Changing land governance, institutional arrangements and power dynamics : the case of Chongqing, China

Abstract

China’s unprecedented urbanization has led to a radical transformation of its rural villages. The existing literature on the impacts of urbanization on rural transformation is dominated by research about exploited peasants and rural-urban migration. Apart from a few exceptions discussing state-village relationships in peri-urban villages, little work has been done to document and explore the impacts of rapid urbanization on local power reconfiguration. This thesis attempts to fill this gap in China’s urban studies. With an in-depth case study of Chongqing, this thesis tries to understand the underlying mechanism of massive land development, and its impacts on land governance and power reconfiguration. Drawing insights from the perspectives of political economy and property rights, rooted in neoliberalism, this study examines how local state, village cadres, ordinary villagers, and other actors act in the land development process, and how their interactions reshape state-market, state-village, and cadre-villager relationships. Through systemic analysis, the study generates insightful findings. First, to smooth the land development process, the local state must adapt its strategies to villagers and other actors’ responses, achieving socio-economic goals and the maintenance of social stability. As a result, different state-village relationships have contributed to evolving compensation policies in land requisitions and collective land development in urban fringes. Second, state-owned investment corporations serve as a platform to operate a land finance system to finance massive land development, which in turn forces the local state to heavily rely on land finance. Third, initially a strategy to deal with cultivated land preservation and urban construction land supply, land tickets and land consolidation have made village governance land-centered, and have totally changed villages’ political landscape. These findings will enrich the literature on urbanization and local governance restructuring in China. It is also hoped that this study will broaden discussion on state-market relationships, and on state-society relationships under the political, economic, and ideological waves of neoliberalism.