Rural Politics in Contemporary China

Emily T. Yeh, Kevin O'Brien, Jingzhong Ye, Kevin J. O'Brien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317661740
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This collection provides an overview of China's rural politics, bringing scholarship on agrarian politics from various social science disciplines together in one place. The twelve contributions, spanning history, anthropology, sociology, environmental studies, political science, and geography, address enduring questions in peasant studies, including the relationship between states and peasants, taxation, social movements, rural-urban linkages, land rights and struggles, gender relations, and environmental politics. Taking rural politics as the power-inflected processes and struggles that shape access and control over resources in the countryside, as well as the values, ideologies and discourses that shape those processes, the volume brings research on China into conversation with the traditions and concerns of peasant studies scholarship. It provides both an introduction to those unfamiliar with Chinese politics, as well as in-depth, new research for experts in the field.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Rural politics in contemporary China

Emily T. Yeh, Kevin J. O’Brien and Jingzhong Ye

Emily T. Yeh is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. She conducts research on nature-society relations, primarily in Tibetan parts of the People’s Republic of China, including projects on conflicts over access to natural resources, the relationship between ideologies of nature and nation, the political ecology of pastoral environment and development policies, vulnerability of Tibetan herders to climate change, and emerging environmental subjectivities. Her book, Taming Tibet: landscape transformation and the gift of Chinese development (Cornell University Press, 2013), explores the intersection of the political economy and cultural politics of development as a project of state territorialization.

Kevin J. O’Brien is the Alann P. Bedford Professor of Asian Studies, Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies, and Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Grassroots elections in China (2011) (with Suisheng Zhao), Popular protest in China (2008), Rightful resistance in rural China (2006) (with Lianjiang Li), and Engaging the law in China: state, society and possibilities for justice (2005) (with Neil J. Diamant and Stanley B. Lubman).

Jingzhong Ye is a professor of development studies and deputy dean at the College of Humanities and Development Studies (COHD), China Agricultural University. His research interests include development intervention and rural transformation, rural ‘left behind’ populations, rural education, land politics, and sociology of agriculture.

We examine overarching themes in the contributions, including critiques of neoliberalism, rural-urban linkages, the relevance of mixed methods and cross-disciplinary approaches, the need to engage social theory, and variation across space and time. At the same time, we provide an overview of rural Chinese politics and explain that the goal of the collection was to bring findings that have appeared in area studies or disciplinary outlets into conversation with peasant studies research. After discussing intellectual debates about the peasantry, everyday practices of governance, contentious politics, the mutual constitution of the rural and urban, and environmental politics, we conclude that work on the Chinese countryside needs ‘lumping’ (to discover unexpected similarities) and ‘splitting’ (to uncover patterns and forks in the road). Chinese rural politics is neither ‘turtles all the way down’ and baffling complexity, nor one master story that applies in all times and places. Instead we must continue to navigate the path between exoticizing China and treating its rural transformation as a tale many times told.

Introduction

Much news about today’s China focuses on the urban. A milestone was reached in 2011, when the proportion of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s 1.34 billion citizens living in cities reached 50 percent, the result of a remarkably rapid ‘great urban transformation’ (Hsing 2010) that began in the 1980s. By 2025, China is projected to have 221 cities with over one million inhabitants. Still, with hundreds of millions moving to urban areas, hundreds of millions more will continue to live in the countryside and work in agriculture. The fact that more people in China make their home in cities than villages marks a historic shift. At the same time, it is the product of long-standing dynamics through which the urban and rural are mutually constituted by processes, politics and ideologies that link, transgress and span both (Murdoch and Lowe 2003, Davis 2004, McCarthy 2005). Even as China becomes more urban, the politics of its countryside will continue to be central to the PRC and around the world.

This collection addresses China’s rural politics, broadly construed as the power-inflected processes and struggles that shape access to and control over resources in the countryside, as well as the values, ideologies and discourses that shape those processes and struggles. Though scholarship on agrarian politics in China has taken off over the past three decades, the literature has tended to appear in area studies journals, or disciplinary outlets in which questions central to a single field are placed front and center. Our intention here is different. In commissioning a set of review essays on themes in critical agrarian-environmental studies, we sought to bring what China experts have uncovered into conversation with the traditions and concerns of peasant studies scholarship. Toward this end, we assembled an international group of established researchers who span the social sciences, including political science, sociology, anthropology, geography, history and environmental studies, to address enduring questions in peasant studies, including the relationship between states and peasants, taxation, social movements, rural-urban linkages, land rights and struggles, gender relations, and environmental politics.

