https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8571-7398
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ABSTRACT
China's rapid urbanization has been fueled by dispossession and subsequent commodification of villagers' land. We use interviews and an original survey of land-losing villagers to examine factors that influence their opposition to land expropriation. We find that villagers are less opposed to land expropriation when local authorities reduce the gap between land-taking compensation paid to them and the land's market value, distribute compensation expeditiously, publicize processes and procedures, and encourage public participation in the process of land expropriation. Our study, while acknowledging massive dispossession and displeasure with it, shows that autocratic governments can sugarcoat the bitter pill of land expropriation.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the guest editors and anonymous reviewers for valuable suggestions to improve the manuscript. We thank Dan Berkowitz, Iza Ding, Wilson Law, Wanlin Lin, Dan Mattingly, Lynette Ong, Kay Shimizu, Fubing Su, Weiping Wu, Dali Yang, Julie Zeng for helpful comments on earlier drafts. The earlier draft was presented at the Urban China Forum at Columbia University, the Land Governance workshop at the University of Pittsburgh, and the 2017 Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference. We thank the participants of the workshops for their comments and valuable discussions regarding land expropriation in China. We thank Dan Mattingly for sharing his forthcoming book manuscript, and Guoli Dong for helping us in the fieldwork. We also thank Yuting Yao for her excellent research assistance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Meina Cai is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on political economy of development, land politics, urbanization, and Chinese political economy.
Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili is Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work focuses on issues of governance, public administration, legitimacy, and security throughout Eurasia.
Ilia Murtazashvili is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and Associate Director of the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh. His current research focuses on selective enforcement of property rights, governance of technologies such as blockchain, and economic development on American Indian reservations. He is currently a Campbell Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Hui Wang is Professor of School of Public Affairs at Zhejiang University in China. His research focuses on land and urbanization in China.
Notes
1 The defining feature of a common-pool resource system is that rights to land and related resources are exercised collectively, rather than by individuals (Schlager and Ostrom Citation1992).
2 The survey was jointly conducted by Landesa Rural Development Institute, Renmin University, and Michigan State University. For more details, see Economy (Citation2012).
3 The survey did not ask about agreement with expropriation or compensation for private use, only public use.
4 Hukou is the Chinese household registration system. It identifies citizens with a status (urban or rural) and a place of one's permanent residence (local or non-local).
5 Interview with a village cadre in Zhejiang, 2013.
6 Interview with a villager in Hebei, 2019.
7 Interview with a former Village Committee member in Shanghai, 2019.
8 Interview with a village communist party secretary in Shanghai, 2019.
9 Interview with a villager in Zhejiang, 2015.
10 Cities are broadly defined in the survey. They include provincial-level megalopolis, prefectures, and county-level cities.