http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4520-1207
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Abstract
In the last two decades, the industrial tree plantation (ITP) sector has expanded rapidly in southern China, causing important changes in land-use and land control. It involves both domestic and transnational corporations, and has provoked widespread conflict and political contestations. The villagers who are affected by the expansion of ITPs have reacted in varied and complex ways: some of the villagers were incorporated in the ITP sector, while others are excluded; some have embraced the change, while others have complaints; and some of the complaints remained latent, while others developed into (overt or covert) forms of resistance. This paper explores how and why various social groups have responded differently to the expansion of ITPs. This paper reveals the dynamics of villagers’ inclusion and exclusion in the ITP sector, covering both ‘passive’ and ‘active’ forms of inclusion and exclusion, resulting in differentiated political reactions from villagers. This paper hopes to contribute towards a more comprehensive understanding of the complex engagement of villagers in changes in land use and land control, not just in the most commonly studied countries in global land grabbing but inside China, and in transactions that involved large foreign companies, something that has so far been missed in the literature on land grabbing.
Acknowledgements
BRICS Initiatives for Critical Agrarian Studies (BICAS) with funds from Ford Foundation Beijing supported part of my fieldwork in southern China. I am grateful for their support. I want to express my deepest thanks to Jun Borras, Max Spoor, Mindi Schneider, Natalia Mamonova, Tsegaye Moreda Shegro and Elyse Mills for their insightful inputs into this piece and/or earlier versions. I would also like to acknowledge the extremely critical but very constructive comments from the anonymous reviewers that helped improved the quality of this paper. Any remaining errors are mine alone.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
ORCID
Yunan Xu http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4520-1207
Notes
1 In this paper, I use ‘villagers’ to describe socially differentiated rural residents. These villagers are not the same as the ‘peasants’ defined by Chayanov who only conduct subsistence farming. Most of the villagers are doing off-farm work. Meanwhile, they are not backward and low quality as discussed in the contemporary narratives of Chinese peasants (see Schneider Citation2015). They have their specific advantages. Moreover, some villagers are not purely ‘smallholders’. Although villagers in China usually have small plots of land, during the past decade or so some have acquired more land than others (this will be analysed in the following sections).
2 Here forestland is not necessarily natural forest, but one of the eight land-uses classified by the Chinese government according to Land Management Law. In this case of Guangxi, according to Guangxi Tongzhi, most of the natural forests had been destroyed for food production or left to bushes and weeds before the rise of the ITP sector. Thus, such land-use change in Guangxi’s forestland does not necessarily lead to deforestation (Guangxi Forestry department Citation1998).
3 Among those individual-dominated large-scale ITPs, there are a few owned by some local villagers.
4 This reveals that the political reactions from below towards the rise of the ITP sector in China are much more complex than the well-known stories told in the documentary Red Forest Hotel.
5 Some studies have pointed out the division among rural dwellers during land-use and land-control changes (Gerber Citation2011; McElwee Citation2009; McElwee Citation2012).
6 Although there are already a few studies that point out environmental conflicts over the ITP sector (Gerber Citation2011; Gerber and Veuthey Citation2010).
7 There used to be many studies about plantation workers’ struggles for the improvement of their terms of inclusion. However, the current focus in academia has been shifted to the struggles of the excluded.
8 To obtain a better understanding of the story behind the ‘hard data’ collected during the interviews, my questions were not limited to those listed on the questionnaire. I also asked other questions according to the information provided by the interviewees.
9 These trees are planted by production teams rather than individual villagers. Villagers are not actively involved in planting trees to restore the collectively owned forestland. This is mainly because they are lacking economic incentives to plant pine trees or acacia trees, and are also short of money.
10 In Guangxi, state forest farms own 10 percent of the forestland, leaving 90 percent in the hands of collectives. Collective-owned land refers to the land owned by rural collectives (everyone in the community), which all of the villagers in the community can commonly use.
11 It is linked with specific institutional arrangements in rural China. As mentioned by Ho and Spoor (Citation2006), without a clear assignment of property rights and with the state’s ultimate control, the Chinese land system is proven to be secure and successful.
12 Field notes, 6 March 2015.
13 Those villagers who are only involved in the upstream/downstream business and are not engaging directly in the ITP sector are also part of the excluded group.
14 Field notes, 23 February 2016.
15 For example, the loss of control of the land they originally used, and the crop yield losses caused by the negative impacts of the ITP sector.