Rural China in brief

As the world’s largest developing country, China’s success in reducing child mortality, promoting primary education, eliminating infectious diseases and lessening hunger has contributed significantly to global progress in meeting Millennium Development Goals. In a remarkable accomplishment, the number of rural people living in poverty was brought from 85 million in 1990 down to 36 million in 2009. China itself has set a goal of not just eliminating extreme poverty, but of achieving an ‘all-around xiao kang’ or ‘moderately well-off’ society by 2020. This objective is to be met by a combination of targeted government investment and the country’s rise as an economic power. Still, while China’s turn toward capitalism has brought prosperity to many, leading some analysts to wonder whether ‘peasants’ continue to exist as a social category,¹ it has also exacerbated income disparities, transforming the PRC into one of the most unequal societies on earth. Peaking at 0.49 in 2008, China’s current Gini coefficient of 0.47 (‘Gini out of the bottle,’ 2013) approaches those of Nigeria and Brazil, and is higher than that of the United States. The wealth gap is regional as well as spatial, with average per-capita income in rural areas less than one third that in cities.

China’s rise has been fueled by more than 250 million migrant workers, members of the ‘floating population’ (liudong renkou), whose labor in export processing zones, cities and better-off villages has turned China into ‘the world’s factory’. The ‘household registration’ (hukou) system, which has tied citizens to their place of birth since the 1950s, was relaxed in 1984 to allow peasants to move to urban areas. As the township and village enterprises that spurred economic growth and absorbed rural labor after ‘opening up and reform’ (gaige kaifang) went bankrupt or were privatized in the late 1980s, the flow of migrant laborers increased. To this day, however, the hukou system denies ‘peasant workers’ (nongmin gong) state services, such as access to education, health care and housing, which are reserved for urban citizens.² In addition, migrants continue to be looked down upon by urban residents, blamed for crimes, paid salaries late or not at all and discriminated against (Solinger 1999, L. Zhang 2002, Yan 2003, Ngai 2005).

As migration exploded in the 1990s, and the countryside was emptied of working age men and women, so too did a national ideology that valorized the urban and denigrated the rural, positing cities as the primary site of political, cultural and economic worth (Bulag 2002, Cartier, 2003, 2005, Ma 2005, Yeh 2013a). Cities became metonyms for development, and urbanization became a top goal of China’s modernization strategy. Along with this, city dwellers were deemed to be of higher quality, or suzhi, than rural residents (O’Brien and Li 1993–94, Bakken 2000, Anagnost 2004, Murphy 2004, Kipnis 2006). This privileging of the urban and disparaging of the rural led to what has been called the ‘spectralization’ (Yan 2003) of agriculture and the countryside, as villages became ghostly reminders of the past, a wasteland inhabited only by the ‘left-behind’, particularly children and the elderly (Jacka 2013, this collection, Ye 2013, this collection).

The 1990s also witnessed an overhaul of the fiscal system that shifted many expenditures to local governments. In poorer, agricultural villages this often led to spiraling taxes and fees, including illegal ones. These ‘peasant burdens’ (nongmin fudan) were a major cause of resentment and contention, ranging from everyday resistance (Scott 1985) to ‘rightful resistance’ (O’Brien and Li 2006), to thousands of sometimes violent ‘mass incidents’ (qunti shijian). As the new century unfolded, the frequency and intensity of protest grew. Whereas 8700 mass incidents were reported in 1993, the figure for 2011 reached 180,000 (Zheng 2012, 30), or nearly 500 every day.

A mounting sense of crisis, referred to as the ‘three rural problems’ (san nong wenti, or rural people, society and production), drew the attention of intellectuals concerned with the peasantry and state leaders worried about social stability and regime legitimacy. Debates emerged between liberals, some of whom argued that land rights should be privatized, and the new left, which critiqued neoliberalism and called for protections from the market and retaining equal distribution of farmland. One current among left-leaning intellectuals centered on calls for a New Rural Reconstruction Movement, modeled after a Chinese populist program of the early twentieth century. These scholar-activists urged fellow intellectuals to lead a rural cultural revival that would remake the countryside, in part through the formation of cooperatives.

The state also took steps to combat the ‘three rural problems’. In 2002, a tax reform abolished most local fees, foreshadowing the complete elimination of agricultural taxes in 2006. That same year, Beijing launched the New Socialist Countryside program, an initiative designed to spark rural development, reduce income inequality and check unrest by redistributing resources and income to rural areas. Its components included expanding the cooperative medical system, eliminating school fees, enhancing water conservancy and completing the electric power network. Despite a shared aim of addressing rural problems, the thrust of the state’s program is quite different from that advanced by leftist intellectuals, insofar as it calls for further urbanization, consumption and market-driven growth. The New Socialist Countryside program, as Elizabeth Perry (2011) has noted, also harkens back to an earlier Maoist campaign in its goals and because it has been implemented through propaganda and work teams. Political campaigns have also become a prime means by which environmental targets, whether for reducing pollution or afforestation, have been addressed (Economy 2002, van Rooij 2006). The reliance on mobilization and ‘education and ideology work’ (jiaoyu sixiang gongzuo), in areas as different as environmental protection, village election implementation (Schubert and Ahlers 2012), protest policing (Deng and O’Brien 2013), and population control and crisis management (Perry 2011) speaks to the Party’s enhanced presence at the grassroots level since the late 1980s.

