Rule through Difference on China's Urban–Rural Boundary

Abstract

In both the academic debate as well as in Chinese politics urban–rural difference is a frequently used categorisation. Policies addressing previous neglect of rural China have been the official top-priority of China's current leadership since it came to power in 2003–2004. This article argues that we need to nuance the distinct dichotomy between urban and rural, and look into the specifics of how differences are actively mobilised when claims are made. The article builds on extensive fieldwork on the claims made by land-losing peasants and local political leaders on the urban–rural boundary in one of the front posts of the current regime's refocus on rural development, Chengdu, appointed as an experimental zone of Urban–Rural Integration (cheng-xiang yitihua) along with Chongqing in 2007 and, as a result of this, subject to massive restructuring of land use. Instead of a clear-cut urban–rural boundary that would have the potential to split the country in two, I find a much more finely masked form of differentiation based on where people are from. Both local leaders and citizens in each locality may bend and interpret rules and regulations considerably as long as their claims do not go beyond their locality.

Notes

1 This article builds on extensive fieldwork on Chengdu's urban–rural boundary, including more than 200 interviews and archival work. For a full list of interviews, see JW Zeuthen, ‘Ruling through differentiation in China: Chengdu's urban–rural integration policy’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Roskilde University, 2010.

2 Quotes are from two of the most path-breaking contributions to the field: Li Zhang, Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China's Floating Population, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001, p 1; and DJ Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999, p 1. Bregnbæk in this issue discusses suzhi. See also A Anagnost, ‘The corporeal politics of quality (Suzhi)’, Public Culture, 16(2), 2004, pp 189–208; and C-P Pow, ‘Securing the “civilised” enclaves: gated communities and the moral geographies of exclusion in (post-)socialist Shanghai’, Urban Studies, 44, 2007, pp 1539–1558 use this concept to argue how the urban middle class constructs itself as the opposite of rural–urban migrants. R Murphy, ‘Turning peasants into modern Chinese citizens: discourse, demographic transition and primary education’, China Quarterly, 177(1), 2004, pp 1–20; and Pun Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005 shows how similar discourses contribute to the disciplining of rural subjects. On hukou, see A Chan & P Alexander, ‘Does China have an apartheid pass system?’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 30(4), 2004, pp 609–629; KW Chan &W Buckingham, ‘Is China abolishing the Hukou system?’, China Quarterly, 195, 2008, pp 582–606; and Wang Fei-Ling, Organizing through Division and Exclusion: China's Hukou System, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.

3 See, especially, Wang, Organizing through Division and Exclusion; and Pun, Made in China.

4 See S Thøgersen, ‘Return of the Chinese peasant: farmers and their intellectual advocates’, Issues and Studies, 39 (4), 2003, pp 230–239 for an overview of the open debate. On mobilisation, see Yu Jianrong, ‘Maintaining a baseline of social stability’ (translation of a speech to the Beijing Lawyers Association), China Digital Times, 17 February 2010, at http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/03/yu-jianrong-maintaining-a-baseline-of-social-stability-part-i/, accessed 10 February 2012.

5 Districts (urban) and counties (rural) are the administrative level just below the city prefecture. They are divided into street committees or townships that are again divided into communities of villages and sub-villages.

6 KJ O'Brien & Li Lianjiang, Rightful Resistance in Rural China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. On fragmented authoritarianism, see K Lieberthal & M Oksenberg, Policy Making in China: Leaders, Structures, and Processes, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.

7 C Tilly, Durable Inequality, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998.

8 M Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

9 Aihwa Ong, ‘The Chinese axis: zoning technologies and variegated sovereignty’, Journal of East Asian Studies, 4(1), 2004, pp 69–96. Historically, see GW Skinner, ‘Presidential address: the structure of Chinese history’, Journal of Asian Studies, 44(2), 1985, pp 271–292; and RB Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997, pp 179–206

10 Cai Yongshun, ‘Power structure and regime resilience: contentious politics in China’, British Journal of Political Science, 38(3), 2008, pp 411–432; Wang, Organizing through Division and Exclusion; and O'Brien & Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China. For a perspective on a well intended centre, see also Wang Shaoguang, ‘Changing models of China's policy agenda setting’, Modern China, 34(56), 2008, pp 56–87

11 G Smith, ‘Political machinations in a rural county’, China Journal, (62), 2009, pp 29–59. On the concept of social engineering, see JC Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

12 Wang, Organizing through Division and Exclusion.

13 For a review, see Chan & Buckingham, ‘Is China abolishing the Hukou system?’ . An example from the academic debate is Zhu Yu, ‘China's floating population and their settlement intention in the cities: beyond the Hukou reform’, Habitat International, 31(1), 2007, pp 65–76.

14 You-tien Hsing, The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010; and Zeuthen, ‘Ruling through differentiation in China’, p 119.

15 For details on documents collected and interviews on the city prefecture's policy, see Zeuthen, ‘Ruling through differentiation in China’, pp 106–122.

16 Hsing, The Great Urban Transformation; and P Ho, Institutions in Transition: Land Ownership, Property Rights, and Social Conflict in China, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

17 JW Zeuthen & MB Griffiths, ‘The end of urban–rural differentiation in China? Hukou and resettlement in Chengdu's urban–rural integration’, in B Alpermann (ed), Politics and Markets in Rural China, London: Routledge, 2011.

18 Interview, November 2007.

19 For details of documents collected and interviews on cases discussed in this sub-section, see Zeuthen, ‘Ruling through differentiation in China’, pp 169–178.

20 Ibid, pp 207–210.

21 Ibid, pp 155–163.

22 The data on urban residents are explored more fully in Zeuthen & Griffiths, ‘The end of urban–rural differentiation in China?’.

23 Parts of the material on rural–urban migrants are also discussed in ibid.

24 For data on the case before resettlement, see A Mertha, China's Water Warriors: Citizen Action and Policy Change, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. For further details on immigration to Chengdu, see Zeuthen, ‘Ruling through differentiation in China’, pp 147–148, 206–207.

25 Anagnost, ‘The corporeal politics of quality (Suzhi)’.