16 Only when p < 0. 05 would the difference be significant.
17 The question was: Do you agree that the income of the villagers has been increased with the rise of the ITP sector? The choices were 1: strongly disagree; 2: disagree; 3: neither agree nor disagree; 4: agree; 5: strongly agree.
18 In Ukraine, the largest share of direct and indirect agricultural subsidies is given to the large agribusinesses, while private family farmers and rural households operate with nearly no state support. Besides that, private family farmers have to compete with large agribusiness for access to land and associated resources (e.g. grain storage facilities), which makes then financially disadvantaged, as they are unable to pay the market price for use of those resources.
19 This is a unit for the measurement of land – 15 mu equals one hectare.
20 Except for a small part of the hilly land already allocated through the HRS reform, most of the forestland remained in the hands of collectives.
21 Field notes, 18 March 2016.
22 Although in some villages, a large part of their collective forestland has already been contracted out before they are motivated to invest in forestland.
23 Under the Returning Farmland to Forest Program, planters received 210 yuan per mu per year for five years (as commercial forests) or eight years (as ecological forests). In 2007, the central state prolonged the subsidies for another five or eight years at reduced rates of 125 yuan (Zinda et al. Citation2017). The subsidies and free seedlings increased the economic incentives for villagers in Guangxi to plant eucalyptus trees.
24 This refers to Chinese currency – currently 1 euro = 7.35 yuan.
25 Field notes, 16 February 2016.
26 Field notes, 22 February 2016.
27 Field notes, 13 March 2016.
28 Most of the collective forestland was not contracted to rural households as the farmland in the HRS reform was, leaving the user rights vague until the forestland reform started in 2008. The user rights of the collective forestland were, then, formally distributed and verified, although most of the land had already been used or occupied by villagers or external investors before the reform.
29 During my fieldwork in 2016, villagers in only one of seven villages mentioned they receive 100 yuan per year as rent for their collective land. Villagers in other villages either said they have never heard about the land rent, or mentioned land rent is left in the collective for public activities.
30 There are also some villagers who transferred their land control as an active livelihood choice (e.g. those who migrated to urban areas), but they do not belong to this group.
31 Field notes, 16 February 2016.
32 According to my interviews, this share ranges from 30 to 50 percent.
33 Fieldwork interviews, 20 March 2015.
34 Unit for the measurement of weight: one jin = 0.5 kg.
35 Field notes, 20 March 2015.
36 Field notes, 30 March 2015.
37 Interviews, 2016.
38 Field notes, 2 March 2016.
39 Field notes, 3 March 2016.
40 Field notes, 3 March 2016.
41 Field notes, 3 March 2016.
42 Field notes, 17 February 2016.
43 Field notes, 23 February 2016.
44 Field notes, 2 March 2016.
45 Field notes, 18 February 2016.
46 Field notes, 11 March 2016.
47 Field notes, 22 February 2016.
48 Field notes, 17 February 2016.
49 Field notes, 12 March 2016.
50 Field notes, 18 March 2015.
51 Field notes, 3 March 2016.
52 Field notes, 3 March 2016.
53 Here I replaced villagers’ family names with ‘X’ and ‘Y’.
54 Field notes, 1 March 2016.
55 Field notes, 3 March 2016.
56 Field notes, 17 February 2016.
57 Field notes, 10 March 2015.
58 This is a way for the citizens to petition higher levels of the state and express their demands.
59 Field notes, 10 March 2015.
60 Field notes, 22 February 2016.
61 The project started from the land exchange among villagers within the community in Guangxi in 1996. At the beginning, such land consolidation was driven by the villagers spontaneously exchanging the fragmented land awarded in the HRS reform (as mentioned above) based on their social relations. Later, the state (referring to provincial and county government) became involved and soon became the driving force. The provincial government provided bonuses for villagers, rural cooperatives and companies who invested in the land levelling and infrastructure construction (including the road and irrigation construction), to encourage land consolidation from 2012. The county government helped the villagers/rural communities seek loans and firms specialised in land levelling/infrastructure construction to facilitate the project. According to a document issued by the provincial government, the target area of the consolidated land in 2015 was 500,000 mu (equal to 33,333 hectares; see document from Guangxi Land and Resources Department Citation2012).
62 Field notes, 21 February 2016.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Yunan Xu
Yunan Xu is a PhD researcher in the research group ‘Political Economy of Resources, Environment and Population’ at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Hague, Netherlands. She has a fellowship from the China Scholarship Council (CSC). She has published in Journal of Peasant Studies, Third World Thematics and Journal of Cleaner Production. Email address: [email protected].