Contested Rent-Based Urban Governance: Land Rent Dissipation and Redistribution Under Scalar Politics in China (Liu & Zhu, 2025)

Summary

"Contested rent-based urban governance: Land rent dissipation and redistribution under scalar politics in China," by Jiayao Liu and Jin Zhu, appeared in Land Use Policy 157 (2025), October issue, as CC-BY open access. It examines a dimension of Chinese land-rent politics distinct from the wiki's existing China cluster: not tax-policy design, not state-versus-private-developer capture, but contestation over land rent between different tiers of government within the state itself.

The Zhongshan Case

Using mixed methods — interviews, archival research, and statistical analysis — the paper traces a case in Zhongshan where implicit land rent distribution prompted rent-seeking by discretionary lower-level (sub-municipal/district) governments, ultimately producing a developmental crisis and rent dissipation. A subsequent scalar restructuring reallocated authority between government tiers in response, but the paper finds these reform efforts themselves "impaired by entrenched rent dissipation and the real estate downturn" — the crisis the restructuring was meant to fix had already begun eroding the very land-rent base any new intergovernmental arrangement would depend on.

Relation to the Georgist Case

This is a genuinely distinct angle within the wiki's substantial existing China cluster. Xu's "active mode" land-finance paper frames China as a public-authorities-versus-private-developers story (the state organizing development and capturing land value directly, contrasted with the developer-led "passive mode" typical of most developing countries). Liu & Zhu's contribution operates on an entirely different axis: within the state itself, different government tiers compete over an implicitly, rather than formally, allocated land-rent stream, and that internal contestation — not developer capture — is what produces dissipation and crisis. It is a useful complication for the wiki's land value capture coverage generally: even where land value is captured publicly rather than privately, which level of government captures it, and how well-defined that allocation is, is itself a live governance problem with real fiscal consequences.

Nuances and Limits

• A single Chinese city case study (Zhongshan). The specific dynamic of implicit, contested inter-tier rent allocation may not generalize identically to other Chinese cities' land-finance systems, let alone other countries'.
• Abstract-level source (B+-claim). The publisher page was blocked to this session, including via a reader-proxy route, despite the paper's confirmed CC-BY open-access status (no independent PDF mirror was indexed anywhere at the time of this session); specific policy instruments, the precise trigger of the "developmental crisis," and the concrete before/after authority allocation between government tiers were not independently obtained.
• Funded by University Research Committee HKU and NSFC grant 52208086.

Bears On

• Research: Xu: China's Land Finance as Active Mode — a state-versus-developer framing of Chinese land finance; this paper's intra-state, inter-governmental-tier framing is a distinct axis.
• Concept: Land Value Capture — a case showing that even public capture of land rent raises live governance questions about which level of government captures it.
• Research: Liu: Shanghai and Chongqing's Real Estate Tax Pilots — a different Chinese fiscal instrument, useful comparison of tax-design vs. governance-design approaches to the same underlying land-finance system.

See Also

• Xu: China's Land Finance as Active Mode of Land Development
• Land Value Capture
• Liu: Shanghai and Chongqing's Real Estate Tax Pilots
• Gaffney: A Real-Assets Model of Economic Crises (China)

Sources

1. Jiayao Liu & Jin Zhu (2025), "Contested rent-based urban governance: Land rent dissipation and redistribution under scalar politics in China," Land Use Policy 157, article 107692, published 15 July 2025, DOI 10.1016/j.landusepol.2025.107692, CC-BY. sciencedirect.com — fetch blocked (403) to this session 2026-08-31, including via a reader-proxy route, despite confirmed CC-BY open-access status (no independent PDF mirror indexed anywhere at time of access); summary built from a WebSearch/RePEc-mirror reconstruction corroborated across independent extractions — used for the Zhongshan case, the implicit-rent-distribution/rent-seeking/dissipation/scalar-restructuring sequence, and the mixed-methods design (B+-claim; secondary description, full text and specific quantitative/policy detail not independently obtained).