Land use rights, market transitions, and labour policy change in China (1980–84)

This paper provides a systematic analysis of the way shifts in property utilization rights in China induced another sequence of institutional changes that led to the rise of ruralurban labour migration from 1980 to 1984, a critical period in the countrys market transition. The paper shows that the 1980s Household Responsibility System (HRS), which brought family farming back from the communal system, endowed rural households not only with land use rights, but also with de facto labour allocation rights. These shifts in property relations promoted a growth in agricultural market size as well as the emergence of intraprovincial non-hukou ruralurban migration, which may have made labour retention policies such as the small township strategy ineffective, and may have given the government an incentive to deregulate its subsequent labour market policy.