The Impact of Land Property Right on China’s Rural-urban Migration

China is a country which has its own unique land property system. Some suggest that the land property rights in China, particularly in rural areas, have limited its economic development, and the free labor flow. The rural to urban migration creates a labor flow, expanding in urbanization and integrating with positive economic activities. However, with blurry and unclear property right policies making it hard to process the transfer of land, lead to a heavy burden on internal migration. To solve the problem and promote more people to migrate, and as the demand of land rose, the Chinese government has thought of two main ways of land transfer in the past years. One way is through the market channel which refers to renting the land out, the other is through the government channel, in which the land is appropriated by the government authorities and converted into other ways of usage. Focusing on the survey data from the peasants who have agricultural land in their household, we compare the two mainstream land transfers in China’s rural areas’s influence on people’s migration choice. Using probit models in this paper to observe the casual relationship between different land transfer channels and people’s migration choice to provide suggestions for the future direction of China's land transfer.