A new model of village urbanization? Coordinative governance of state-village relations in Guangzhou City, China

Abstract

China’s ongoing urbanization has profoundly reshaped local governance with an increasing emphasis on reducing urban-rural inequalities through public investment in the rural areas in order to enhance the wellbeing of villagers. Drawing from more than one decade of intensive field research in a peri-urban area of Guangzhou, our study elucidates how the process of village urbanization has developed into a tri-partite partnership between the local state, the village organizations and the villagers in village asset management and welfare provision. This collaborative model presents an alternative approach to the top-down, state-led urbanization model which has notoriously led to landless villagers and economic dispossession in village urbanization. It also differs from the bottom-up, village corporatist model which tends to oppose integrated urban-rural development. This study attempts to conceptualize the delicate interdependency of the local state, the village collectives and villagers. Our findings offer new insights into the restructuring of state-village relations and explain its implications for community capacity building in periurban China.