Group items tagged

UPDATE: China Average Housing Price Rises in June After 9 Months of Decline - CREIS - China housing prices rebounded for the first time in June on month after nine months of decline, according to a private data provider -- Average housing price in June was CNY8,688 a square meter, rising 0.05% from CNY8,684 in May, reversing from May's 0.31% decline -- Housing prices in Inner Mongolia's Baotou city and Beijing rose by the widest margin, at 2.6% and 2.3%, respectively -- Sales have improved as China eases monetary policy, and prices are rising as developers have started to reduce discounts, analysts say (Adds comments from analysts in third to fourth paragraphs, 13th to 14th paragraphs, a homebuyer's comment in 10th to 12th paragraphs and background onrecent property easing moves by local governments in the final paragraphs.) By Esther Fung SHANGHAI--The average price of housing in 100 major Chinese cities recorded its first sequential rise in June after nine straight months of decline, in a further sign that the housing market is turning a corner, though analysts say a robust rebound in prices remains unlikely. A survey of property developers and real-estate firms showed the average price of housing in June was CNY8,688 a square meter, rising 0.05% from CNY8,684 in May, and overturning May's 0.31% decline, data provider China Real Estate Index System said Monday. "I believe the housing market has bottomed out," said Nicole Wong, a property analyst from CLSA. She also said that inventory will likely peak in the third quarter and prices will rise by a modest 5% by the fourth quarter, as demand for new launches has been strengthening in the past few months and developers don't need to lower their prices too much to attract buyers. On an on-year basis, the average housing price fell for a third consecutive month, sliding 1.90% from CNY8,856 booked in June 2011, and accelerating from May's 1.53% decline. The survey, compiled wi

Thématique n° 2 [ScienceDirect, via Biblio-SHS] Auteur : Hui Wang, Lanlan Wang, Fubing Su, Ran Tao Paru dans : Habitat International, Volume 36, Issue 2, April 2012, Pages 201-209 Abstract Rural residential land represents one of the most important land use types in China. However, the literature so far has paid insufficient attention to the patterns and efficiencies of this type of land use. To fill in this gap, this paper uses a national survey to analyze the institutional setups for rural residential land use, to assess the effectiveness of existing regulations, and to evaluate the efficiencies in rural residential land use. Farmers' subjective receptiveness toward rural residential property regulation reform is also investigated. We find that rural residential properties are inefficiently utilized under the existing land use regulations, that those who are younger and who had previous migration experiences are more likely to support the free trading of rural residential properties while the village cadres are more likely to oppose it. A coordinated policy reform package that includes free trading of rural residential properties and Household Registration System to facilitate permanent migration out of the countryside is proposed to address the existing efficiencies in China's rural residential land use. Highlights ► Rural residential land is an important land use type in China. ► Under existing regulations rural residential land is inefficiently used. ► A coordinated land-Hukou reform package is needed to address the inefficiency.

May 18th, 2012 Authors: Jonathan Unger, ANU, and Him Chung, HKBU Across China, ongoing industrialisation and urbanisation has led to many local villagers being pushed off their land, sometimes with inadequate compensation. But in some parts of the country - and especially in the southern province of Guangdong - rural communities retain collective ownership of much of their land when it is converted into urban neighbourhoods or industrial zones. In these areas, Mao-era rural collectives have not disappeared. Instead, they have been able to convert themselves into property companies that sometimes generate very sizeable incomes from industrial zones and urban property. Every native villager owns a share in the property company, which is really the old rural collective with a new title [...]

As China's real estate market continues to cool, experts have warned that a collapse in the market could spell disaster for the economy. This poses a dilemma for the Chinese regime. Sky-high property prices can fuel social tensions, but a reverse of the property boom could damage Beijing's bid to maintain the economy.

Chen, Yiu Por. (2012). Land Use Rights, Market Transition, and Rural-urban Labor Migration in China (1980-84). UC Los Angeles: The Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. Online at: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3pk220mn# 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 rural-urban labor migration from 1980 to 1984, a critical period in the country's market transition. I show 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 labor allocation rights. These shifts in property relationspromoted a growth in agricultural market size as well as the emergence of intraprovincial non-hukou rural-urban migration, which may have made labor retention policies such as the small township strategy ineffective, and may have given the government an incentive to deregulate its subsequent labor market policy.

[ScienceDirect, via Biblio-SHS] Auteur : Wanxin Li, Jieyan Liu, Duoduo Li Paru dans : Journal of Environmental Management, Volume 98, 15 May 2012, Pages 65-72 Abstract By comparing three cases of environmental activism in China, our paper answers the following three questions about public participation in environment protection in China: (1) what are the drivers for public participation, (2) who are the agents leading the participation, and (3) do existing laws facilitate public participation? We find heightened public awareness of environmental degradation and increasing anxieties over health and property values drive people to fight for more political space to influence decisions that have an impact on the environment. Despite the promises one finds in the letter of Chinese laws, Chinese society lacks a meaningful institutional framework to allow public participation, even in the area of environmental protection. The Chinese government mainly passively responds to public demands on an ad hoc basis, with no institutional commitment for engaging the public on environmental issues. This is unfortunate, because public policies without adequate public input are doomed to be clouded by illegitimacy. Highlights ► The public fights for more political space to influence environmental decisions. ► A concern for health and property values drives public environmental participation. ► Public participation has not yet been well institutionalized in China. ► The Chinese government passively responds to public demands on an ad hoc basis.

