incidence of land takings over the period. Although compensation levels remained close to the net present value of profits from agricultural production, their level increased slightly compared to before the RLCL.

# **3.1 Data sources and basic characteristics**

To obtain reliable information on an issue as sensitive as that of land expropriations, we use a two-stage sampling procedure and rely on resident enumerators in the selected locations who are intimately familiar with the communities which they had covered several times for the Rural Survey Team of China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).<sup>18</sup> The main element of the first stage, conducted in Oct. 2003, shortly after the promulgation of the RLCL, was a survey of 1200 villages, randomly selected from NBS’ regular household survey sample, in China’s 12 main provinces. Administrative records were relied upon as much as possible to obtain reliable information. A quiz with eight substantive questions on the content of the RLCL was administered to village leaders and -with questions regarding their exposure to RLCLrelated dissemination activities- to the 10 households in NBS’ master sample.<sup>19</sup> Of the 12 provinces included in the first survey, the 9 with the highest levels of land market and land taking activity were selected for a follow-up survey in February/March of 2005 to assess whether the law had led to any changes in observed behavior at the village level. With the goal of providing an update on village level variables included in the earlier survey, more specific questions on takings and land reallocation since the RLCL had come into force were posed. In addition, to obtain specific information on the processes involved and also to provide a cross-check on the information obtained from officials, up to 4 households affected by land takings were selected for household-level interviews.<sup>20</sup> Characteristics of the sample villages, which on average comprise 427 households with some 4 members each, at the regional level, are described in table 1.<sup>21</sup> With 79%, the majority of households still rely on agriculture as the main source of income, a share that ranges between 90% for Southwest and only 51% in the Coast. Large differences between the Coast and the rest of the country are also visible in annual per capita income where the amount for the Coast is, with Y 4,600, about 50% above the national average (Y 3,000) and more than double the earnings in the Southwest (Y 1,980). Wealth differences are reflected by the variation of the value of village assets (Y 0.56 mn. on average), between Y 1.15 mn in the coast and

> 18 Enumerators visit sample households every two weeks, in addition to conducting an annual village survey, something that has led experts to generally consider these data as being of very good quality (Jalan and Ravallion 2001). In fact, the database generated constitutes to our knowledge the only base of information about land expropriations in China that has at least approximately national and comprehensive coverage. 19 The sample for this survey is drawn in a three-stage sampling using the 1997 Agricultural Census which covers all households residing in rural areas (excluding military camps, welfare houses, temples, prisons, and boats) as a sample frame. Within each province, first counties, and then administrative villages are drawn with probability proportional to size (PPS). Subsequently, households in each village are drawn in a simple random sampling (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2002).

> 20 Fore each of the villages where land acquisition had taken place, the goal was to interview 4 households, equally split into two who lost land before the RCLC’s came into force and two thereafter. Also, in cases where land had been taken for public infrastructure and private investment, the sample was stratified to maximize the changes of including both types. For the 202 villages that had reported land takings in the 2003 survey, we obtained on average 3.3 households with usable data.

> 21 The 4 regions are defined as follows: North and Northeast region include Liaoning and Hebei provinces, Coastal includes Zhejiang and Shandong provinces, the Central region include Henan and Hubei provinces, and the Southwest includes Sichuan, Guizhou and Shanxi provinces.

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