‘Resettlement with Chinese characteristics’: the distinctive political-economic context, (in)voluntary urbanites, and three types of mismatch

ABSTRACT

In recent years, urban resettlement as a specific form of urbanisation has gained its momentum in planning practices to accommodate newcomers of cities, in line with the macro policy reforms of urban-rural integration. This paper synthesises literature related to the proposed term ‘urban resettlement with Chinese characteristics’ to shed light on the distinctive and unparalleled socio-economic and spatial transformation entailed by the ongoing urban resettlement in China. Mindful of China’s socialist ideology and authoritarian regime, we argue that urban resettlement has become a potent tool for the Chinese government to fuel economic development and urbanisation. The longstanding issues such as involuntary resettlement have been alleviated with the gradualist institutional changes, but emerging predicaments concerning social mismatch, space mismatch, and spatial mismatch still linger. This paper calls for researchers to draw lessons and implications from the discourse of ‘urban resettlement with Chinese characteristics’ to expand the knowledge of sustainable urban-rural development.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban resettlement
• Chinese characteristics
• landless villagers
• urban-rural development
• mobility

Introduction

The year 2020 marks an iconic milestone for the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Chinese nation (zhonghua minzu) to achieve the comprehensive establishment of ‘a moderately prosperous society’ in China’s long-range development strategic plan. One year later, President Xi Jinping announced that China had scored a ‘completely victory’ in fighting against poverty.¹ This long enduring process is achieved through China’s consistent efforts of institutional changes concerning the ‘three rural issues.’ Resettlement has become a key tool in facilitating the development of the impoverished peasantry, with some 9.6 million farmers are resettled during the Thirteen Five-Year Plan (2016–2020) to alleviate poverty (Xinhua News Agency 2020). As Rogers and Wilmsen (2019) summarised, research on resettlement incorporates two strands of literature, focusing on (1) resettlement as a vehicle for development and (2) resettlement as the resolution for adaptation to climate change. Early resettlement literature was written by anthropologists in the mid-fifties and early sixties who studied dam-induced resettlement in African countries, such as Egypt and Ghana (Terminski 2015). The focal point gradually shifted towards Asia because of the high population growth and rampant urbanisation process. Mega development projects such as the Sardar Sarovar Dam in India, transnational dam constructions alongside the Mekong River, and the well-known Three Gorges Dam in China have frequently prompted concern (Neef and Singer 2015). Similar to the adaptation of neoliberalism theory in China’s context (Lim 2014), urban resettlement theory and praxis in China are by no means the same as explicated by the western literature (Connell 2012; Bonney 2013). Urban resettlement in China has not been systematically examined yet due to its institutional (Tang et al. 2016), social (Zhang et al. 2017), and economic (Siciliano 2014) particularities. Moreover, the political economy of socialist China has complicated resettlement, especially when it comes to the trade-offs between government interventions and market economy laws. This paper aims to unveil the Chinese characteristics of urban resettlement from three separate but entangled aspects, paying special attention to the changing political-economic context, existing socio-economic and institutional barriers, and post-resettlement adaptation. In the meanwhile, we dissect urban resettlement in China from the affected people’s perspective, understanding their rationality and agency in adapting to such resettlement practices.

During the last decades, after the marketisation of land in post-reform China, urbanisation has consumed a massive amount of rural land (29,579 km² as of 2017). The land-driven economy is still the case in China and will continue in the next couple of years (Lin 2014; Qun et al. 2015; Y. Liu et al. 2018). The capitalist urbanisation process has significantly homogenised Chinese cities to a universal and general typology coupled with an increasingly urbanised population (60% as of 2019). In megacities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hangzhou, urban resettlement prevails in their development and modernisation process (Liu et al. 2016; Qiu and Xu 2017; Ming Zhang and Wang 2013). The resettlement in China is a complicated phenomenon manifested in various forms, including the land dispossession during urban expansion, the redevelopment of urban villages, the regeneration of inner urban areas, and much intricated ‘sedentarisation of herding communities’ (Rogers and Wilmsen 2019). This paper seeks to unpack how urban resettlement can be used by the Chinese government to fuel its rapid urbanisation process and achieve integrated urban-rural development (Wei et al. 2018).

Prior literature on urban resettlement in China has focused on the agents of government and developers (Gu and Wu 2010; Wei 2012; Cao et al. 2014), whereas the resettled farmers’ agency to adapt to this imposed resettlement is underexamined. This is largely due to the assumption that resettlement generally results in the improvement of resettlers’ livelihood. Although some studies (Lo et al. 2016; Xiaojun et al. 2017; Wei; Liu et al. 2018) claim there is an increase in income for displaced people, some critiques highlight the resettlement’s adverse impact on the displaced people, especially the destruction of their social relations (Gomersall 2018). As Sargeson (2013a) pointed out, the resettled are pre-defined by the government as ‘backwards’ or ‘lacking’ so as to justify the intervention of resettlement development. The powerful state dominance in China’s urbanisation has therefore become integral to resettlement planning, implementation, and appraisal (Xu et al. 2011; Ren 2017). This paper further expands the existing knowledge of urban resettlement in China through a lens of China’s gradualist and progressive manner of institutional adjustments to promoting urbanisation (Zhu 1999; Sofield and Li 2011). In the following sections, we first define the term ‘urban resettlement’ in this paper to distinguish urban resettlement from other forms of resettlement projects, such as development-induced and climate change-related resettlement. Subsequently, we synthesise the literature on urban resettlement according to the three aspects mentioned earlier. Given China’s longstanding efforts in balancing development and social stability, urban and rural areas, this paper situates resettlement in the changing dynamics of China’s urban-rural development. To be specific, how do China’s unique political-economic settings influence the unfolding of urban resettlement in China? How has urban resettlement evolved to facilitate landless farmers’ adaptation as urbanisation progresses in China? Lastly, what are the major issues incurred by urban resettlement that hinder landless farmers’ adaptation to the host urban societies? We conclude by making suggestions on future research agendas to incorporate urban resettlement in China as a critical aspect of achieving a sustainable human settlement.

