Impact of Tenure Implementation on Peasant Households' Perceived Control over Land: From a Perspective of Cognitive Balance Theory

The improvement of peasant households' perceived control over land is an important way to construct their master consciousness and induce productive behavior. Meanwhile, it also reflects the performance outcomes of land reform in terms of strengthening land property usufruct property. This paper employs a survey of 1114 peasant households collected in four provinces, namely Jiangsu, Hubei, Guangxi and Heilongjiang, and empirically tests the impact of land tenure security on peasant households' perceived control over land. The results indicate that there is a temporal consistency tendency of peasant households' perceived control over land. Secure land tenure makes peasant households prone to keep transcendental perceived control, while insecure land tenure results in the change in the perception of peasant households with stronger transcendental perceived control over land. The empirical results show that peasant households with land certificate possession and without land allocation experiences display a relatively higher temporal consistency of perceived control over land. The lack of land certificates and experiences in land allocation lowers current perceived control over land among peasant households with stronger priori perceived control over land. Therefore, the administrative core of rural collective land ownership should be peeled off, land property usufruct property should be strengthened further, and peasant households' perceived control over land will be enhanced by the improvement of tenure security.