"Building local ties and creating a long-term future in Chongqing is the goal of BritCham's development forum, notes Thomas Vincent. Chongqing is urbanising at a tremendous rate. Two thousand people a day are moving into built up areas across the Municipality, maintaining a steady stream of demand for the construction of residential and commercial property. It could be said that Chongqing is currently at the forefront of urbanisation in the entire world, and so there is nowhere more fitting to educate and inform people about the need for sustainability."

Building local ties and creating a long-term future in Chongqing is the goal of BritCham's development forum, notes Thomas Vincent. Chongqing is urbanising at a tremendous rate. Two thousand people a day are moving into built up areas across the Municipality, maintaining a steady stream of demand for the construction of residential and commercial property. It could be said that Chongqing is currently at the forefront of urbanisation in the entire world, and so there is nowhere more fitting to educate and inform people about the need for sustainability.

[From: Scientific.net] Author(s): Cai Gui Zheng et al. Source: Advanced Materials Research. Advanced Manufacturing Technology, 472-475, p. 231-238, 2012. DOI: 10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMR.472-475.231 ABSTRACT: This paper, based on the current state and problems of saving and intensive land use system of urban-rural integration in Chongqing, in which methods of theoretical approach and system analysis are applied, brings up three mechanisms as: (1) the connecting of the increase of urban construction and the decrease of rural residential area; (2) the connecting of sprawling and farmland consolidation; (3) the connecting of intensive land-use in urban-rural area. At last, the paper builds up the saving and intensive land use system of urban-rural integration follow as: (1) perfecting land surveying system; (2) strengthening land statistics system; (3) perfecting land evaluation system; (4) clearing land property right system; (5) improving land registration system; (6) refining land use system; (7) building land tax system; (8) explicating land consolidation system.

[From: Scientific.net] Author(s): Cai Gui Zheng et al. Source: Advanced Materials Research. Advanced Manufacturing Technology, 472-475, p. 231-238, 2012. DOI: 10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMR.472-475.231 ABSTRACT: This paper, based on the current state and problems of saving and intensive land use system of urban-rural integration in Chongqing, in which methods of theoretical approach and system analysis are applied, brings up three mechanisms as: (1) the connecting of the increase of urban construction and the decrease of rural residential area; (2) the connecting of sprawling and farmland consolidation; (3) the connecting of intensive land-use in urban-rural area. At last, the paper builds up the saving and intensive land use system of urban-rural integration follow as: (1) perfecting land surveying system; (2) strengthening land statistics system; (3) perfecting land evaluation system; (4) clearing land property right system; (5) improving land registration system; (6) refining land use system; (7) building land tax system; (8) explicating land consolidation system.

August 15, 2012 9:20 AM Posted By: Melissa M. Chan As criticism of land grabs and forced demolitions continues, the Wall Street Journal reports that despite signs of a rebound in the property market, Chinese developers are skittish at land auctions: A number of cities, including Shenyang, Dalian, Zhuhai and Tianjin, have seen disappointing land auctions, with many real-estate developers reluctant to add to their land holdings. That is bad news for local governments, which depend on land sales for a large slice of their revenue. Data from the Ministry of Finance show that revenue nationwide from land transfers dropped 27.1% to 1.35 trillion yuan ($212.1 billion) in the first seven months of the year compared with a year earlier. Government officials in Shenyang, Dalian and Tianjin all declined to discuss the data. An official in Zhuhai conceded that there has been a problem selling land even at reduced prices, adding that this has squeezed government resources. "It's difficult to sell land now," the official said. "The government had to scrap plans for auctions, and has had to sit tight and see how things work out." Some cash-rich companies like China Vanke Co., 000002.SZ -0.12% the nation's biggest listed developer by market value, have jumped into the market, either at auction or in second-hand deals. But others are holding back, waiting for local governments to lower their prices or to see if the market is making a more solid turnaround. Amid difficulties in auctioning off land, Beijing and local governments have produced conflicting real estate policies. From MarketWatch: Over the pas

Xuefei Ren's work on the high-end of the building boom in China brings together the sociology of globalization with the study of architecture and the built environment. Building Globalization treats architectural production as crucial to the material and symbolic ways in which global cities are made. Based on Ren's doctoral research at the University of Chicago, the book draws on fieldwork conducted in Beijing and Shanghai between 2004 and 2008, covering the bull years leading up to the Beijing Olympics. China is now taken to exemplify the geo-demographic shift that has seen developing countries lead current processes of urbanisation. However the Chinese government's attitude towards quanqiuhua chengshi (global cities) and its support for rapid urban growth from the mid-late 1990s represented a striking reversal of official policy which had been to limit the growth of large cities and promote instead the development of small-medium centres (p.11). The re-scaling of state power to metropolitan level in the interests of enhancing urban competitiveness has been an international trend in recent decades. In China this has proved particularly effective in driving urban growth, given state ownership of land and government control over household registration, urban planning and development decisions. Metropolitan governments in China have the kind of ownership and discretionary powers of which the most boosterist western city mayors can only dream. Ren argues convincingly that the processes shaping these cities are increasingly transnational; in particular, the forces that make buildings 'operate beyond national boundaries, as seen in the circulation of investment capital, the movements of built-environment professionals, and the diffusion of new technologies' (p.6). However, while Chinese economic growth may have destabilized a global balance of power dominated by the triad of the USA, the European Union and Japan, Ren's analysis suggests that older core-peripher

