Concerns about agricultural land use and its institutional
arrangement has long been a heated topic (Blarel et al., 1992; Tan
et al., 2006). While research on non-agricultural land use in the
peri-urban areas is fairly scarce there are some good examples of
those trying to model land use dynamics, measure and characterize
peri-urbanizing systems, and identify driving forces behind land
use dynamics in peri-urban areas (Sui & Zeng, 2000; Heikkila and
Shen, 2003; Long et al., 2007). These studies, however, have mainly
focused on prefecture-level cities, and the analysis of the driving
forces has been limited to general macro-level factors such as GDP,
the urbanization process and population growth. This paper is an
attempt to enrich our understanding of land use change in periurban
areas, especially at the township and village level, and its
driving forces from the perspective of local state corporatism via a
comparative study of the PRD and YRD. This paper addresses the
following research questions: