The article explains the regional variation in the electoral rules governing village election in China. We argue that China’s fast urbanization and land development have undermined the quality of rural democracy because local government officials faced pressure to ensure “right” cadres elected, and therefore been motivated to manipulate election rules. A panel dataset covering two rounds of elections in 2005 and 2008 is utilised to test the hypothesized relationship. Our findings are robust to various refinements in measurement and model specification. These findings contribute to the general literature on land and democratization as well as the recent debate about competitive elections in authoritarian countries.