The scope of ‘urban resettlement’ in China

Resettlement is defined by the World Bank (2015) as a process that involves assisted efforts to facilitate the affected to ‘improve, or at least to restore, their incomes and living standards.’ The phenomenon has garnered wide attention from scholars in the Global North, but the intellectual battlegrounds are primarily in the Global South (Neef and Singer 2015; Rogers and Wilmsen 2019). International organisations like the World Bank and Asian Developmental Bank serve as the main agents funding development projects, which are likely to result in migration, resettlement and displacement of the local residents. Since urbanisation has become a global condition (Brenner and Schmid 2014), we hereby conceptualise resettlement as a specific form of urbanisation that entails the creative destruction of the siting community’s spatial, social, and economic arrangements.² The enclosure of landscape in peri-urban and rural areas has accelerated capital circulation at the cost of millions of rural residents, not only in the form of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2008).

Resettlement in China comes in various forms: the widely practiced development induced displacement and resettlement, the resettlement as development targeting poverty alleviation in the countryside, intra-urban resettlement resulting from urban redevelopment projects, and urban resettlement of land-lost farmers due to urban expansion and land expropriation (Wang and Lo 2015; Wu 2016b; Liu J 2017; Wei; Liu et al. 2018). The last form is the main research object of this paper, which will be referred to by using ‘urban resettlement.’ In China, urbanisation is defined as ‘a complex and multifaceted process involving population migration from rural to urban areas, rural and urban land conversions, spatial reconfiguration of settlements, and changing governance’ (Gu and Wu 2010, p. 1–2). We can easily peek from the definition that rural-urban dualism is the most substantial feature that distinguishes China’s urban transformation from its international counterparts. This entrenched urban-rural divide has its historical and socio-economic roots in China’s long history as an agricultural country and the legacy of the National Party’s ruling before the civil war. Facing the underdevelopment reality, the Communist Party of China employed an urban-biased development strategy to catch up with developed Western countries in the post-reform period (Wang et al. 2019). The household registration system (hukou zhidu) emerged in 1958 and has since become a defining identity of Chinese society, which bears the brunt of criticism during China’s social and economic transformation. In post-reform China, the urban-rural relations have undergone intensive transformations under the paradigm shifts of China’s urbanisation (Zhu et al. 2019). China’s socialist ideology demands an ultimate urban-rural integration rather than the urban-rural antagonism that is bound to happen in capitalist development (Mili 2019). Against this backdrop, the term ‘coordinated urban-rural development’ was formalised by the written provisions that came into being at the 16th Party Congress in 2002. Later on, urban-rural integration has become macro policy rhetoric and a national priority of rural reforms and China’s subsequent Five-Year Plans (11th, 12th, and 13th). In recent years, China has initiated a new round of policy reforms aiming at rural revitalisation.³ The most recent attempt made by the central state to establish a Common Wealth Demonstration Zone in Zhejiang Province is a big milestone to realising the Marxist objective of eliminating the urban-rural divide (Xinhua News Agency 2021). As an important form of urban-rural development, urban resettlement needs in-depth exploration.

Urban resettlement is the direct consequence of land finance in China. The large body of literature on land finance has documented how China managed to achieve such high-speed growth within a regime where central government and local government are in a win-win situation (Lin 2014; Liu et al. 2016b; Zhang and Wu 2017; Huang and Chan 2018). Against this economic triumph, another body of literature on land expropriation pays heightened attention to the sufferings of land-lost farmers being deprived of their land and displaced from their original settlements (Siciliano 2014; Lin et al. 2018; Xie 2019; Zhang and Qian 2020; Kan 2020). The longstanding property rights ambiguity issue associated with China’s land ownership has further stigmatised urban resettlement practices in China (Qian 2019; He et al. 2009; Zhang et al. 2018). Urban resettlement, therefore, has remained a subordinated research subject compared to urbanisation and the broad land issue in China. In this sense, it is essential to foreground urban resettlement to deepen our understanding of the changing urban-rural dynamics in China, particularly as an emerging form of rural-urban population transfer. Indeed, Chan (2012) contented that hukou reclassification, rather than net migration, was the primary contributor to the recent urban population explosion. The transition from rural residents to urban residents is an enduring process that involves the social integration of economic, social, and political dimensions, which has been extensively examined by Chinese scholars and is termed as ‘citizenization’ (Liu et al. 2012; Shan 2014; Feng and Ye 2017; Xu et al. 2019).

In sum, urban resettlement in this paper is defined as a special form of urbanisation through which farmers transform into urbanites through the creative destruction of their socio-economic conditions. To our best knowledge, existing research on this form of resettlement in China has mainly adopted case study approach (Hu et al. 2015; Qian and Xue 2017; Wu et al. 2019; Xie 2019) partly due to the uneven geography of Chinese cities (Li 2012; Chen et al. 2019). Therefore, this research lacuna calls for a systematic and contextualised exposition of the subject. This review aims to fill this gap by synthesising existing literature to forge a multi-layered but relatively fine-grained understanding of urban resettlement in contemporary China.

