Subcounty administration in rural southwest China (1950-2000): changing state spatiality, persistent village territoriality and implications for the current urban transformation

ABSTRACT

This article is a historical ethnography of how village communities in southwest China had maintained a certain amount of autonomy amid the expanding state spatiality in the second half of the twentieth century. Shortly after the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, the party-state built up three successive subcounty administrative systems – the district-township system, the people’s commune system, and the current township system – to expand its institutional terrains in the rural areas. Meanwhile, village communities under the jurisdiction of these penetrating administrative structures strove to maintain their social and physical boundaries through a series of traditional mechanisms. The interaction between the state’s attempts to establish a socialist order and villages’ tenacity to maintain their special territorial status resulted in a three-layered land rural land ownership, under which villages were able to maintain a certain degree of extraterritoriality. Such a situation has made the state territorial control in rural areas incomplete and porous.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural administration
• territory
• village
• China

Acknowledgments

This research would not have been possible without the generous help from people in Yuquan, who, over the past 15 years, welcomed me into their lives, shared their experiences with me, and put up with numerous questions I asked. I especially want to thank the Office of Local Chronicles Compilation of Yuquan County, Yuquan County Archive and Yuquan Cultural and Historical Research Committee for providing me with data and information needed for this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 To protect the privacy of local people, I used a pseudonym to replace the real name of the county.

2 Feng shui is the traditional geomancy in China, which emphasises the importance of choosing appropriate locations for graves, temples and housing. A good site is believed to have the ability to protect and bring good fortune to the offspring of the dead.

3 Village data came from my interviews with villagers and village leaders during my fieldwork between 2002–2004 and 2016-2019.

4 Land readjustment did take place occasionally between villages, usually either for the convenience of irrigation, or to reduce significant inequality in landholding between neighbouring communities. However, such readjustments often caused great tension among villages and required lengthy negotiation.

5 Failed agricultural production also resulted from the government’s mass mobilisation of rural residents into rural industrialisation projects or irrigation projects, preventing villagers from following the appropriate timing for farming.

Additional information

Funding

The collection of historical data for this research (2002-2004) was supported by the National Science Foundation's Law and Science program (formerly the National Science Foundation's Law and Social Science Program) under grant no. 0213841 and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. More recent village data were collected in Yuquan County during my summer fieldwork conducted between 2016-2019, supported by the summer research fund from the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice at Clemson University. Documentary research conducted in 2020 was supported by the National Science Foundation's Cultural Anthropology Program (grant number 1918352).

Notes on contributors

Yi Wu

Yi Wu is an assistant professor of anthropology at Clemson University and the author of Negotiating Rural Land Ownership in Southwest China: State, Village, Family (University of Hawai’i Press, 2016). She is a cultural anthropologist interested in the interrelationships among law, culture, and society and is currently working on a project that examines the impact of rapid urbanisation on the distribution of land rights in village communities in China.