In reality, land finance has become a nation-wide phenomenon.
The share of land leasing fees as part of government revenue rose
from 9.7% in 1993 to 36.2% in 2010. Meanwhile, the area of city
built-up area increased by 3.12 times from 1990 to 2010 (China
Statistics Yearbook, 1994–2012). At the township and village level,
capitalization of collective land has played an essential role. Based
upon the survey of Wen (1998), land value appreciation converted
from farmland to TVEs’ use had been captured by the TVEs without
any cost or with very low cost in the 1980s, and it occupied
around 30% of all investment of TVEs. Therefore, rural industrialization
has been greatly facilitated by the free use of collective land.
The “land-centered urban politics” has been regarded as one of the
most important driving forces behind the spectacular expansion of
Chinese cites and urbanization of China since the mid-1990s (Deng
et al., 2010)