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Chinese central government uses top-down land quotas as a key tool for limiting urban expansion. Faced with the benefits of land development, how will local governments respond to centralised quotas? We established a framework for multidimensional local government competition to explain quota implementation. This framework includes vertical competition for fiscal revenue and quotas, horizontal competition for economic growth and political promotion, competition between former and subsequent local leaders for recognition of their leadership and temporal distribution of land finance revenue and government debt and competition with landowners as well as developers for land appreciation income and tax revenue. We argue that these types of competition and their spill-over effects drive local governments to strengthen land-centred urbanisation, resulting in the failure of quotas to restrain urban expansion. Our findings help to improve the understanding of local governments' strategies for urban spatial development and centralised urban growth management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How to effectively promote the large-scale and market-oriented farmland leasing process in China is one of the most important practical issues concerning the current academic circle and decision makers. However, restricted by the current situation of rural social development, farmers' spontaneous and informal farmland leasing is still widespread. Exploring the long-term evolution characteristics of informal farmland leasing at the village scale is of great significance for optimizing the process of farmland leasing, perfecting the farmland leasing market, and promoting moderate-scale farmland management. Therefore, based on field survey data from the whole village and social network analysis methods, this research conducted a detailed empirical study on the characteristics, development process, and consequences of informal farmland leasing behavior in a traditional rural society in central China. The results show that with the development of time, the scope of informal farmland leasing in Huang village has been expanding, of which more than 70% of the farmland in 2020 was leased among acquaintances. Farmland leasing among acquaintances is becoming a trend toward informal farmland leasing in some villages. At present, 13 large-scale households lease 73.9% of the total area of farmland leasing in Huang village. The informal farmland leasing in the village has basically formed a centralized circulation pattern with the villager group as the core, which can promote moderate-scale farming to a certain extent. However, there are also problems, such as the ability of a simple internal leasing mode to resist external risks is limited. The findings may be helpful in rethinking China's farmland leasing policy and provide useful insights into the multifaceted rural sustainability of other similar traditional villages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]