From jobs, money, to flats: Land dispossession and regimes of compensation in China from 1978 to 2019

The literature on land dispossession mostly focuses on the causes and processes of dispossession, whilst paying insufficient attention to the amounts and types of compensation that peasants or small farmers have received for land loss. This paper introduces the concept of ‘regime of compensation’ to analyse policies of compensation for land expropriation in China over the past four decades (1978–2019). It is found that compensation in China has transitioned through three successive regimes, characterized by compensating land-losing villagers with employment, money, and housing, respectively. The compensation regimes and regime transitions were shaped by economic reforms, modes of accumulation, state ideology, and land struggles from below. The regime of compensation offers a new angle to examine the dynamics of land dispossession and land struggles in China and other countries.