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China's Rural Land Politics: Bureaucratic Absorption and the Muting of Rightful Resistance*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2014

Julia Chuang
Julia Chuang*
Affiliation:
Brown University. Email: julia.chuang@gmail.com.
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Abstract

In recent years, the Chinese central state has launched the “new socialist countryside” campaign (NSCC), which authorizes the local state expropriation of rural land from farmers, and then incorporates evicted farmers into township residence and urban citizenship. In affected regions, this campaign enables local state officials to enact practices of bureaucratic absorption that undermine potential resistance by bringing resisters into formal channels of bargaining through both juridical and ideological means. Based on ethnographic data from Sichuan province, this article reveals an in situ process of bureaucratic absorption in “Lan-ding village,” where the incorporation of rural residents into urban citizenship enables the depoliticization of resistance to land expropriation, first by changing the citizenship-based grounds on which legitimate claims to land can be made, then by discursively reframing eviction as a normative shift towards modern wage dependence.

摘要

近年来, 中国开展了“社会主义新农村”运动, 有些地方授权当地政府征用农民的土地, 并将失去土地的农民纳入乡镇居住, 成为城镇居民。 在这场运动中, 地方官员用政府化解的方法, 通过正规司法渠道和意识形态手段与反对者进行谈判, 以便化解可能的抵抗。在四川以人类学研究方法所收集的资料的基础上, 本文揭示了在兰定村征地过程中, 对征地的反抗是如何通过变农村居民为城镇居民而被非政治化的。首先通过更改居民身份, 取消了农民对土地的合法要求, 然后再把征地说成是向现代的, 依赖工资收入的规范性转变。

Keywords

land rightsrightful resistancehukouurbanizationnew socialist countryside campaign土地权利正当反抗户口城市化社会主义新农村运动
Type
Articles
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 219 , September 2014 , pp. 649 - 669
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2014 

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Footnotes

*

The author acknowledges funding support from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Bucerius Foundation for Migration Studies. She owes special thanks to Michael Burawoy for guidance and comments on earlier drafts. She also thanks John Lie, Michael Levien, Albert Wu, Ching Kwan Lee, members of the 2012–2013 Haas Junior Scholars Program, and two anonymous reviewers for comments.

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