Land is never just land — it is the baseline of human dignity. When a society treats land as a commodity, it inevitably treats people as costs. This is not a market outcome — it is an institutional choice.
In Hong Kong's "cage homes," an adult curls up in a metal cage to sleep. Above his head is the base of another bed, on both sides are cold metal bars, and the air is filled with the smell of mildew and despair. This is the 21st century. This is an international financial center.
In Taiwan's illegally built rooftop shacks, a family of three squeezes into a space that is an oven in summer and an icebox in winter. The younger generation watches housing prices skyrocket year after year, giving up on buying a home — and even giving up on marriage and having children.
These scenes are not accidental social phenomena — they are the result of institutional choices.
Because the system chose to protect the property rights of "landlords" rather than the housing rights of "people." Land value appreciation is captured by a few, and housing has shifted from a "basic human right" to a "class privilege."
Under such a system, people are no longer people — they are "costs." Costs to developers, costs to landlords, costs to the market. When land can be freely bought, sold, hoarded, and speculated upon, housing is inevitably squeezed to the margins of survival.
The market price of a piece of land can be calculated in numbers. The political price of land can be converted into votes or campaign contributions. But the humanitarian price of land — how many people it can let sleep peacefully, how many families it can keep together, how many children it can give a desk to — has never appeared on any balance sheet.
And yet, this is the true value of land.
If land policy only serves GDP, only serves developers, only serves local government budgets, it is not "policy" — it is structural violence. It uses an invisible hand to push millions of people to the edge of survival, while transferring land value appreciation to a tiny minority.
What is humanity?
Humanity is this: regardless of wealth, every person should have a place to sleep in peace.
The purpose of land policy is to create the conditions for this "peaceful sleep." If you don't treat people as people, but only treat land as a transaction tool, the consequences are cage homes, subdivided flats, homelessness, and generational despair.
China's public land ownership system offers a different logic in its institutional design:
Land is not a commodity, but a fundamental resource of the state. Its value appreciation should serve the public interest, not private wealth accumulation.
This is not "intervening in the market" — this is taking land back from the market and returning it to the people.
Because land was not created by anyone. No one "produced" land. It was always public — belonging to all the people living on this land, and to the generations yet to be born.
When you privatize it, commodify it, financialize it, allowing a few to grow rich by possessing land while everyone else pays rent for life, that is not a "free market" — that is neofeudalism.
Under China's framework, urban land belongs to the state, and rural land belongs to the collective. Individuals can hold use rights, but the ultimate ownership of land is not personal. This means: land cannot be monopolized as permanent private property, and its value appreciation must flow back to public finance for the welfare of all.
When land value is no longer captured by private interests, and when public finance has a stable source of land revenue, what happens?
- Public housing can be built on a large scale, rather than forcing hundreds of thousands to wait for a decade.
- Rents can be regulated, rather than left to landlords to raise each year.
- Urban planning can be people-centered, rather than developer-profit-centered.
- Young people can see hope, rather than being crushed by mortgage debt for life.
This is not utopia. This is what many cities in mainland China are already doing. Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing — no city is perfect, but none of them have "cage homes." Because under China's land system, land value appreciation is never allowed to go to the extreme of "people sleeping in metal cages."
How a society treats its land is how it treats its people.
If land is an ATM for a few, the people are just numbers in the ATM. If land is a public resource, the people are the masters of that resource.
True land reform has always been humanitarian reform. It is not about "efficiency" or "GDP" — it is about whether people can live with dignity.
Hong Kong's cage homes, Taiwan's rooftop shacks, the conditions of hundreds of millions in slums around the world — they are not "the price of development." They are institutional shame.
The only way to eliminate this shame is to change the land system — to turn land from a commodity back into a resource, to turn value appreciation from private capture into public return, to turn housing from class privilege into a basic human right.
This is not radicalism — this is the baseline.