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Based on the brief historical review, the purpose of this paper is to expound the target and bottom line for the farmland institutional reform of in China, analyze the “Chinese scenes” and historical heritage of farmland institutional arrangement, evaluate the policies and their effects over the last four decades and outline the keynotes and possible direction of the future reform.

The paper builds the analytical clue of “institutional target – institutional heritage – policy effort – realistic dilemma – future direction” and review and forecast the Chinese farmland institutional reform.

The farmland institution is an important issue with Chinese characteristics. Over the last four decades, the farmland institutional reform in China has focused on “stabilizing the land property rights” and “promote the farmland transfer.” As the study indicates, the promotion of farmland transfer has not effectively improved the scale economy of agriculture and stabilizing land property rights by titling may restrain the development of farmland transfer market because farmland transfer is of special market logic.

It depends on the revitalization of farmland management rights to resolve the transaction constraint of personal property and its endowment effect in farmland transfer. And, classifying the land management property to involve farmers into the economy of division can be reference for the reform of traditional agriculture worldwide.

This paper seeks to understand the evolution of financial intermediation in the course of China's economic transition.

The research is based on a unique data set collected by the authors and other collaborators from a 1998 survey of financial institutions, enterprises, and government officials in southern China.

Based on an empirical investigation of rural financial reforms, it is argued that China's two‐decade long financial reform was a gradual process that accommodates reforms in other sectors and responds to changing policy goals and the economic and institutional environment in which financial institutions operate. Although using standard measures of financial system performance may cast doubt on the effectiveness of China's rural banking system, when one understands the different roles that it has been asked to play, it can be argued that it has not operated so poorly.

In conclusion, it is found that China's rural economic environment is still changing. If the system continues to change in the future, responding to pressures in the economy, further financial reforms will almost certainly emerge in the coming years.

These findings, although primarily from the 1980s and 1990s, are still helpful in understanding the reform process that is currently ongoing.

This paper will help readers make sense of agricultural financial reforms and will allow for more discourse over what has been accomplished and what still is needed.

This is the first manuscript to comprehensively put China's rural financial reforms into the context of modern economic analysis, explaining why China's government proceeded as they did and why the reforms have unfolded in such a stop and start manner.

In recent decades, the responsibility for the financing of compulsory education in rural China has rested with townships and villages which, with limited tax authority and uneven revenue capacity, increasingly relied on a plethora of arbitrarily imposed fees for funding. To reduce farmers’ fiscal burdens, in 2000, the central government installed a series of rural taxation reforms. Correspondingly, the central government shifted the administrative responsibilities of rural compulsory education to the county level in 2001, and implemented a series of policies to make up for the loss of revenues to education. Using a provincial-level dataset from 1998 to 2006, we examined whether and how the rural taxation reforms affected the adequacy and equity of compulsory education finance in China, addressing related theoretical and policy implications from the perspective of intergovernmental fiscal relations.

Poverty alleviation has been a major theme of China's modernization process since the founding of New China. This paper points out that China's poverty alleviation process presents three stylized facts: “Miraculous” achievements of poverty alleviation have been made on a global scale; the poverty alleviation achievements mainly occurred in the high growth stage after reform and opening up; the poverty alleviation process is accompanied by the structural transformation of the urban–rural dual economy.

Therefore, a logically consistent analytical framework should form among the structural transformation of the dual economy, economic growth and the achievements in poverty alleviation. In logical deduction, the structural transformation of the dual economy affects rural poverty alleviation through the effects of labor reallocation, agricultural productivity improvement, demographic change and fiscal resource allocation.

The first two refer to economic growth, and the latter two are alleviation policies. The combination of economic growth and poverty alleviation policies is the main cause for poverty alleviation performance. China's empirical evidence can support the four effects by which the structural transformation of the dual economy affects poverty alleviation.

China's socialist system and its economic system transformation after reform and opening up provide an institutional basis for the effects to come into play. After 2020, China's poverty alleviation strategies will enter the “second-half” phase, namely, the phase of solving the problems of relative poverty in urban and rural areas by adopting conventional methods and establishing long-term mechanisms. This requires the facilitation of the reconnection between poverty alleviation strategies and the structural transformation of the dual economy in terms of development ideas and policy directions.

Bottlenecked by rural underdevelopment, China’s overall development is bound to be inadequate and unbalanced. Through a brief retrospect of the reform directed against the “equalitarianism (egalitarianism)” in China’s rural areas, as well as the Chinese Government’s conceptual transformation and systemic construction and improvement thereof, the purpose of this paper is to clarify the panoramic significance of rural reform; the necessity, priority, and long-term nature of the current rural development; and the important role of public policy in doing so. It also looks ahead to consider the prospects for future rural reform.

This paper first reviews the rural reforms that were carried out in 1978. Second, it introduces the government’s conceptual change regarding rural reform and the establishment and improvement of the system that underlies it. Finally, the future of rural reform is envisaged.

The initial rural reforms brought extensive and profound changes to China’s rural areas. The experience of rural reform has been referred to and escalated by other fields of study. Hence, rural reforms have become something of global significance. Moreover, since the government can undertake reforms well beyond the reach of farmers, its views must be modified in a timely manner, and only then may it reasonably construct and improve the system pertaining to the “three rural issues (agriculture, rural areas, and farmers).”

This paper reviews the rural reforms carried out in 1978. It introduces the government’s change of concept with respect to rural reforms and the establishment and improvement of the system based on the “three rural issues,” thus looking forward to the future of rural reforms. The findings of this paper are of significance to the formulation of future agricultural policies.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the structure and changes of China’s land system. To achieve this aim, the paper is divided into four parts. The first part gives a brief introduction to the structural characteristics of the Chinese land institutional arrangements; the second part analyzes the reform process of the land system in the past 40 years and its path of change; the third part engages the discussion about the historic contribution made by the land institutional change to rapid economic growth and structural changes; and the final part is conclusion and some policy implications.