The development of high-tech industrial parks (HTIPs) has become a salient phenomenon in China's economic and urban development. Current studies regarding the development of HTIPs tend to focus either on the active role of the local government or on the consequences of technological innovation that those parks may have brought about. Very few studies have paid attention to the intrinsic relationship between the process of space production in building HTIPs and the effect on urban development. To fill this theoretical gap, this article considers developing HTIPs as a territorial project through which both central and local states seek to promote economic growth by reorganizing their territories so as to facilitate capital accumulation based on building high-tech industrial parks. The authors use Beijing's Zhongguancun and Shanghai's Yangpu areas as examples to show the active role played by district governments in promoting and using the symbol of "high tech" to develop industrial estates. In the end, due to the HTIPs' quick tax-generating potentiality, their construction has given rise to commodity housing and commercial projects that district governments are much more enthusiastic to pursue. The property-led high-tech development projects have paradoxically generated a negative impact on sustainable high-tech development.

[ScienceDirect, via Biblio-SHS] Auteur : Ying Tanga, Robert J. Masonb, Ping Sun Paru dans : Habitat International, Volume 36, Issue 3, July 2012, Pages 388-395 Abstract Since the onset of rapid economic development and urbanization, China's land resources-rather than capital, technology and human resources-have become the lead limiting factor in constraining economic growth. Coordination of urban and rural construction land (CURCL) can be a very effective means for reducing conflicts between economic development and land protection. This research examines the roles of stakeholders involved in the CURCL process. The reasons why the interests of legitimated stakeholders were encroached upon are analyzed and countermeasures to protect the interests of legitimated stakeholders are proposed. Ambiguously defined property rights for owners of rural construction land, unclear conceptions of the public interest, and overlap of power and interest among multiple levels of authority are the reasons why legitimated stakeholders' interests were encroached upon. Legitimizing construction land ownership clearly, better defining the multiple conceptions of public interest, opening up express channels for expression of the public interest, and clarifying governments' functions in land interest adjustment are the countermeasures to protect the interests of legitimated stakeholders. Highlights ► We examine roles of key stakeholders involved with urban and rural construction land in China. ► Agricultural protection measures notwithstanding, farmers' interests frequently are neglected. ► Local governments seek to maximize profits at the expense of public interests. ► Profit maximization is inherent to private enterprises. ► Government roles and express channel for farmers are important for fair interest distribution.

4/09/2012 The Urban China Initiative (UCI) had its biggest event of the year on September 7th in Tsinghua Science Park - the 2012 Annual Forum, inspiring enlightening discussions among participants from public, private and academic sectors to develop policy thinking that will help address China's urbanization challenges. Themed "China's New Urban Era" as China's urban population surpassed that of rural areas for the first time in 2011, the event brought together about 50 urban leaders and more than 400 professionals from the urban field. The Forum consists of keynote speech, three plenary panels and three breakout panels. Keynote speakers include: Yang Weimin, Vice Minister of office of Central Leading Group on Finance and Economic Affairs; Gu Shengzu, Deputy Director of Internal and Judicial Affairs Committee at National People's Congress and Vice Chairman of the Central Committee of the China National Democratic Construction Association; Li Xiaojiang, President of China Academy of Urban Planning and Design; Li Dongming, General Manager, Urban Fund of China Development Bank Capital. The plenaries showcased three UCI flagship projects: urban citizenship of Chinese migrants; research on mega regions and the China urban indicators system. The three breakouts showcased UCI's five latest grant projects. The forum brought together leaders from UCI partners including the National Development and Reform Commission, local DRC, China Society of Urban Studies, Development and Research Center of the State Council, China Center for Urban Development, China Development and Reform Foundation, Chinese Academy of Urban Planning and Design, Chinese Academy of Urban Development, Fung Global Institute, New Cities Foundation, Rio Tinto, BMW, CDBC, Tsinghua, Columbia Global Centers and CITIC Property. To find more about the Forum: Highlights of the keynotes and forum news Research and speeches of the plenary and breakout panels Media report on UCI 2012 Ann

From Scholar to Official Cui Zhiyuan and Chongqing City's Local Experimental Policy by Emilie Frenkiel [06-12-2010] An interview with a Chinese political scientist trained in American universities gives us an insight into China's pragmatic policy of local experimentation. It chronicles how officials in the municipality of Chongqing have seized the opportunity offered by its special status to launch a unique blend of liberal and socialist economic policy.