Abstract: The autonomy of land development and the right of income distribution are the focus of the rural land income distribution system in the context of urbanization. The system has experienced a trajectory from empowerment of farmers to power limitation and then to empowerment. The mutual configuration of the stock mechanism and the incremental mechanism in the gradual reform has shaped the pendulum phenomenon. The stock mechanism is the public ownership of land and the dual property right structure of urban and rural areas. Incremental mechanism is the state’s empowerment of local governments and farmers. The state uses incremental reform to solve the efficiency problem of the stock system, triggering the game between the state-owned land right and the collective land right stakeholders, thus prompting the state to adjust the income distribution mode between the state and farmers in the stock system. At present, it is difficult for the land system reform to bypass the restriction of the power limitation system and fully realize the goal of empowering the people. This stems from the path dependence of incomplete development of social property rights and highly embedded state power in the land market. Therefore, the development of farmland income distribution system does not depend on the compatibility of state-owned and private schemes, but on how to overcome the reconstruction problem of social property rights under the power embedding.