China’s distinctive political-economic context

The political landscape of Asian countries, especially China, has determined the development path of resettlement projects. The state-dominated resettlement reminds us of the protracted discourse of planned economy versus market economy in China (Tang 1994; Ma 2002; Qian 2014). Whether strong government interventions under socialism would lead to promising outcomes has yet to be seen. Indeed, the land institutions in place have been criticised for being ‘wrong’ by scholars who uphold Western neo-classic economics theories that private ownership leads to better economic performance and prosperity (Ho 2013; Webster et al. 2016). The gradual decentralisation and the deployment of market-driven urban development under neoliberalism have profoundly affected resettlement projects. While the hegemonic capitalist mode of production has penetrated China’s urbanisation process (Chan 2012; Brenner and Schmid 2015), some pronounced socialist features characterise urban resettlement in China, including socialist neoliberalism, landed finance and the public ownership of land. These three bodies of literature can enhance our understanding of urban resettlement in China’s distinctive political-economic context.

First, neoliberalism has unfolded in China in a way that follows the ‘authoritarian turn’ of neoliberalism (Peck and Theodore 2019) that features ‘more unilateral actions of authoritarian states than democratic consent to impose neoliberal practices’ (Su and Qian 2020, p. 3). The proliferation of literature on China’s neoliberalism and the entrepreneurial government has clearly revealed the political-economic backdrop of China’s unprecedented urbanisation. The urbanisation parallels the displacement of people and peasants from their settlements to be resettled elsewhere in usually concentrated and gated urban communities (Zhao and Zou 2017). A consensus has been made that the process of neoliberalisation in China is inscribed with strong ‘Chinese Characteristics’ (Harvey 2005a; Ong 2007; Peck and Zhang 2013), and China’s post-reform market economy boom is undeniably attributed to the hegemonic ideology of neoliberalism (Wu 2008; Chu and So 2010). Furthermore, neoliberal planning that favours pro-growth and market-friendly state-market relations also demonstrates variations in China. China’s authoritarian regime substantially differs from the neoliberal planning practices in North American and Western European countries (Wu and Phelps 2011), where the retreating state is actually gaining a more proactive role in introducing market mechanisms in planning. Wu (2015) asserted that China’s post-reform planning is featured by rescaling instead of retreat, aiming at the market but also consolidating state power. As such, neoliberal planning has been used by both central and local governments to fuel the deregulated market-oriented growth.

Against this socialist neoliberal backdrop, urban resettlement is tacitly sanctioned and even promoted by the Chinese state under the banner of planning for growth and planning for the market. However, although the state controls the allocation of land resources, China’s treatment of land related to resettlement varies significantly from the ‘eminent domination’ in India and a pro-market process in socialist Vietnam (Phuc et al. 2014; Parwez and Sen 2016; Ren 2017). Chinese government exercise much regulatory power over urban resettlement and land conversion. In practice, while the developers sometimes participate in the resettlement project of land-lost farmers, the local government makes ultimate decisions.⁴ Urban resettlement aligns with neoliberal principles that favour property market and suburbanisation and caters to the central government’s pursuit of urban-rural integrated development and local government’s fiscal demands. It creates an overall promising prospect except for the land-lost farmers in some cases, which will be examined in-depth in subsequent sections.

Second, the landed finance is a phenomenon relatively unique to China. Land commodification and land financialization in China add knowledge about the role of land in urban growth and development. For the former, Lin (2014) pointed out that land commodification rather than human capital and advanced technology that are main contributors to Western urbanisation played an instrumental role in China; for the latter, Liu et al. (2016) concluded that contra to Western countries where suburbanisation results from the capital switch from the primary circuit to the secondary circuit, China’s capital accumulation is facilitated by land-reserve and financing systems that local governments deliberately orchestrate. As we argued before, China’s neoliberalism unfolding does not lead to a wholesale retreat of the state, but reinforces the state’s governance, especially for the local governments. What becomes unique for China is that instead of following the orthodox neoliberalism framework of the diminishing and minimum state at this stage, it diverts to another form of re-orientation, from ‘redistributive state’ to the ‘entrepreneurial state(s)’ (Wu 2008). Wu (2010) further addressed that the ruthless commodification and privatisation process undermine Chinese social stability after Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour in 1992, which led to extensive lay-offs as a new underclass and the suspension of social housing provision, contributing to the development of entrepreneurial governance.

The paradox in this shift is while the theory of neoliberalism advocates the minimisation of state’ intervention to the free market (Harvey 2005a, p. 2), in the authoritarian regime like China, the disempowerment of central state de facto reinforces the ‘sovereignty’ (Hsing 2010) of the local states with more autonomy (Harvey 1989a, p. 14) on devising the land economy to adapt to the neoliberal urbanisation. This argument aligns with many scholar’s observations that notwithstanding resembling neoliberalism to some extent, China’s land commodification is primarily led by the party-state rather than the capitalist class (Ong 2007; Wu 2016b; Horesh and Lim 2017). Furthermore, He and Wu (2009) highlighted the importance of land and housing reform in the late 1990s in facilitating the neoliberal shifts of China from an egalitarian society to a marketised society. Besides, they claim that a new nexus of governance has emerged wherein the local state is more proactive in the practice of neoliberal urbanism within the framework devised by the central government. The defining feature of land commodification is anchored with China’s neoliberal urbanism, which is controlled by China’s authoritarian government intervention (Ong 2007). This prevailing land consumption directly leads to the encroachment of rural lands surrounding the existing urban boundary, thereby creating landless farmers and fierce collisions responding to the land grabbing (Lin 2010). Therefore, the resultant resettlement is not produced solely by market-driven spatial enclosure but is contributed much by the local entrepreneurial government’s deliberate embracement of ‘spatial fix’ to attract and absorb capital investment.

