Beyond the Three Ambiguities: A Capability Approach to Divorced Women’s Collective Membership for Land Expropriation Compensation in Rural China

Under the dual impact of new urbanization and rural population mobility, divorced rural women in China face severe challenges in obtaining collective membership qualification for land expropriation compensation. The newly enacted Rural Collective Economic Organization Law (RCEOL) contains ambiguous provisions, hindering effective implementation. This study asks: How can collective membership qualification for divorced rural women be determined based on pre-enactment court judgments to refine the law’s ambiguities? Adopting a qualitative design, data were collected from China Judgments Online. Through systematic keyword search, 238 court judgments were retrieved and analyzed using a three-level coding procedure (open, axial, selective). The theoretical framework draws on Amartya Sen’s capability approach. Three main findings are briefly summarized. First, a concrete determination scheme is proposed: the “stable rights-obligations relationship” is operationalized via collective medical insurance purchase and non-abandonment of contracted land; “basic livelihood security” emphasizes land’s security function without requiring primary income reliance; the “stable production-living relationship” criterion should be discarded. Second, the household registration (hukou) condition is becoming ambiguous, but such ambiguity reflects governance adaptation to complexity, moving toward “de-hukouization.” Third, legal ambiguity, while challenging, creates a flexible space for adaptive rural governance. This study contributes by introducing Sen’s capability approach into the analysis of divorced rural women’s membership qualification and providing empirical grounds for clarifying Article 11 of the RCEOL. Future research may observe changes in case volume and litigant testimonies after the law’s implementation to evaluate its real effects, further enriching the discussion on institution—agency interaction.