![Sample our Global Development journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5929/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Global-Development.jpg"})
Abstract
Do variations in land ownership affect people’s democratic participation? Quantitative, cross-country research on this topic suffers from the non-comparability of regulatory systems and cultures, and the use of crude indicators to identify participation. This study attempts to overcome these methodological problems, by employing indicators of procedural and substantive participation in a structured, diachronic comparison of qualitative data from five sites in China – an authoritarian state, which, however, requires residents of urban communities and villages to participate in ‘self-government’. It examines whether and why changing land from collective ownership to state ownership, and residents’ compensated acquisition of cash and secure, fungible assets, strengthens or weakens participation in self-government. In the research sites, collective land ownership is found to stimulate participation in self-government. Transformation of the land to state ownership and people’s acquisition of private property weakens participation. The robust results of the study support the direction of a causal argument that collective land ownership is conducive to democratic participation. These findings imply that scholars and policymakers should consider the potentially adverse political consequences of changing land ownership. A further implication is that, absent substantial political reform, an urbanized China might be less rather than more democratic at the community level.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the journal’s referees, and Bjoern Alpermann, Edward Aspinall, Tian Chuanhao, Tamara Jacka, Lynette Ong and Jonathan Unger for their constructive comments on previous drafts of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Citizens may directly elect delegates to Local People’s Congresses (LPC). However, nominations for the LPCs are controlled by the Communist Party and government, voter turnout is low, and the Local and even National People’s Congresses (China’s legislature) are sidelined from political decision-making, management and supervision.
2 Lease duration is 70 years for residential land, 50 years for industrial land and 40 years for commercial and recreational land.
3 There are widespread debates over the legal strength of, and support for collective land ownership (see, e.g., Ho Citation2014; Sargeson Citation2004, Citation2012; Zhang and Donaldson Citation2013).
4 In some villages including site X discussed below, residents of sub-village hamlets or small groups (xiao zu) are viewed as the collective land owners, and elected hamlet heads (zu zhang) exercise ownership rights on their behalf.
5 State policies and subsidies encourage the rental of farmland, with the total area leased reaching 26 percent of the area farmed by 2013 (Yan and Chen Citation2015, 374; see also Sargeson Citation2016; Trappel Citation2016, 119–54; Zhang Citation2012).
6 In Doc. No 1, 2014, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party directed that in areas zoned for urban construction, village collectives could auction construction land for development. As of 2015, however, this had been widely implemented only in the Pearl River Delta.
7 China Organic Law of Villagers’ Committees of the People’s Republic of China (1998; Revised 2010; hereafter referred to as Village Organic Law); Organic Law of Urban Residents’ Committees of the People’s Republic of China (1989).
8 Jacka and Sargeson (Citation2015) analyze cross-provincial variations in the roles of villager representatives.
9 In many villages, non-core committee members receive very little payment. Three ‘core’ committee positions (Party Secretary, Village Director and Accountant) receive salaries from state budgets, at levels pegged to the average local rural per-capita income. In poor areas lacking off-farm business and job opportunities, state salaries might make village leaders more responsive to their government paymasters than to voters. However, in wealthier areas, successful entrepreneurship has become a prerequisite for leadership, so most election winners already are well off. Their election often results in a sharp reduction in income. Some village leaders consider this a price worth paying to expand their connections with government, banking and business leaders. Others say they stand to gain much more from serving their neighbours than from government servitude.
10 Kung, Cai, and Sun (Citation2009) found the requirement for majority approval to be widespread even before the 2010 revisions to the Village Organic Law.
11 Article 6, Organic Law of Urban Residents’ Committees.
12 See, however, Tomba (Citation2014, 52).
13 In some locations, village Party Secretaries are appointed by township Party Committees, or elected by all village Party branch members.
14 Most Zhejiang counties, including the sites in this study, prohibit Party Secretaries from standing for election as Village Director.