Third, China’s ambiguous property rights institution is relatively credible and effective in the current stage (Ho 2014, 2016; Sun and Ho 2020). An extensive literature stresses that clearly defined private property rights are the prerequisite for economic development (Deininger et al. 2015; Sun 2016; Ho 2017). However, in China’s authoritarian management of production elements, the land is either collective-owned or state-owned. The enigma that has long plagued scholars is that China’s economic boom is rooted in ‘wrong institutions,’ including ‘authoritarian, non-transparent, unclear, ambiguous and insecure’ (Ho 2013, p. 1088). While China’s property rights ambiguity has been explicated through various perspectives (Zhang and He 2020; Zheng and Ho 2020; Cai et al. 2020; Wang and Tan 2020), we seek further to explore this topic from the perspective of urban resettlement. We identify that: 1) the local predatory government takes advantage of this ambiguity to advance urban resettlement, 2) the central government is promoting gradualist institutional changes to achieving equitable property rights, and 3) collective ownership of rural land can be conducive to landless farmers’ post-resettlement adaptation.

Qian (2007; 2017; 2019) argues that the local government uses coercive measures such as land expropriation to appropriate the rural land from rural collectives justified by ‘public interests’ to generate profits. In such practices, property rights ambiguity reinforces the power imbalance among actors of local government, rural collective and siting farmers, which further exacerbates the unfair redistribution. The land system in China went through a privatisation-socialisation-marketisation process, and the institutional setting also evolved accordingly (Qiu and Xu 2017). China’s central government has proactively engaged in institutional changes as a top-down effort in recalibrating the existing dysfunctional system (Lin 1989; North 1990). Liu et al. (2019) conceptualised this fluid state as ‘property rights regimes in transition’, which involves reassigning ‘operational level rights’ to reach a new balance among actors involved. In 2020, the revised Land Administration Law standardised the legitimised rural land transactions. Specifically, it seeks to safeguard farmers’ rights and interests by clarifying land property rights and the vague formulation of ‘public interests’ (Wen et al. 2020). Furthermore, recent studies have suggested that collective land ownership can enhance farmers’ bargaining power against local government and provide a reliable source of income for land-lost farmers (Sargeson 2013; Qian 2015). In Hangzhou, the local government leaves rural collective a certain percentage (often 10%) of the land expropriated. The retained land is then converted to urban construction land and can be used for market purposes, which realises the hidden market value of the rural land. In the long run, the retained collective land can provide sustainable economic benefits as well as employment opportunities for the resettled villagers, facilitating their adaptation to urban societies. In addition, the property exchange has become a primary form of compensation for landless farmers during resettlement (Hu et al. 2015), which provides another outlet for property rights reform.

The shocking magnitude of near 250 million displaced peasants in China by 2025 (Johnson 2013) alarms urban scholars to seriously interrogate the phenomenon and the drivers that fuel the great transformation. In the socialist neoliberal political-economic context, China’s urbanisation unfolds in a balanced manner that combines state control over land and market-driven capital circulation. In light of this, urban resettlement has become a potent tool in planning for growth, market, entrepreneurial governance, equitable property rights, and urban-rural integration. On a macro level, urban resettlement and urbanisation in China have been successful with promising statistics, but whether it improves landless farmer’s livelihood and welfare warrants further investigation.

Voluntary or involuntary Urbanites

Building on the contextual setting outlined in the previous section, this section covers more literature on how urban resettlement has changed over the years. We seek to explore whether urban resettlement is a voluntary or involuntary process by delving into three bodies of literature on land expropriation, compensation, and the hukou system. Wilmsen and Wang (2015) claimed that voluntary and involuntary resettlement is a false dichotomy in China since the two may transform to each other, thus resettlement should be based on ‘a commitment to settlement not just resettlement’ (p.612). While this argument is valid in its own right, this section focuses on whether the changing conditions of urban resettlement have eased landless farmers’ transition to urbanities.

Literature has documented much about the social instability inflicted by land expropriation in China, including impoverishment, violence, and social segregation (Sargeson 2013; Vanclay 2017; Zhang and Qian 2020). Land expropriation, or domestic land grabbing (Siciliano 2014), involves the transformation of collective-owned rural land to urban land for market purposes and the resettlement of landless farmers. According to China’s Land Administration Law, those farmers are entitled to a compensation package that facilitates their post-resettlement adaptation. Nevertheless, this package does not guarantee a fair monetary compensation based on land’s market value since the scheme is designed mainly according to the original use of agricultural production. The exclusion of rural collectives and individuals from the decision-making process has been criticised for many potential reasons: shortcomings in governance, institutional deficiencies, speculative behaviours of local actors, and property rights ambiguity (Qian 2015; Tang et al. 2015). Over time, extensive literature has developed on two contentious aspects of China’s urban development, including the negotiation of compensation (Tao and Xu 2007; Hui et al. 2013; Wang et al. 2017) and violent confrontations (Escobar 2004; Chen et al. 2013; Sargeson 2013). Facing the abrupt and involuntary displacement, peasants have to grasp the compensation package as the last straw from the government. The compensation package generally comes in three forms:1) compensation for the original land, 2) allowance for the resettled, and 3) compensation for unharvested crops (Lin and Ho 2005). In a recent review, Qian (2015) reported that land requisition compensation has gradually improved in many aspects in recent years, generating a more sophisticated hybrid approach that encompasses monetary compensation, employment alternatives, and others. However, Wang et al. (2017) pointed out that compensation is often unevenly distributed, with large rooms of negotiation at the locale.

On the one hand, the negotiation opens the window for displaced villagers to claim more monetary rewards from their land expropriation; on the other, given the power relations within the village, the masses are likely to gain lower compensation compared to those who have social connections with village cadres or dominant clan. While the situation has drawn attention from the central government, the existing legislative policy lags behind the rampant land acquisition in place, which inevitably compromises the compensation (Hui et al. 2013). It is worth noting that compensation schemes should not be viewed homogeneously. To wit, compensation standards in developed coastal areas differ substantially from those of western regions. This spatial heterogeneity complicates the perception of land compensation associated with resettlement. For those who receive a large lump-sum monetary compensation, conspicuous consumption behaviour becomes problematic (Bao et al. 2017). The transition from inadequate compensation to over-compensation in some parts of China has critically challenged our traditional conception that enough compensation brings harmonious post-resettlement social adaptation. For instance, the term ‘chai erdai’ (literally meaning the second generation of resettlement households) has gained wide attention in Chinese academia.

