Posted: Soumis par wtanaka (648) le lun, 2006-01-02 11:11. | Sujet: Purchasing land or a house in rural China

I'd like to share my observations about buying a house or land in or around Xianggeilla.  The rules probably apply to some degree to other non-metropolitan areas in China, but I don't know for sure.  If anyone has any insights, I'd love to hear them, since I might be going about things all wrong.  =)  A post on Lonely Planet's forums inspired this.

Land in villages is still allocated at the level of the villages.  It's passed down from generation to generation, and there's no GPS to tell you were plot boundaries are, so people rely on things like rocks and trees as landmarks.  Disputes don't come up since everyone in the village knows where all the boundaries are.

To transfer the ownership of a piece of property, there apparently needs to be consensus among all the people in the village.  Otherwise, they can make life difficult for any new "owner" that they don't recognize.  A purchase is accomplished after meetings are called, and everyone in the village gets compensated for the land that gets sold.

There may be some national law about the government owning all land and people just renting it, but that doesn't seem to affect every day life in the villages here.  People believe they own the land (and if economic reform in China continues the way it's going, probably formally will at some point if they don't already).

There's something called a "tu di shi yong zheng", which seems to be analagous to a land deed and gives you some kind of eminent domain rights over the land.  However, most peple don't have one of these, and they're difficult to get (the central government seems to stop issuing them country-wide every so often).  Also, people seem to get reimbursed (to some extent) when the government takes their land whether or not they have any papers.  People do the thing here where they renovate property that's going to be condemed to get more money from the government.

The situation in the "villages" in the city itself is a bit different.  There you don't need communal agreement -- you just need to make sure that the village chief/mayor approves and is officially aware of the transfer.  Again, there are no centralized records of boundaries, so make sure to define them well in your contract.

As far as foreigners actually owning/100-year-leasing land under their own name, I'm sure it's possible with guanxi, but I don't know what the official laws are.

It is also possible to buy a house (but not the land), which sometimes involves carting the house off and using the wood somewhere else.  This is a handy way to avoid some of the legal problems involved in purchasing or using new lumber in Yunnan.