15 It is described as a single regulatory environment because none of the research sites was piloting policy experiments. In all, there was a high level of consistency in implementation of the 2005 Zhejiang province Party and government directive that the administrative village is the legal entity representing collective land owners in the negotiation of changes to property rights. Compliance with provincial implementation regulations supporting the 2010 Village Organic Law also was quite high. Moreover, research by the ADB (Citation2014, 14–15) shows that compared to local governments in other provinces, Zhejiang authorities are subject to more stringent, consistent financial oversight.
16 Reviewers questioned whether my colleagues chose atypically law-abiding, democratic sites. I doubt this, because at the beginning of our research, conflicts and electoral corruption were evident in two sites, and participation rates in two other sites were low.
17 Definitions of urbanization in China are contested. The four indicators chosen here attempt to capture administrative, economic, and geographical dimensions of different definitions.
18 Migrants registered as temporary residents of a location for more than 12 months may vote there instead of in their home villages. In the Guangdong delta, as Yep (Citation2015) observes, long-term migrants have clashed with locals attempting to prevent them from voting so as to exclude them from sharing in the management and distribution of benefits from villagers’ collective assets. X and W had relatively large populations of migrant workers. However, most were itinerant and had no interest in local politics.
19 Villager, 18 April 2014.
20 Party Secretary, 13 February 2013.
21 Villager, 15 February 2013.
22 Group leader, 16 February 2013.
23 1 mu =1/15th hectare.
24 Villager, 16 February 2013.
25 Village representative, 17 February 2013.
26 Party member, 22 April 2014.
27 Director, 20 April 2014.
28 Party member, 22 April 2014.
29 According to Huang and Sun (Citationn.d.), in 2007 China produced 1600 tons of freshwater pearls, approximately 90 percent of the world’s output.
30 Many village leaders embezzle collective land compensation funds. In X, however, villagers said candidates believed they would face less risk of exposure and make far more money from business ventures than by embezzling their compensation.
31 Former Party Secretary, 1 May 2014.
32 Villager, 24 May 2013.
33 Villager, 20 May 2013.
34 Villager, 1 May 2014.
35 Deputy Party Secretary, 1 May 2014.
36 Director, 2 May 2014.
37 Party member, 1 May 2014.
38 Villager, 2 May 2014.
39 Former Party Secretary, 1 May 2014.
40 Party Secretary, 27 May 2013.
41 Literally, street (jiedao) government.
42 Village representative, 28 May 2013.
43 Residents may vote in only one village or community electorate.
44 Group leader, 3 May 2014.
45 Party Secretary, 5 May 2014.
46 Residents, 7 May 2013.
47 Resident, 6 May 2013. When asked what ‘self-government’ meant, another interviewee responded, ‘If anything is to be decided in a village everyone has to participate in the discussion. It can’t be decided by just one person. Everyone talks it over then raises their hands to vote’. When asked if urban communities also were self-governing, she scoffed, and said ‘They should be!’
48 Party Secretary, 5 May 2014. Apartment owners also pay fees into a maintenance fund that the community committee uses to pay for infrastructure repairs.
49 Community Director, 7 May 2013.
50 As explained by Yep (Citation2015, 543–47), typically such transfers involve village households swapping contracted land use rights for a commensurate number of shares. As legal owner, the village collective receives the largest block of shares, and the village committee represents the owner by serving as the Board of Directors. The shareholding entity then leases the land or constructs rented buildings on the land, and the resulting income pays annual dividends to shareholders.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Sally Sargeson
Sally Sargeson is a Senior Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, College of Asia and the Pacific, the Australian National University. Her recent publications include a book co-authored with Tamara Jacka and Andrew Kipnis, Contemporary China: society and social change (Cambridge University Press 2013); a volume co-edited with Tamara Jacka, Women, gender and rural development in China (Edward Elgar 2011); and articles in Critical Asian Studies, The Journal of Peasant Studies, The China Journal and Journal of Contemporary China.