Conceptualizing Rural Land Reform in China Through State Rescaling and Policy Experimentation

This chapter reviews the theoretical approaches relevant to rural land reform, focusing on state rescaling and policy experimentation. Building on an extensive body of literature, it develops an integrated conceptual framework for understanding the multi-layered policy implementation process at both national and local levels. This chapter argues that China’s rural land reform should be understood as a process concurrently shaped by autonomous local governments through policy experimentation initiatives and constrained by hierarchical control and institutional path-dependency. This analysis begins with the evolution of China’s land institutions through the lenses of institutional change and path-dependency, followed by a discussion of state rescaling and restructuring of inter-scalar relations within China’s nested hierarchical urban system. It then examines policy entrepreneurship and place-specific policy experimentation as embedded features of China’s reform trajectory. The literature review identifies three major gaps that existing studies have yet to fully address, thereby motivating the proposed conceptual framework that captures how rural land reforms are simultaneously conditioned by the (re)configuration of local state power in a land-centric developmental era and regulated through intensive central-local interactions. The chapter concludes by highlighting the potential contributions of this framework to understanding rural land reform amid rapid urbanization.