Accompanying the compensation are sometimes petitions, protests, and violent confrontations. Zhong et al. (2010) noted that China is known for its massive land-use change and surge in land conflicts. The proportion of land expropriation accounts for 73.2% of Chinese farmers’ petitions concerning land issues (Lin et al. 2018). The aforementioned property rights ambiguity has intensified the conflict about land expropriation. Sargeson (2013) argued that in China, ‘expropriation violence is an expression of popular demand for real property rights in the land’ (p.1073). Since property rights conversion is an integral part of land development (Huang and Chan 2018), local governments use economic incentives and political repressions to propel the process. In the face of the forced resettlement, the rural collective and individuals are often passive recipients given the uncertain property rights and weak collective organisation structures (Yan et al. 2018). Lack of property rights leads to the denial of China’s landless farmers’ right to the city (Harvey, 2003). While Sargeson (2013) found a political maturation of villagers to resist expropriation through protests and activist mobilisation, such movements are limited to claims for rights to subsistence (Shin 2013) and fair compensations (Ren 2017). Moreover, farmers generally lack the awareness of legal property rights and the need to defend them from violation (Qian and Xue 2017), leading to local government’s property rights abuse.

Escobar (2004, p. 47) maintained that ‘violence is not only endemic but constitutive of development’ and is closely associated with the development process under the banner of modernisation, specifically with displacement. The forceful land expropriation violates the fundamental security of peasants without further accommodations for their adaptation to the new urban environment through a participatory process. Building on Escobar’s research, Sargeson (2013) proposed the notion of ‘violence as development’ to further explain the expropriation violence, calling for attention to ‘people’s participation in political-economic processes’ (p.1081). Notably, the violence and the protest are mainly against the local government (township), which, in So’s (2007) view, is ascribed to the neoliberal bifurcated state with a ‘benign’ centre and a ‘predatory’ local apparatus juxtaposed in post-reform China. This assertion is evident in recent ‘hecun bingju’ (village consolidation) in Shandong Province where local villagers were forcibly displaced and inadequately compensated. Although the Rural Revitalisation Strategic Plan (2018–2022) clearly states that ‘farmers shall not be forcibly relocated and concentrated in apartments,’ the contentious resettlement in Shandong Province has clearly violated this rule.

In Shandong’s case, while the village consolidation intends to deal with the ‘hollowing villages’ (Zhao and Zhang 2017) and improve rural land-use efficiency, the misconducts of local governments during the implementation renders the resettlement problematic for rural villages. For example, different from other ‘hollowing villages,’ there is a large population of young adults in Xiaofan village, who still inhabit there and are engaged in agricultural production. Local villagers’ primary concerns about the upstairs lifestyle include: no place to park farm equipment such as tractors, the expenses burden of utilities and maintenance fees, and the employment loss. In addition, the compensation offered cannot even meet the construction cost of the new apartments, which requires the villagers to pay additional money for the difference. The difference can reach more than 100,000 yuan, which is a huge burden for the peasantry. Worse still, due to the uncertainties associated with the resettlement, the location selection and construction for the resettlement housing lag far behind the demolishing of the village. With only 9 months of rent compensation, the villagers are distressed about their future (Chen 2020). Villagers’ resistance also stems from their own sense of powerlessness in face of resettlement projects. The policy discourse is so powerful that villagers have to comply with it. Moreover, the local officials often employ both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ tactics to persuade villagers, which leaves no alternative options for villagers (Lv 2020). The forceful resettlement projects have sparked intensive and extensive discussions online in China. On 17 June 2020, the Shandong Provincial Government held a press conference to respond to the ongoing village consolidations. The secretary of Shandong Provincial Department of Natural Resources made it clear that ‘land consolidation project should be premised on villagers’ willingness to do so, and the project can only be implemented after 95% of them agree.’ The secretary also promised that land consolidation will not be a one-size for all project and shall never impose burdens on local villagers (The Paper 2020). On 29 June 2020, Shandong Binzhou City Discipline Inspection Commission informed the public about the discipline for the local officials (Guancha 2020). With the stepping down of local officials and the cease of the consolidation projects, the attention on the controversial involuntary resettlement was gradually subsided. Although Shandong’s case shows how involuntary resettlement can be in China, the promotion of rural to urban resettlement in other regions can be much smoother, such as Zhejiang .⁵ While less heed has been paid to violence and confrontation relating to land expropriation in recent literature, we should be cautious about the uneven geography of Chinese cities in postulating the facts about resettlement-related conflicts.

The most widely acknowledged barrier for landless farmers’ transition to urbanites is the hukou system. Studies on hukou’s role in China’s rural-urban migration process are well documented (Chan and Zhang 1999; Zhu 2007; Zhang and Wang 2010; Chen and Fan 2016), and it is also acknowledged that the migration is often ascribed to the forced displacement and land grabbing (Levien 2012; Siciliano 2014). The hukou system served as a rigid labour mobility control in China, and it was not until 1998, the Ministry of Public Security authorised rural people’s free entry into cities (Cai 2011). This mobility increase has catalysed the influx of rural populations to participate in urban secondary and tertiary sectors, thereby significantly boosting urbanisation. However, some criticise this pseudo-urbanisation for distorting the facts (Chan 2012). While the urbanisation rate based on residence status is around 60% in 2018, the household registration rate remained at around 43.37% (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2019). The 17% gap represents those who live temporarily in cities without urban hukou status. In this sense, the existing hukou reform did not lead to a promising prospect, and the hukou system is deemed as an outdated policy that severely obstructs the transition of rural residents to urban residents (Chan 2010). The geographical attribute of hukou status further obscures the effect of the hukou reform. In recent years, megacities in China such as Beijing and Shanghai have implemented strict city entry criteria to determine the temporary residents’ eligibility to obtain the city’s hukou status. In contrast to such stringent regulations, small and mid-size cities in China are constantly relaxing their requirements for newcomers. The regional disparity of the hukou system raises the importance of the urban locality of hukou registration (Wu and Zhang 2018). Therefore, the hukou system in flux has prevented rural migrants from purchasing permanent housing in urban areas, rendering them the nomadic population.

