How administrative powers have impacted land-use development in China during the last 30 years: A diachronic corpus-based news values analysis

Administrative powers have historically played a central role in shaping land use in China, yet existing research methods often overlooked the complex sociological ways these powers influence land allocation and development. This study addresses these gaps by analyzing the social portrayal of land use in Chinese mass media, using corpus linguistic techniques and a discursive news values analysis to examine key words, nomination strategies, and photographs. The results show that China's land use has been enormously urbanized through the last 30 years, with the concept of state-owned land use gradually decentralized into localized, commercialized and functionalized land use. During the urbanization of land use, administrative powers have been consistently highlighted in news reports through the last 30 years as continuously exerting a negative effect on China's land use development. The main sources of this effect include various illicit management arrangements, such as under-the-table dealings and power and money transactions related to land use rights, misappropriation of land transfer funds, compulsory land expropriation, land overtaxation, and illegal land tax abatement. These types of activities have much negative value in the news owing to their sustained and prominent nature. The results of this study further reveal that various social problems related to land use, including land use transfer, land use taxation, and land use rights expiration and renewal, are significantly correlated with the concentration of administrative powers. Furthermore, the bane of administrative powers taints every link of China's land use development. Thus, the administrative powers in China's land use management urgently need to be weakened or supervised, and the professional legal competence of administrative institutions should be improved. In particular, the administrative powers of local governments, which have frequently been revealed, via news reports, as the culprits behind land market harassment, should be addressed. Quantitative news data analysis provides solid evidence of the negative impact of the administratized dual-track land allocation system on China's social land use and powerful support for previous policy-centered research, elucidating both the defects of the dual-track land allocation system and a way to eliminate this system.