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Land Rights, Political Differentiation, and China's Changing Land Market: Bounded Collectivism and Contemporary Village Administration
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Abstract
This article examines how legacies of bounded collectivism in Southwest China play out in the form of land rights sharing involving the current administrative village and its constituent villagers’ groups, as well as in the form of political differentiation between administrative village cadres and leaders of villagers’ groups. It also documents the ways in which land markets change as the two levels of village administration compete to develop rural land.
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- Copyright © The Authors 2016
References
Notes
1 See “Bounded Collectivism: Approaching Rural Land Rights and Labor through Natural Villages in Southwest China.” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 12, Issue 31, No. 3, August 4, 2014.
2 One yuan equaled about 0.12 U.S. dollars in 2005 and 0.16 U.S. dollars in 2014.
3 In southwest China, tobacco is a cash crop that can generate great revenue for local governments. To push for rapid growth of the local economy and to obtain higher revenue, local governments, assisted by village cadres, organize and sometimes even force villagers to grow tobacco according to the government's economic plan. Each household whose land is located in tobacco-growing zones is assigned tobacco production quotas. But village cadres no longer organize the labor process, which is left to each household.
4 Until the reform of rural taxes and fees began in 2003 eliminating most local taxes, village cadres held this responsibility.
5 See my previous article “Bounded Collectivism: Approaching Rural Land Rights and Labor through ‘Natural Villages’ in Southwest China”
(http://japanfocus.org/-Yi-Wu/4156/article.html) for details on the transformation of the subcounty administrative structure from the 1950s to the new millennium.
6 The number of zhaizi didn't coincide exactly with that of the groups because of the existence of very large and small zhaizi. Very small zhaizi often formed a villagers’ group, while a very large zhaizi could form an administrative village, which was further divided into villagers’ groups.
7 When land cultivation rights were allocated to individual households in Fuyuan in 1982, the criteria for defining community membership included: 1) a person living in the zhaizi/team and/or born there, 2) a person who did not hold an urban household registration and could not buy subsidized grain, 3) a person who did not receive a government salary. This means that being born in the community was not necessarily a guarantee that an individual was recognized as a team/zhaizi member. Daughters and wives of community members received shares of land in 1982. Daughters who married out into another community usually left their shares of land to their natal families and they subsequently worked the land held by their husbands’ families. Their husbands’ communities did not allocate land to women who married in.
8 One mu equals 0.165 acre.
9 The 1998 Land Management Law stipulates that farmers whose land is acquired will be compensated through a package that includes three components: (1) compensation for the loss of land. This part of compensation is 6 to 10 times the value of the average annual output of the acquired land calculated over the three years preceding the acquisition, (2) resettlement subsidies. Local governments may raise resettlement subsidies to make sure that farmers will be able to maintain their previous standard of living. However, in no case was the total value of the above two components more than thirty times the previous three-year average output value of the acquired land; (3) compensation for loss of plants and attachments to the acquired land, such as buildings.
10 See Zhang Xiaoshan (张晓山), “Top Priorities in Specifying Rural Land Ownership Rights,” The Eastern Morning Times (东方早报) February 5, 2013.
11 Pseudonyms are used for names of places and people for this case.
12 See See Tangcun jiufen: Yige nanfang cunluo de tudi zongzu yu shehui (Disputes in Tangcun: Land, Lineage, and Society in a Southern Village), by Yang Fangquan, Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2006.
13 Fuyuan Xianzhi (1986-2000) [Fuyuan County Gazetteer, 1986-2000], 95.
14 Yearbook of Fuyuan (2010), 209.
15 Tobacco sales are monopolized by the government and tobacco can provide an important source of revenue for local governments. Forced tobacco production has been widespread in the southwest region during the reform era.
16 See Frank N Pieke, “Contours of an Anthropology of the Chinese State: Political Structure, Agency and Economic Development in Rural China,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2004 (10): 517-538; Keven O’Brien and Lianjiang Li, “Accommodating ‘Democracy’ in a One-Party State: Introducing Village Election in China,” The China Quarterly 162 (June): 465-489.
17 Pseudonyms are used for names of places and people in this case.
18 See Report of China's Urban Development, 2011, compiled by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Quoted from Caijing Magazine.
19 “Tudi gaige maichu guanjian yibu (A Critical Step in Land Tenure System Reform),” Caijing Magazine.
20 See “Qiming daitou naoshizhe bei panxing; wei jiejue tudi zhengyong jiufen, juzhong baiyuren weidu qujing zhengfu” (Seven Leaders in Riot Sentenced: Hundreds of People Besieged the Qujing Government Due to Land Requisition Dispute), The City Times (dushi shibao), January 27, 2003, A3. The City Times is published in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan.
21 See Yang Fangquan (2006).
22 Him Chung and Jonathan Unger, “The Guangdong Model of Urbanization: Collective Village Land and the Making of a New Middle Class.” China Perspectives 2013 (3): 33-41.
23 Ibid., p.36.
24 Data comes from the official website of Xinhua News Agency.