The end of the agricultural tax has also produced a number of other far-reaching consequences. One has been a hollowing out of the township, the lowest level of formal government. This has led some Chinese observers to call for the township to be eliminated, while others have proposed that it become little more than a service provider (Kennedy 2013, this collection, Day 2013, this collection). Perhaps an even more important result of revamped fiscal relations has been the turn to land appropriation by local authorities to generate revenue to compensate for lost taxes and fees. In China’s complex property rights system, local officials can expropriate farmland, transfer it to state ownership, and then sell it to real estate developers. But rural collectives cannot sell their land or move it to non-agricultural uses. Peasants are compensated based on the average value of the land’s agricultural output, typically only a small fraction of the market price. As a result of land takings, roughly 88 million peasants became landless between 1990 and 2008, with another 50 million expected to join them by 2030 (Sargeson 2013, this collection). Not surprisingly, whereas high taxation inspired much discontent in the 1990s and early 2000s, land expropriation has come to the fore now, accounting for some 65 percent of rural ‘mass incidents’.

Environmental protests are also becoming more common. With five of the 10 most polluted cities in the world, and pollution reducing gross domestic product (GDP) by 8–15 percent not including health care costs (Hilton 2013, 8–9), grievances run deep. Though much attention has been paid to urban pollution, as in coverage of Beijing’s 2013 ‘airpocalypse’, unhealthy air and water are also common in rural areas, including the notorious ‘cancer villages’ where death rates far exceed the national average (Lora-Wainwright 2010). Despite growing concern with environmental degradation and stringent regulations, enforcement remains lax, largely because local governments are financially dependent on polluting factories. Coal mining accidents, particularly at small, unregulated and often illegal mines, illustrate these dynamics well. Fearful of protest, the state hesitates to condone anything that interferes with economic growth. This necessitates continuing use of coal to avoid brownouts and keep industry humming, and reduces incentives to enforce worker safety and environmental measures (Weston 2007).

The environmental politics of China’s capitalist transformation are not limited to air and water pollution. The building of large hydropower dams has led to the involuntary resettlement of millions of peasants. Plans for new dams, particularly along the Nu River, have also been targets of local protest and mobilization by environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) (Büsgen 2006, Litzinger 2007, Yang and Calhoun 2007) as well as the source of much bureaucratic infighting (Mertha 2008). Other development efforts, including those designed to improve the environment, have also led to large-scale resettlement of farmers and pastoralists (Yeh 2009). The rapid expansion in the number of nature reserves, for example, has reduced access to crucial livelihood resources, leading to various forms of peasant resentment and resistance (Yeh 2013b, this collection).

The essays

All these issues and more are discussed by the 12 contributors to this collection. Though written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the papers are all grounded in Chinese culture and society, and an approach to politics that rejects essentialist understandings of a reified ‘Chinese culture’. Many of the reviews include both English-language and Chinese sources; this is true of the contributions that discuss Chinese debates on rural society, and those on taxation and land expropriation. Furthermore, though access makes long-term fieldwork in the countryside difficult, most of the contributions are grounded in just such experiences. This engagement with daily life and the quotidian is reflected in the ‘view from below’ found in many of the essays.

Although a single volume cannot take on all of agrarian politics in China, this collection covers substantial territory. Drawing on a wide range of topics, five themes emerge: intellectual debates about the peasantry, everyday practices of local governance, contentious politics, rural-urban linkages, and environmental politics.

Intellectual debates and the New Rural Reconstruction Movement

Our first set of essays, by Alexander Day, Yan Hairong and Tamara Jacka, explores Chinese debates about past, present and future state-peasant relationships. Both Day and Yan argue that there are resonances between contemporary discussions, particularly within the New Rural Reconstruction Movement, and those of the early twentieth century. Jacka, on the other hand, offers a feminist critique of the New Rural Reconstruction Movement. All three find that, even while criticizing neoliberal proposals to further integrate agriculture and rural labor power into national and global markets, the movement’s intellectual leaders tend to view peasants as a homogenous whole, ignoring class, gender and other forms of differentiation crucial to understanding rural society. This complicates their efforts to protect the peasantry from economic exploitation and to ameliorat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Rural politics in contemporary China
• 2. A century of rural self-governance reforms: reimagining rural Chinese society in the post-taxation era
• 3. Debating the rural cooperative movement in China, the past and the present
• 4. Chinese discourses on rurality, gender and development: a feminist critique
• 5. Finance and rural governance: centralization and local challenges
• 6. Measurement, promotions and patterns of behavior in Chinese local government
• 7. Rightful resistance revisited
• 8. Violence as development: land expropriation and China’s urbanization
• 9. In defense of endogenous, spontaneously ordered development: institutional functionalism and Chinese property rights
• 10. Internal migration and left-behind populations in China
• 11. The politics of industrial pollution in rural China
• 12. The politics of conservation in contemporary rural China
• 13. The politics of water in rural China: a review of English-language scholarship
• Index