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Abstract
This paper concerns the process of power at the periphery of state bureaucracy with a focus on township governments and their land development projects in the last two decades. I argue that townships at the bottom of the state bureaucracy operate like power brokers between the state and the village. When dealing with the formal party–state system above them, the township's delegated power is highly uncertain. Townships choose to maneuver in the unspecified legal and administrative zone to bypass the scrutiny of the supervising government. When it comes to the village below them, the township's power is under-defined, and therefore can be stretched to intensify and centralize the grips over village resources and land. In both cases, township officials strategize to maximize their control of village land and profit from the booming land-lease market in China's fast industrializing and urbanizing areas. Townships' land deals reflect the general power process of decentralization. Their brokerage of power corresponds directly with that of property rights in post-reform China.
You-tien Hsing is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley. She is also an affiliated researcher at the Sociology Division of the E-Institute at Shanghai University, China. She is the author of Making Capitalism in China: The Taiwan Connection (Oxford, 1998). She is now working on a book concerning the relationships between land and territorial politics in China's late-socialist transformation.
Notes
1. For a discussion of fiscal decentralization policies and local state autonomy, see CitationOi (1992) and CitationMontinola et al. (1997). For a more recent treatment of fiscal decentralization see CitationTsui and Wang (2004). For the typology of Chinese local states, see CitationBaum and Shevchenko (1999).
2. For example, CitationLi's (1998) work on Guangdong provincial government, CitationWank (1998) on Xiamen municipal governments, CitationLi (2005) on Yichang county in Hubei Zweig (1992) and CitationEdin (2003) on township governments.
3. In this paper I use the term ‘townships’ to refer to both xiang and zhen. Both xiang (townships) and zhen (towns) are at the same administrative level, under the county-level governments. For details of the difference see CitationZweig (1992) and CitationMa (2000).
4. The general order of command in Chinese bureaucracy is hierarchical: all superior government agencies and officials have the authority over those below them. But those immediately above have more direct influence. This is because of the ‘one step down’ cadre management system. For discussion of the ‘one step down’ cadre management, see CitationO'Brien and Li (1999).
5. Furthermore, the CCP's dominant position in the villages is formally stated in the Organic Law: the CCP party organization is the core of the village organization. See CitationO'Brien and Li (1999).
6. Important works have been done on power brokering between the state and the peasantry in Chinese history. In addition to the earlier writings in the 1960s on gentry, there are works by historians like CitationDuara's (1988) state gentry broker-peasant quadruple.
7. Here I follow scholars whose works integrate legal and social factors in landed property rights issues, including those contributed to CitationJacobs (1998). Third World-focused research is represented by CitationSantos (1977). These scholars of law, sociology, anthropology and history have treated property as social relations; and shared the view that law informs, and is informed by, the social and political evolution of the practices of landed property rights. See CitationSinger (2000). For Eastern European post-socialist transition studies see CitationVerdery (1999).
8. The definition and calculation of China's urban expansion and urban population growth have always been controversial, due to the use of multiple criteria and reporting flaws. For the discussion of the complexity see CitationZhang and Zhao (1998). More recent works suggest that it is safe to take the figure of 36 to 40 per cent as ‘urban’, that is, between 1980 and 2002 the urban population grew from 18 to 20 per cent to 36 to 40 per cent of the total population, or about 500 million in total were added to the urban population. See CitationLin (2002) and CitationZhou and Ma (2003).
9. Here ‘urban governments’ are defined as those local governments at and above county levels, including counties, city districts and all levels of cities.
10. PRC Constitution, Article 10. PRC Land Management Law (first adopted in 1986, amended in 1988, 1998 and 2004), Article 2.
11. There are two types of ‘cities’ below the provinces: prefecture-level cities that have administrative authority over several districts (in urbanized areas) and counties (in rural areas); there are als county-level cities that are upgraded to city status mostly after 1986.
12. There are some differences between ‘city leading county’; and ‘city governing county’ j see Chung and Lam (2004: 951–4) and CitationMa (2005).
13. Throughout the 1990s, local governments' irregular and illegal sales and conversion of farmland were rampant and the approval could be made by the township government. In 2003, the land management system was restructured and the central ministry and its provincial bureaus took back from local governments much of the authority in approving land lease sales and land conversion. It is too early to tell how effective the reinstallation of the ‘vertical management’ will be.
