Changes of Rural Land Property Rights System in China from the Perspective of Development

Based on the macroscopical, historical and systematic Marxist property rights theory paradigm, we try to establish a development perspective to understand the changes of rural land property rights system in China.From this perspective, the change of rural land property rights system since the founding of new China is a process of institutional reconstruction to adapt to the historical change of agricultural and rural farmers’ function orientation. It is a process of adapting to China’s development stage, development mode and collective economic function transformation, and reshaping the relationship among the state, the collective and the farmers. It is an adaptive adjustment process for the dynamic evolution of the dual functions of rural land in the development process; and a systematic evolution process to realize the transformation from legal rights to economic rights through supporting reforms on the basis of development which includes the realization of rural land property rights. In the interpretation of development, the core view of western property rights theory, “the validity of private property rights” and “the invalidity of public property rights”, is essentially a highly ideological Western narrative, neither conforms to the socialist value orientation of common prosperity, nor objectively reveals the multidimensional and dynamic complex relation between property rights and development. These fundamental defects make it impossible for western property rights theory to deeply understand the real logic of China’s rural land property rights system changes and “Chinese-style modernization”. In order to tell a good “Chinese story” of reform and development, guided by the Marxist theory of property and combined with China’s own practice, we must strengthen the research on property rights from the perspective of development, and promote the innovative development of the socialist property rights theory with Chinese characteristics.