'Can a vibrant real estate market arise in a nation with a stunted legal system? Hernando de Soto famously thought not. Splendidly interweaving field findings with social-scientific theory, Shitong Qiao dismantles the de Soto thesis. In many Chinese cities, booming housing markets have rested largely on informal understandings.' Robert Ellickson, Walter E. Meyer Professor of Property and Urban Law, Yale Law School 'In this remarkable book, Shitong Qiao not only illustrates the intricacies of China's booming periurban land market but also demonstrates how Chinese peasants, together with newly urbanizing industrial workers, have fashioned extensive systems of informal 'small property' commercial land transactions, in spite of a legal system that purportedly forbids them. Qiao's book offers a nuanced discussion of the relationships between law and social norms in Chinese land markets, along with a significant rejoinder to the view that dynamic land markets depend on formal systems of property law.' Carol M. Rose, University of Arizona 'A fascinating exploration of the lively housing market that arose in suburban Shenzhen outside the framework of formal law. Based on in-depth field research, Qiao documents the residential building boom, and he then assesses both the strengths and the ultimate limitations of extra-legal arrangements as engines of development.' Susan Rose-Ackerman, Yale University, Connecticut 'In this multi-disciplinary work, Qiao has taken Robert Ellickson's pioneering work on social norms and property rights from rural California to Shenzhen, China, one of the world's fastest growing, most complex urban markets. In doing so he has demonstrated that much of what we thought we knew about law, property rights, social norms, and development was incomplete at best and flat wrong at worst.' Frank Upham, Wilf Family Professor of Property Law, New York University School of Law 'All in all, this book provides very valuable insights into the evolution of China's property rights regime. It revisits several influential conventional theories and offers critical and valid scrutiny based on empirical findings in China. These insights are most likely applicable to other primitive property markets in developing countries too. The author advances the theoretical depth of existing literature and offers an analytical framework for further research worth doing by scholars of varying fields, including property law, comparative law, law and development, and law and economics.' Weitseng Chen, ICON