Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, the system of  "collective ownership" of China's rural land has been constantly improved to adapt to the development of China's rural productivity.However, the western scholars and domestic neo-liberal scholars have been criticizing the "collective ownership" of rural land in China for various reasons, and advocating that "privatization" of land is the panacea for solving the problems of agriculture, rural areas and farmers. For this hind of misunderstanding, we first of all elaborate the theoretical source of  "collective ownership" and its development in China in the theoretical level, as well as focus on the key disputes over the current land system and analysis of "mystery of Alchian" to propose the fact that the private ownership is not better than the pubfic ownership; secondly, we summarize the lessons learned from foreign land "privatization" and the successful experience of China adhering to the "collective ownership" to propose that it is correct for China to adhere to "collective ownership" of rural land to avoid a series of political, economic and social problems brought by land privatization, which is the proper way in line with the socialist development.

Editor: Zhong Yao

Contemporary Economic Research.2017.No.2.