With massive growth taking place in the real estate industry, how can China develop a free market and private ownership of land while still officially subscribing to Communist ideology? This study uses fieldwork interviews to establish how the Chinese real estate market operates in practice from both legal and business perspectives. It describes how the market functions, which laws are applicable and how they are applied, and how a nation can achieve dramatic economic growth so rapidly while its legal system is so unsettled. The book demonstrates how China is drawing on the world for ideas while retaining a domestic system that remains essentially Chinese, and how the recent revitalization of China's real estate market has confounded the predictions of many developments economists.

One of the most pressing issues in contemporary China is the massive rural land takings that have taken place at a scale unprecedented in human history. Expropriation of land has dispossessed and displaced millions for several decades, despite the protection of property rights in the Chinese constitution. Combining meticulous doctrinal analysis with in-depth historical investigation, Chun Peng tracks the origin and evolution of China's rural land takings law over the twentieth century and demonstrates an enduring tradition of land takings for state-led social transformation, under which the takings law is designed to be power-confirming. With changed socio-political circumstances and a new rights-respecting constitutional agenda, a rebalance of the law is now underway, but only within existing parameters. Peng provides a piercing analysis of how land has been used by the largest developing country in the world to develop itself, at what costs and where the future might be.

Providing a new perspective on economic and legal institutions, particularly on contract and property, in Qing and Republican history, this volume provides case studies to explicate how these institutions worked, while situating them firmly in their broader social context.

Qiao demonstrates how an impersonal and unbounded market can operate without legal protection or enforcement of property and contract rights.

Zhang argues that property institutions in preindustrial China and England were a cause of China's lagging development in preindustrial times.

This sweeping study examines the law of intellectual property in Chinese civilization from imperial days to the present. It uses materials drawn from law, the arts and other fields as well as extensive interviews with Chinese and foreign officials, business people, lawyers, and perpetrators and victims of "piracy."

Comparing four key branches of private law in China and Taiwan, this collaborative and novel book demystifies the 'China puzzle'.