The Great Urban Transformation : Politics of Land and Property in China

As China is transformed, relations between society, the state, and the city have become central. The Great Urban Transformation investigates what is happening in cities, the urban edges, and the rural fringe in order to explain these relations. In the inner city of major metropolitan centers, municipal governments battle high-ranking state agencies to secure land rents from redevelopment projects, while residents mobilize to assert property and residential rights. At the urban edge, as metropolitan governments seek to extend control over their rural hinterland through massive-scale development projects, villagers strategize to profit from the encroaching property market. At the rural fringe, township leaders become brokers of power and property between the state bureaucracy and villages, while large numbers of peasants are dispossessed, dispersed, and deterritorialized, and their mobilizational capacity is consequently undermined. The Great Urban Transformation explores these issues, and provides an integrated analysis of the city and the countryside, elite politics and grassroots activism, legal-economic and socio-political issues of property rights, and the role of the state and the market in the property market. This book emphasizes the centrality of cities in China's ongoing transformation. Based on fieldwork in twenty-four Chinese cities between 1996 and 2007, the author forwards an analysis of the relations between the city, the state, and society through two novel concepts: urbanization of the local state and civic territoriality. Urbanization of the local state is a process of state power restructuring entailing an accumulation regime based on the commodification of state-owned land, the consolidation of territorial authority through construction projects, and a policy discourse dominated by notions of urban modernity. Civic territoriality encompasses the politics of distribution engendered by urban expansionism, and social actors' territorial strategies toward self-protection. Findings are based on observations in three types of places. In the inner city of major metropolitan centers, municipal governments battle high-ranking state agencies to secure land rents from redevelopment projects, while residents mobilize to assert property and residential rights. At the urban edge, as metropolitan governments seek to extend control over their rural hinterland through massive-scale development projects, villagers strategize to profit from the encroaching property market. At the rural fringe, township leaders become brokers of power and property between the state bureaucracy and villages, while large numbers of peasants are dispossessed, dispersed, and deterritorialized; their mobilizational capacity is consequently undermined Frontmatter Acknowledgments (page viii) List of Figures (page x) Table (page xi) List of Chinese Terms (page xii) Prologue (page 1) 1. Land and Urban Politics (page 5) Part I: Redevelopment of the Urban Core 2. Municipal Governments, Socialist Land Masters, and Urban Land Battles (page 33) 3. Grassroots Resistance: Property Rights and Residents' Rights (page 60) Part II: Expansion of the Metropolitan Region 4. Metropolitan Governance, Real-Estate Projects and Capital Accumulation (page 93) 5. Village Corporatism, Real-Estate Projects, and Territorial Autonomy (page 122) Part III: Urbanization of the Rural Fringe 6. Township Governments as Brokers of Power and Property (page 155) 7. Peasant Relocation and Deterritorialization (page 181) 8. A New Territorial Order (page 211) Bibliography (page 228) Index (page 249) As China is transformed, relations between society, the state, and the city have become central. 'The Great Urban Transformation' investigates what is happening in cities, and the development of quasi-property markets in China