Governing rural redevelopment and re-distributing land rights: The case of Tianjin

Abstract

The character of the rural society is blurred under Chinaös rapid urbanization process, posing challenges to governance in rural areas. By investigating the implementation of a widely-adopted rural resettlement policy in Tianjin, China, this paper explores the heterogeneity of rural governance, the factors influencing the formation of governance modes, and the effect of governance types on the re-distribution of rural land rights. Based on data collected through extensive interviews and fieldwork in 2012 and 2013, three forms of governance mode were identified: the highly-centralized mode, the semi-centralized mode, and the shared network. The paper concludes that de facto governance modes, not the nominal project leadership, drove the resettlement projects, and that capability and structural factors had the strongest influence on the redistribution of rural land right in the urbanization process, followed by project scale and the intervention from higher levels of government, and capability of stakeholders is influenced by the local economic, social and political conditions.