Objective/Meaning   The role of “human feelings” in the rural land circulation was studied, in order to prevent the land circulation market from being alienated by “human feelings", and provide countermeasures and suggestions for building a standardized and reasonable rural land circulation market.

  Methods/Procedures  Based on the survey data of CSS in 2017, the relationship model between the gift spending and the land circulation of farmers was constructed to empirically test the impact of the gift spending on the land circulation of rural households.

  Results/Conclusions  The study found that the gift spending had significant substitution effect on the land circulation of rural households, and the farmers would make up for the loss of relative income caused by the increase in the gift spending through the land circulation. When the gift spending increased by 1%, the probability of land circulation of rural households increased by 3%. The gift spending had a significant scale effect on the land circulation of rural households. With the increase of gift spending, the probability of rural households’ transfer-in land increased, but was also restrained by the law of decreasing returns to scale. The impact of the gift spending on rural households’ transfer-in land showed a generally “inverted U” type relationship. In other words, there was an “inflection point” in the impact of gift spending on the transfer-in land. After this “inflection point”, the continued increase of gift spending would significantly reduce the possibility of rural households’ transfer-in land and weaken the compensation effect of the relative income loss.