China’s pro-market reform has led to a substantial increase in land values, little of the “surplus value” created by the conversion of farmland to urban uses has gone to local landlords with mere user rights, as the state is effectively the sole landowner. In response, local landlords have created the urban village, an informal rental housing market, to compensate for their loss of livelihood and to meet the demand of low-wage migrant workers. At a later stage, the Beijing municipal government introduced more reasonable compensation and reemployment packages to ease social tensions caused by forced demolition and unfair compensation. Since 2009, the new urban policy of “growth coalition” has been designed to allow disadvantaged landlords to share more equitably in the land surplus from urban village redevelopment. Pilot and demonstration projects in Beijing include the Dawangjing (大望京) and Beiwu (北坞) models, as well as several pilot “public rental housing” programs on collectively owned land (集体土地建设租赁住房试点) in Haidian District.