Unlike rural migrant workers who are excluded from urban hukou due to voluntary migration, landless farmers who are resettled to the city are instead compensated for the entitlement to urban nonagricultural hukou status (Qian 2019). According to Chan (2012), hukou reclassification contributed much to the recent urban population explosion. The hukou reclassification directly results from urban expansion and nationwide policy to abolish the dualist hukou system that distinguishes ‘agricultural’ and ‘nonagricultural.’ Most of the hukou converters are land-lost farmers whose rural land was located in the peripheral urban areas. Despite being granted the urban hukou status, the landless farmers are far from being treated as urban residents equally. As Qian (2019) argued, the landless farmers are beset with socio-economic and social-psychological barriers rooted in the longstanding urban-rural divide. In addition, institutions of the ruptured urban-rural relation have adversely impacted other formal institutions, such as ‘education, employment, health care, public housing, social welfare, and other public redistribution systems’ (Qian and Xue 2017, p. 153). Such entrenched institutional arrangements have further excluded landless farmers from participating in urban market competitions fairly. Furthermore, they are not always granted full entitlements of social and economic welfares. While prior literature has suggested that hukou has been a systematic barrier for rural residents’ integration into urban society, the hukou system’s deregulation has revealed that the longstanding urban-rural divide is much problematic.

In recent years, with the promotion of hukou reform since the 1980s, another paradoxical phenomenon arises where rural residents tend to decline the attainment of urban hukou despite the superiority over rural hukou. Chen and Fan (2016) concluded that the primary concern for farmers is the loss of land rights and the diminishing value of the urban hukou, specifically in small and medium-sized cities. As mentioned in the previous section, the central government has shifted much of its role of providing social welfare to the free market, so the institutional arrangements change accordingly, significantly reducing the entitlements associated with urban hukou status. To that end, farmers seek to guarantee their rights in the expropriation process by demonstrating a state of reluctance (Chen et al. 2017) or building ‘skeleton housing’ (Cao et al. 2018). The results of this game between farmers and local government define the stance of farmers: being involuntary or voluntary. In addition, Kan (2019) conceptualised a novel mode of ‘accumulation without dispossession’ as an alternative for rural residents to deal with forced resettlement induced by land expropriation. In this mode, rural residents could participate in the land commodification process through the formation of rural-urban alliances based on ‘mechanisms of speculative rentiership.’ Instead of being resettled, villagers can reserve a proportion of their land to avoid deterritorialisation. Therefore, for those landless farmers, hukou’s role, especially the rural hukou status has progressively shifted from the barrier to an asset that can be exchanged for urban entitlements and safeguard their post-resettlement living.

Post-resettlement living in the concentrated resettlement community

The previous sections shed light on the situations before and during the urban resettlement, whereas this section delves into post-resettlement adaptation. An expansive and burgeoning body of literature has attempted to unveil landless farmers’ post-resettlement adaptation to their host societies in China (Xie et al. 2014; Li et al. 2016; Qian 2017; Zhang et al. 2018), but many, if not all, adopted the case study approach hence limited to partial interpretation to the holistic picture. In this sense, we propose three identified themes based on the literature to enhance our understanding of urban resettlement, namely social mismatch, space mismatch, and spatial mismatch. The social mismatch refers to the creative destruction of social relations and networks of the resettled villagers where capitalist social relations based on exchange value have pervaded and dominated the social (re)production of the affected through resettlement. The space mismatch is alluded to that the top-down planned and produced concentrated resettlement communities (CRCs)⁶ do not match the spatial practices of the former villages. The spatial mismatch points to the changing pattern of general mobility and jobs-housing mobility of the landless villagers. It is worth noting that these three predicaments facing the affected can be alleviated over time given proper planning interventions and villagers’ agency to make changes.

The massive scale of displacement in China often couples with governments’ development of resettlement neighbourhoods, which aims to restore the lives of those affected. The resettlement community is a performance project by ‘local growth coalitions’ (Qian 2007a), which is initiated by the local authority but developed by real estate developers who are in collation with the government through contracts. Given the financial and time budget, the displaced are relocated to top-down designed and central planned gated communities, consisting of mid-rise and high-rise apartment buildings (Yip 2012). Commentators portray this displacement as ‘involuntary urbanization’ (Chen et al. 2016), which denotes the passive transition both socially and spatially. As Cernea (1997) had long ago reminded us, resettlement and displacement often disrupt social networks and community bonds, which is difficult to restore and rehabilitate in new communities. Hsing (2010) contended that peasants’ land loss and relocation is substantially a deterritorialisation process, which creates ruptures of their former collective identity and solidarity. The dismantlement of the ‘local state’ expels peasants from their land with barely limited compensation due to their limited access to governmental mechanisms to bargain for compensations. With no land, job and social security, the voluntary displaced villagers are becoming ‘three-no farmers’, which reflects the capital shift process under neoliberalism, echoing the widely acknowledged notion of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2005b).

