Chapter 2 uses official data and primary documents to examine land as a factor of production and the legal status of land in China’s political economy. It highlights how insecure property rights and incomplete markets for land diverge from the liberal economic model. As codified in law, the state generates rents through its ability to take land from the rural sector at below-market prices to sell into the urban real estate and industrial sectors at higher and lower prices, respectively. This pattern is reminiscent of the planned economy and enacts urban bias. Local governments rely on land for revenue, as a tool of industry policy, and for capital mobilization through local government financing vehicles (LGFVs). Informality persists in the form of illegal land conversion and “small property rights” in urban villages and elsewhere. Beyond the analysis of land law at the rural-urban interface, the chapter also analyzes land rights within the rural and urban sectors, respectively. Within the agricultural sector, reforms have improved the property rights of rural households to arable land, but limits on rights and sources of insecurity remain. Urban households have been the beneficiaries of housing reforms, giving them a vested interest in resisting property taxes.