This research project, in close collaboration with Chinese partners, considers the ways in which evolving public interest practices in China are meeting the legal needs of the 900 million farmers in the countryside. Specifically, the project examines how rural legal aid centers address certain externalities of China's economic development and its concomitants of urbanization and migration, namely, the legal consequences of changing policies toward real property and its regulation. Transitional China shows the emergence of new privatized actors operating within socialist administrative systems. These relationships are both produced by and productive of valuations of land, its use, ownership, and transfer, which differ markedly from those of just a generation ago. Emergent markets in rural land complicate views of land value held by local social groups defined by region, religion, and ethnicity. Land laws, as the product of compromise and calculation, may create a set of conditions preferable to the realization of certain types of value of land over others. The leading question of this research, therefore, is: what role do legal aid centers play in mediating the different modalities of land ownership held by diverse actors in transitional societies?
To address this question, the project compares the operation of different legal aid centers in rural China to examine the capacity of such institutions to address differences in views toward the use, value, and meaning of land. The methodology employed is on-site participation in client counseling and observation of claimants' visits to legal aid centers and their interaction with legal aid personnel. Further, semi-structured interviews will be conducted with members of the local community as to the wider impact of the legal aid center. The project uses the case of China to build theory about the role of public interest law in transitional economies.
