No Worse off? The governance impacts of compensating for land takings in China

ABSTRACT

We examine the impacts of compensation not only on land-losers' subsequent livelihoods, but also on distributions, governance and organisational capacity, social positioning, and ability to live the sorts of lives farmers value. The power of this encompassing perspective to reveal complex, far reaching consequences of different compensation arrangements is illustrated by qualitative research in three wealthy jurisdictions that trialled China's new ‘models' of land compensation: Guangdong, Shanghai, and Zhejiang. The analysis demonstrates that the emphasis on ‘models’ of compensation obscures incoherence, contradictory rules and processes, and reversals in compensation arrangements; and that rather than providing corrective justice or well-being, compensation has left many communities, households, and individuals worse off.

KEYWORDS:

• Land
• expropriation
• compensation
• villagers
• urbanisation
• development
• governance
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Yanpeng Jiang is a research professor in the Institute for Global Innovation and Development, Centre for Modern Chinese City Studies, Centre for China Administrative Division, East China Normal University. He received his PhD in Geography from the University of Leeds. Before joining the Department of Geography at the University of Hong Kong as a research fellow, he worked as a research fellow in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. His main research interests are urbanization, land, and social change and governance in contemporary China as well as regional development strategy, comparative urban studies, geopolitics, development of global cities and inter-city competition, regional industrial transformation and upgrading in the Asia-Pacific region.

Sally Sargeson is a Senior Fellow in the College of Asia and the Pacific, the Australian National University. Since 2000, she has been researching political change, land rights, and gender and development in rural China. Her recent publications include articles in Development and Change and the Journal of Peasant Studies, and a book co-authored with Tamara Jacka and Andrew Kipnis, Contemporary China: Society and Social Change (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Luigi Tomba was born and educated in Italy. He is a political scientist with three decades of China experience, having visited China for the first time in 1988. From 2001 to 2017, Luigi taught and researched Chinese society and politics at the Australian National University. In 2017 he assumed the directorship of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. His work covers many aspects of China's political and social change, with a particular interest in China's urbanisation. Luigi was the editor of The China Journal from 2005–2015. His latest book, The Government Next Door. Neighbourhood Politics in Urban China (Cornell University Press, 2014) was honoured by the American Association of Asian Studies as the best book on post-1900 China with the 2016 Joseph Levenson prize.

Notes

1 Expropriation regulations issued in 2011 covered only urban expropriation, demolition and relocation.

2 Since 2007 China’s legislative drafting committee repeatedly has recommended the removal or amendment of Article 47, and insertion of a stipulation that compensation must be based on the market value of expropriated land. However, these recommendations have been resisted strenuously by governments and industries concerned they would increase costs of land taking.

3 1 mu = 0.6667 ha

4 Each administrative village is divided into small groups that comprise hamlets or residential quadrants

5 In 2002 governments in Zhejiang began pegging compensation to land prices set for urban zones. The compensation initially offered was far lower than it would have been if that policy had been adopted in the Nanhu site. But the land compensation amount eventually paid following villagers’ protests was far higher than the zone price policy would have delivered.