Capitalist social relations in host urban societies often render some resources invisible, such as cultural assets, sense of place, social networks and sociocultural livelihood practices (Gomersall 2018). The prior literature has paid much attention to the social dimension of resettlement community, exploring their role in consolidating territorialisation and neighbourhood identity (Blandy and Lister 2005), serving as a transitional neighbourhood for rural-urban migrants (Liu et al. 2010a), reshaping the social relations of resettled rural residents (Zhang et al. 2017), and facilitating the regulation of the resettled (Cséfalvay and Webster 2012). Recently, many scholars heed to the significance of villagers’ clan and kinship-based relations, arguing that such relations are conducive to supporting landless farmers’ integration into urban societies through economic, emotional, and socio-psychological aspects (Qian and Xue 2017; Wu et al. 2019; Wang et al. 2020). These distinctive and dominant social relations have a pronounced role in land-lost villagers’ post-resettlement adaptation. For example, Qian (2019) revealed that social capital resources could lead to investment outlets through which resettled villagers can properly use the lump-sum monetary resettlement compensation in planning for their long-term livelihood. Wang et al. (2020) asserted that kinship ties help mitigate landless farmers’ feelings of discrimination in the host community. In this sense, while the creative destruction of landless farmers’ social relations is inevitable, planning policies should at least facilitate a smooth transition, which has been inadequately addressed in contemporary planning practices.

In China, the top-down planned CRCs, while improving general living conditions, had normalised land-lost farmers’ everyday practices through the confinement of physical containers of social activities (Zhao and Zou 2017; Zhang et al. 2018). Landless farmers find it hard to adapt to the physical environment and spaces in CRCs that are designed exclusively for urban residents, ignoring farmers’ living customs and residential culture (Li et al. 2016). Urban living also brings substantial unexpected expenditures to farmers, such as food expenses, apartment management fees, utility bills, and transportation costs (Zhao and Zou 2017; Weiping Liu et al. 2018). The space mismatch between CRCs and landless villagers’ erstwhile rural housing can be well deciphered by Lefebvre’s classic space production theory (Lefebvre 1991). Given (social) space is socially produced, the production of space encompasses three constitutive moments: spatial practice, the representation of space, and the representational spaces (Watkins 2005; Prigge 2008; Schmid 2008). In conceptualising the production of CRCs, the three moments can be concretised and perceived as the rural society living, top-down and technocratic design of resettlement community, and the bottom-up efforts in reshaping spaces. The concentrated, gated, and urban-oriented spatial arrangements of CRCs is produced through a state-dominated course (Ye et al. 2014) thus in many cases do not take into account landless villagers’ requirements for space. Against this backdrop, landless farmers in China have spontaneously conducted spatial reconstruction in resettlement communities to reconcile the conflicts between their social demands and the imposed planned spaces (Li et al. 2016; Zhao and Zou 2017; Wu et al. 2019; Zhang and Qian 2020). Such informal practices are clear signs of the resettled people’s aspiration to appropriate space (Schmid 2012; Shin 2013), although the community management regulations prohibit them. These spontaneous grassroots behaviours can even lead to urban informality (Zhang et al. 2018). However, investigators should be mindful of the nuances of spatial practices in further employing this conceptualisation. For instance, the spatial proximity of the resettled village to cities is a decisive factor in determining the spatial practice of the villagers. Qian and Xue (2017) reported that the resettlement is less intense for those landless villagers who have already adapted to urban living. In other words, the imposed urban style CRCs would be less likely to trigger conflicts over space usage.

The existing literature only incidentally examines the spatiality of CRCs, but its implications on the mobility of the resettled villagers merit in-depth examination. Since the advent of ‘the new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry 2006), the keyword of ‘mobility’ has dominated the discourses and interrogations that emerged from this field. The ‘mobility’ as an underlying conception has been widely applied in studies, generative of informative works related to transport geography, cultural geography, sociology, migration studies, tourism studies and feminism, to name a few (Adey et al. 2014). Scholars from diverse backgrounds have noted the imperative of introducing mobility theory into the hotly debated area of displaced villagers in China. In King’s (2012) important commentary on migration studies, he pointed out China’s case is a reminder to researchers not to neglect ‘internal migration’, which is as important as the discourse around translocality (Greiner and Sakdapolrak 2013), transnationality and diaspora (Blunt 2007). In addition, the politics of mobility has rendered a world with unevenly distributed power of exercising mobility. In this vein, mobility has been criticised not being as a notion of liberality but as ‘dysfunctional, inauthentic, and rootless’ representations (Cresswell 2010). As such, the binary of mobility is at the crux of offering meaningful insights into a social phenomenon as a mobile one. In rebutting Harvey’s ‘time-space compression’ (Harvey 1989b), Massey (1993) used the notion of ‘power geometries’ to express the core idea that mobility is socially differentiated. In often cases, this disparity in mobility becomes the culprit of the spatial fixity or ‘forced mobility’ (Hankins et al. 2014) of vulnerable groups. These insights rooted in mobility are constructive to our knowledge of urban resettlement and the involuntarily displaced villagers in China (Gill et al. 2011).

