New Progress in Privatization of the Collective Forest Land in China: Evidence from 9 Villages

China started forest land tenure reform in the early 1980s. The household responsibility system (HRS) was usually referred to as reform even though various forms of reforms have been developed from region to region. More importantly, the approaches to reform have been evolving through time. A trend toward privatization became more apparent when the Central Government started a pilot experiment called new stage of forestland tenure reform recently. While this paper compares the various roads toward privatization and adopting market mechanisms, special attention is paid to new reforms by examining and comparing 9 villages (330 households) in 3 provinces in Southeast China where collective forest ownership is dominant. The impacts, public attitudes and response to the new reform are investigated, and some challenging questions are analyzed.