14. Since 2001, several provinces (e.g. Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Anhui, Guangdong and Beijing) have chosen ‘testing-point’) (shidian) cities and towns to experiment with the new policies of ‘rural construction land circulation’ without the urban government's interference; see CitationXie et al. (2004).
15. According to a survey of the 200 largest projects in eleven counties of an unidentified province in 1992, only 21 per cent of the appropriated land is used for public purposes like roads and schools, 5 per cent for governmental agencies, and 74 per cent were commercial projects; see CitationLin et al. (2004).
16. For the debate on rural governance reform and the necessity of township-level government, see CitationWu (2002).
17. CitationGeorge Lin (2005) has found in his fieldwork that in Yangtze River Delta over 98 per cent of the total conveyance fee collected during the period of 1989 to 1997 was retained by the municipal government and none was handed over to the central government (p. 430).
18. An official at the Finance Bureau of Kunshan city captures well the attitude of the urban government towards collective land: ‘…land is owned by the state, so every level of the state is entitled to the profit from land’ (CitationYang et al. 2004: 129).
19. In some cases, townships are made responsible for the expenses of cultivating new agricultural land to make up for the farmland that is being expropriated, as a part of the national policy of ‘balancing between occupation (for non-farm uses) and expansion of farmland’ (‘zhanbu pingheng’) (CitationYang et al. 2004).
20. The township gets a share of the compensation paid to the villages and villagers. But the overall compensation is so low that a small share pales in comparison to the large sum of conveyance fee that the urban governments dominate. The Land Law states that compensation fees belong to village collectives and individual households. A survey shows that, in practice, individual peasant households get only 5 to 10% of the total compensation, while the rest is retained by county and township governments (60 to 70 per cent) and village collectives (25 to 30 per cent). See Lin et al. (2004: 272.)
21. Townships could also build factories and workers' dormitories on the construction land themselves, then rent the units to enterprises. See, for example, CitationZhang et al. (2004).
22. Interview in Beijing, August 2003. Also, a vice director at the Hubei Procuratorate (jianchayuan) admitted in his investigative report that the number of unreported cases far exceeded reported ones. Most of the cases are resolved by fines instead of reconverting the land back to farm uses (CitationXu 2004: 140).
23. This is taking advantage of the ambiguous line between land leasing and renting in practice. When collective land is rented out to developers for non-farm projects, it is usually a long-term arrangement like a lease.
24. Interview in China, December 2003.
25. For homebuyers family farms in the suburbs are much more spacious and less expensive. They also expect that in the event of urban government tearing down these illegal projects, the homeowners as victims can demand compensation from the government. The fact that this type of illegal housing with ambivalent ‘xiangchanquan’ is popular in suburban areas means that township governments command enough legitimacy, if not legality, to issue the certificate that carries certain weight in the market.
26. Although it was commonly recognized that the principle of the ‘collective ownership’ of village land is that ‘under the three-tiered ownership system, the team (villagers’ groups) is the basis' (sanji suoyou, yi dui wei jichu). For a discussion on the ambiguity of the collective ownership of land, see CitationHo (2001).
27. Compared to Shenzhen and Guangzhou where land control is in the hands of the district-county governments, Dongguan's townships have had greater control over village land. See CitationYang and Xu (2005).
28. The phenomenon of ‘zhen-ya-cun’ (‘the township dominates the village’) is found in other research. In my own interviews with town planners in Zhongshan city-region in the Pearl River Delta region (2000) and another town near Shanghai (1997), both interviewees had boasted about the comprehensiveness of their plans for the villages under their jurisdiction.
29. Interview with a sociologist in Beijing, December 2001 and June 2002. Interview with the vice-mayor of Xiaolong (not the real name), June 2002.
30. The mixture of production and retail use of space is known as ‘stores in the front, workshops in the back’ (qiandian houchang).
31. For the cadre responsibility system, see CitationO'Brien and Li (1999) and CitationEdin (2003). Most of their discussion of the cadre responsibility system focuses on the township leader cadres. Townships' responsibility in tax collection and population control, among other policy tasks, is further shared by villages below them. CitationTsui and Wang (2004) reported that in recent years village leaders also have to sign responsibility contracts with the superior township government (p. 76).
32. See CitationEdin (2003) for a discussion on overlapping appointments at different administrative levels as an important method of cadre management.