Meina Cai

Assistant Professor, Political Science and Asian and Asian American Studies

Primary Research Theme

People and the City

Secondary Research Themes

Governance and Urban Services

Recent Cities-related Projects

  • Development of land property rights in China: In face to formal legal discrimination against rural land, villagers have pursued their land property rights through informal ways. This project examines how the state and society interact to shape the development of land property rights in China.
  • Public policy on land-taking compensation: The project compiles a dataset on the local land-taking compensation policies at the county level in China over a decade and examine the subnational variation in the compensation policy.
  • Rural governance: The urbanization turns massive villagers into urban residents in China. The project examines how this urbanization process influence rural governance, such as village elections, villagers’ political participation, villagers’ political trust etc.

Selected Urban-Related Publications

Cai, Meina, Ilia Murtazashvili, and Jennifer Murtazashvili, and Raufhon Salahodjaev. “Patience and Climate Change Policy: Global Evidence.” Environmental Research. Forthcoming.

Cai, Meina, Pengfei Liu, and Hui Wang “Land Commodification and Hukou Policy Innovations in China” Journal of Chinese Governance. Forthcoming.

Cai, Meina, Ilia Murtazashvili, Jennifer Murtazashvili, and Hui Wang. “Sugarcoating the Bitter Pill: Compensation, Land Governance, and Opposition to Land Expropriation in China.” Journal of Peasant Studies. Forthcoming.

Cai, Meina, Ilia Murtazashvili, and Jennifer Murtazashvili. 2020. “The Politics of Land Property Rights.” Journal of Institutional Economics 16 : 151-167.

Cai, Meina, Pengfei Liu, and Hui Wang. 2020. “Political Trust, Risk Preferences, and Policy Support: Evidence from Survey Experiments in China.” World Development 125, 104687.

Cai, Meina, Ilia Murtazashvili, and Jennifer Murtazashvili, and Raufhon Salahodjaev. 2019. “Individualism and Governance of the Commons” Public Choice, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-019-00722-3

Cai M. (2018). Institutional bindingness, power structure, and land expropriation in China. [no publisher provided].

Cai M. (2017). Revenue, time horizon, and land allocation in China. Land Use Policy.

Cai, Meina. 2016. “Land for Welfare in China.” Land Use Policy 55: 1-12.

Cai, Meina. 2015. “”Flying Land”: Institutional Innovation in Land Management in Contemporary China,” in Local Governance Innovation in China: Experimentation, Diffusion, and Defiance, Jessica C. Teets and William Hurst (eds), New York: Routledge, 2014: 60-83.

Cai M. (2015). Review of China’s Disappearing Countryside. Journal of Chinese Political Science.