Taking property rights seriously: reducing gender bias in the rural arable land contracting system in China

Chinese women enjoy constitutional and statutory equal rights to men, including property rights in rural land. In practice, however, women’s property rights in the rural arable land contracting system have been dwarfed by those of men. Many women made strategic move in the critical decisions of marriage and divorce to either exploit or circumvent the gender-based practice of allocation of such property rights, which invited backlash and created serious legal and policy challenges. The gender-based bias in basic property right in rural land reflected a long-lasting tension in the current decision-making mechanism in rural China: such property rights of women are attached to their marital status and membership in the rural collectives. The ultimate solution lies in taking seriously such property rights of women and redefining the property right nature of these rights, by decoupling marital status of women from their property rights and institutionalizing such delineation, including allowing full transferability of such property rights.