The collectively owned rural land has been managed by a threetiered
governance system: township, administrative village and
natural village (Ho, 2001). However, how much each entity is
entitled to has never been clearly delineated, and the ownership
boundary of the collective is not fixed. Thus, collective land ownership
is ambiguous to its nominal owners (Cai, 2003). With the
incomplete and non-tradable status of land use rights over collective
land, the problem of land fragmentation remains highly
intractable