After 40 years of reforms and opening up, China has not only created a growth miracle unparalleled for any major country in human history, but also transformed itself from a rural to an urban society. Behind this great transformation is a systemic reform in land institutions. Rural land institutions went from collectively owned to household responsibility system, thereby protecting farmers’ land rights. This process resulted in long-term sustainable growth in China’s agriculture, a massive rural-urban migration and a historical agricultural transformation. The conversion of agricultural land to non-agricultural uses and the introduction of market mechanisms made land a policy tool in driving high economic growth, industrialization and urbanization.

Research shows that the role of land and its relationship with the economy will inevitably change as China’s economy enters a new stage of medium-to-high speed growth. With economic restructuring, low-cost industrial land will be less effective. Urbanization is also shifting from rapid expansion to endogenous growth so that returns on land capitalization will decrease and risks will increase. Therefore, China must abandon land-dependent growth model through deepening land reforms and adapt a new pattern of economic development.

This paper gives a brief introduction to the structural characteristics of the Chinese land institutional arrangements, analyzes the reform process of the land system in the past 40 years and its path of change, and evaluates the historic contribution made by the land institutional change to rapid economic growth and structural changes.

Historically, China's political attempts to provide access to rural credit has met with mixed results and an institutional structure that often strays from intended policy goals. Unlike Robin Hood of English lore, the emergence of financial institutions in China appears to have robbed from the poor to lend to the rich, with actions that severely depleted the lending resources required for rural development. Historically, there has been a close correspondence between financial depression and the many policy‐driven financial institutions that dominated the rural financial system in China. More recently, ongoing reforms are dedicated towards a gradual liberalization within the system. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to rethink the structure of rural finance in China, reviewing the current reform and putting forward the policy implications.

The paper explores the context of agricultural transition and political process as defined by the various interlinkages across the Chinese rural financial system.

The paper finds that there has been negligible progress in the evolution of the rural financial market in China. The policy‐led financial institutions ended up as merely a disbursement window and a costly drain on state budget. Institutional changes were locked in by patching up the existing institutions. The ongoing reforms projected by policymakers promote competition among different institutional lenders and thus potentially improve the financial services in rural areas.

This paper analyzes the new‐round reform of rural finance in China and brings forward the future direction of rural finance in China.

In this paper, the authors present a case study of successful school leadership at County Line Middle School. The purpose of the paper is to identify how particular leadership practices and beliefs were adapted to increase student achievement in this rural, high-poverty school in the southeastern USA.

After purposefully selecting this school, the authors adapted interview protocols, questionnaires, and analysis frameworks from the International Successful School Principalship Project to develop a multi-perspective case study of principal leadership practices at the school.

The findings illustrate the practices which led to students at this school, previously the lowest-performing in the district, achieving significantly higher on state standardized tests, getting along “like a family,” and regularly participating in service learning activities and charity events. A particularly interesting finding was how the principal confronted the school's negative self-image and adapted common leadership practices to implement a school-wide reform that suited its unique context.

While the findings of the study explicate the specific ways the principal adapted leadership strategies to enhance student learning, this study also highlights the need to understand how principals become familiar with their community's needs, cultures, norms, and values, and exercise leadership in accordance with them.

The case offers an example of the need for context-responsive leadership in schools. In particular, it illustrates how this principal enacted leadership strategies that successfully negotiated what Woods (2006) referred to as the changing politics of the rural. To realize this success, the principal utilized his understanding of this low income, rural community to guide his leadership practices. Critically, part of this understanding included the ways the community was connected to and isolated from dominant sub-urban and urban societies, and how to build enthusiasm and capacity through appeals to local values.

While it is widely acknowledged that school leaders need to consider their school and community contexts when making leadership decisions, less research has focussed on understanding how this can be achieved. This case provides rich examples of how this was accomplished in a rural, high-poverty middle school.

The paper sets out to consider the impact of China's reform dynamics on its cooperative economy, examining developments both within the statist sector and beyond, in the variety of experimental quasi‐cooperative forms that have grown between plan and market.

The paper employs a field study approach, examining the roles of farmers' specialised cooperatives within the agro‐industrial chain with experiments in Shandong province.

The paper shows that reforms in the cooperative economy have been gradual, uneven and jerky, favouring the more entrepreneurial or better‐placed farmers to pursue new market opportunities. Creating a sustainable mechanism that would protect and even enhance the interests of the poorer farmers is proving to be far more difficult.

The field study of this paper covers just one region. A further investigation of the impact that the reform dynamics has on the cooperative economy is planned for the near future.

China's approach has favoured experimentation, encouraging initiatives from below and developing a more flexible relationship between government and farmers. This broad bottom‐up approach has allowed for a diversity of models adapted to local conditions, but has also led to uncertainties about the limits of local government influence and the extent of autonomy, with many cooperatives taking an investor‐oriented direction.

The paper adopts a broader social economy perspective that offers a fruitful way to evaluate developments and consider the future for China's cooperative economy.

The welfare state is certainly paradoxical. On the one hand, it is extraordinary mundane, concerned with the minutiae of the pension and benefit rights of millions of citizens. On the other, the sheer scale of its growth is one of the most remarkable features of the post-war capitalist world and it remains on of the dominant, if sometimes unnoticed, institutions of the modern world. (Pierson, 1998, p. 208)