The quality of democratic management of cooperatives in rural Beijing is of some concern to the Beijing Municipal Agricultural Commission. Secretary General Du Yintang's capable staff at ICCIC also conducts PRA (Participatory Rural Assessments). Technical reviews of legitimacy is how Beijing keeps a close eye on the formation and management of its peripheral cooperatives, in order to mitigate against certain risks. Today's farmland is leased out long term to households in what are called land use contracts. If land use contracts held by various contiguous households are pooled into a cooperative, it's much easier for property developers to engineer a transfer of rights en masse for commercial enterprises. This may not be in everybody's best interests.

Private ownership, on the other hand – or its doppelganger, a model featuring "voluntary land use transfer rights" – has been espoused within the context of agricultural reform, usually by capitalist disciples entering China after Deng's reform and opening-up got underway. Champions of both the cooperative and private ownership models recognize the challenges posed by any form of massive reorganization of the countryside, but take a gentlemanly stance against each other's solutions.

So Gung Ho is once again at the heart of social justice matters; it promotes what it says is a reasonable alternative to private ownership models and land transfer mechanisms. Today's reality is that people are leaving the countryside for different prospects in cities, subleasing their plots to members of the family who remain in the area. Over time, a family group may have a set of holdings that are not geographically contiguous. Marriages also further complicate the issue of how to reshape, reallocate or exchange holdings that make practical sense for the people left to work it. Readjustments conducted by local cadres became common.

A capitalist model argues these readjustments discourage investment in the land; they could mean a loss of what a farmer has put into irrigation systems, greenhouses, or soil enrichment. Supporters of private ownership point out that investments made by farmers with documentation or "deeds" of a sort, is double that of those without. "Voluntary market transactions" of land "leased long term without readjustments" effectively mimics private ownership and would address the needed stimulation of investment. Holes in record-keeping, documentation that fails to record a wife's name as an equal shareholder; lack of adequate land description, lack of knowledge about the 2007 Property Law and its provisions, including those that safeguard the rights of daughters who marry and leave for other villages – all these problems the current Chinese government has inherited, would be wiped out along the way, they say.

However, Gung Ho is part of a tradition that its supporters think is more democratic and people-centered, one that may be better equipped to bridge the kind of deficits that currently make capitalist-style private ownership of land a bad fit with China's rural realities. Proponents of cooperatives say their solution addresses all the same issues and does it more sensitively; making land a commodity will bring its own curses. "Theoretically private ownership looks like a great idea, but in China it is not a practical or feasible design, and unlikely to produce good results," comments Zhang Xiaoshan. Since 42 percent of farmers still lack any document or "deed," it stands to reason that lack of adequate land description would be an impediment to the issuance of official documents of ownership, or seem to require massive surveying efforts and arbitration processes.

Michael Crook has deeper objections, "Permanent disassociation of farmers from the land will cause massive social unrest in my opinion." Guo Lulai, a professor at the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), agrees with him in so far as "land for rural inhabitants is a form of social security." That said, the government does recognize that urbanization is a worldwide phenomenon, a choice people are making, and one they support in principle – and even encourage. But until China has put another form of social security in place – estimates are by 2020 – it is not feasible or wise to allow rapid and complete disassociation of farmers from their land.

What cooperatives offer is a third or middle way. To satisfy the inevitable effects of change, such as that brought about by social migration, a person's investment in a cooperative, expressed as shares, can be transferred to others or to other cooperatives. Long or short term transfer of land rights to relatives can still be used to achieve both freedom and connection to the soil.