You Own the Flat, the State Owns the Ground: Seventy-Year Leases in China — Epoche B1
When you buy a flat in a Chinese city, you buy the building but not the land under it: urban land belongs to the state, and what comes with the flat is a right to use that land for a fixed term. Here is what that means in practice. How long is the term? Seventy years for residential land. Commercial and industrial land are granted for shorter periods. The clock starts when the land was granted to the developer, not when you sign — so a flat in an older block may have rather less than seventy years left. What does the certificate say? Since the property registers were unified, a single certificate records both the ownership of the flat and the land use right, with its starting and ending dates printed on it. Has a lease ever actually expired? Yes. Around 2016 in Wenzhou, plots granted in the 1990s on unusually short twenty-year terms ran out. Owners were at first quoted large renewal sums; the responsible ministry then instructed that renewal proceed without an application and without a fee, as an interim arrangement. And the law today? The Civil Code, in force since 2021, states that residential land use rights renew automatically when the term ends. Whether any payment is due on renewal, and how much, is left to later legislation. As of this writing that question is genuinely open. So is the flat safe? Practically, yes: no government has an interest in dispossessing millions of households, and the direction of the law has been towards reassurance. Legally, the sentence about fees remains unwritten. It is worth sitting with the distinction. Ownership everywhere is a bundle of promises rather than a fact about soil — China simply writes the term on the paper, where other systems leave it unsaid. References National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China (2020). Civil Code of the People's Republic of China, Article 359. Beijing: National People's Congress. National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China (2007). Property Law of the People's Republic of China, Article 149. Beijing: National People's Congress. Ho, P. (2001). Who owns China's land? Policies, property rights and deliberate institutional ambiguity. The China Quarterly, 166, pp. 394–421.