The urban resettlement has imposed a capitalist social relation for landless farmers in host societies, embodied by the changing work-residence nexus and the reliance on mobility. The literature on the spatial mismatch phenomenon has much to offer in facilitating our understanding of urban resettlement-induced mobility change. This is a theme closely interrelated with residential mobility (Hankins et al. 2014; Coulter et al. 2016; Scott et al. 2017) and employment mobility (Cresswell et al. 2016). It is worth revisiting the resettlement process here that the process while is ostensibly the relocation of people to new residential places, but de facto the relocation of the labour force from rural to urban areas. In this light, the current practice of forced resettlement in China has resulted in problems concerning landless farmers’ integration to urban employment, which impedes the sustainable implementation and progression of China’s urbanisation. The spatial mismatch theory or spatial mismatch hypothesis (SMH) was originally proposed by Kain (1968) to investigate the unemployment conundrum facing Black workers who live in the downtown communities but are distant from the employment opportunities due to suburbanisation. The research on spatial mismatch has expanded to investigating other groups of the underclass in the U.S., including Latinos, low-income workers, single mothers, and immigrants (Fan 2012). The theoretical assumptions of spatial mismatch help unravel the agglomeration of poverty and unemployment rate in American megacities’ downtown area (Wilson 2012). A systematic literature review by Fan (2012) classifies four groups of planning policies to mitigate the spatial mismatch problem from the planner’s perspective and highlights the importance of nonspatial factors of employment barriers in affecting the employment issue, such as human capital social support and discrimination.

The spatial mismatch in Chinese cities demonstrates some discrepancies with American cities. One of the most significant is that, while in American, ‘spatial mismatch is mainly about residential centralisation of race-based neighbourhoods in employment-decentralised metropolitan areas’ (Xu et al. 2014, p. 2), in China, the employment locations concentrate in the city centre with low-income residents dispersed in the suburb areas (Wang et al. 2011). Besides, the targeted population in American cases is focused on ethnic minority groups; therefore, racial segregation and discrimination are central to the discourse. Empirical studies have shown that displaced residents often reside in urban fringe areas with some in proximity to the original places of the displacement, irrespective of how the compensation is negotiated (Xu and Chan 2011). This distinctive location choice arbitrarily made by the government exerts profound impacts on the displaced villagers’ adaptation to the urban milieu. The ‘spatial barrier’ of the resettlement communities can also spawn other side effects such as residential immobility and residential segregation (Liu et al. 2010b), and the relations among these aspects are under-examined in the current body of literature. Moreover, the transition from ‘spatial match to ‘spatial mismatch of the displaced villagers has been overlooked in prior studies considering the expropriation of farmland is accompanied by the deprivation of landless farmers’ identity and occupation as ‘farmer.’ In retrospect to the North American suburbanisation started in the 1960s, the current urbanisation in China has catalysed a new wave of spatial-mismatch and spatial restructuring in urban China.

Moving from rural to urban areas has been traditionally viewed as an environmental change from immobility to mobility (Rau 2012), whereas it is not the case in the face of China’s institutional legacy. Additionally, while Chinese cities generally provide high job accessibility because of high density, complete public transit, and the absence of social segregation, the recent urban expansion has resulted in increasing concerns about the spatial mismatch, which further exacerbates the social stability for the disadvantaged (Fan et al. 2014). Confronting this transformation, Chinese researchers have carried out empirical studies based on SMH in major cities to draw attention from the government and make recommendations to formulate and implement planning policy (Li and Wu 2006; Meng and Fang 2007; Liu and Weng 2008). The applicability of SMH in China has been proved by the extensive attention of scholars, although the social and economic background in China is different. Further argued by Zhou et al. (2013), the SMH with its principal aiming at ‘solving urban unemployment, alleviating traffic congestion, and filling the gap between the rich and the poor’ (p.1819) is competent to address urban spatial-mismatch issues in China. In a neoliberal China, the market exchange has prevailed as the primary form of social integration (Wu 2010). In this context, landless farmers’ employment opportunity is inherently circumscribed by their low levels of education and technical skill, which leads to either unemployment or employment in strenuous manual labour jobs for them, thereby being socially excluded (Zhao and Zou 2017). Thus far, the spatial mismatch phenomenon that links the resettlement community’s spatial dimension with the social dimension of displaced villagers’ employment has unveiled another distinctive feature of urban resettlement in China. The three types of mismatch of post-resettlement living indicate an arduous adaptation process of landless farmers. However, existing literature reported an overall satisfaction of the resettled to the improved living environment, amenities, public services, and social connections (Chen et al. 2016). As such, the trade-offs between development and social costs of urban resettlement need further and nuanced investigations.

Conclusion

According to Kingsley Davis’s S-curve (Davis 1965), a fully urbanised country has an urbanisation ratio somewhere between 75% and 85%. In this light, China will transform itself into a fully urbanised region in the next two decades, with the projected annual urbanisation growth at 1% (Chen et al. 2019). However, this macro statistical fact does not tell the whole story. Urban resettlement as a specific form of urbanisation has contributed much to China’s objective of urban-rural integration by transforming land and population from rural into urban. Its profound repercussion for sustainability cannot be fully unravelled without a systematic and tailored overview of the distinctiveness of urban resettlement in China’s unique political-economic climate. This structured review outlines the ‘urban resettlement with Chinese characteristics’ by probing three aspects of the process. We first analysed China’s particular political-economic context where neoliberalism, landed finance, and property rights institutions are heavily influenced by China’s socialist ideology and authoritarian regime. Against this backdrop, urban resettlement in China unfolds in a way that differs from its counterparts in the Western and Asian countries. We then show that while landless villagers are faced with hindrances of land expropriation, compensation, and hukou restrictions, recent improvements in such realms have blurred the dichotomy of voluntary and involuntary urbanites. On this account, the entrenched criticism on the social costs concomitant with urban resettlement becomes untenable and warrants further critical examination. In addition, we propose three types of mismatch that are commonly seen in landless farmers’ post-resettlement adaptation. While the social mismatch has been well documented in existing literature, space mismatch and spatial mismatch have been underexplored, particularly the latter. As China’s overall urbanisation rate reaches a high level, the imperative of urban-rural integration and the revitalisation of the countryside has become the foci point of policy reform (Zhu et al. 2019; Chen et al. 2020; Gao et al. 2020), which pulls spotlight onto urban resettlement.

Reflecting on our review, we recommend further research should delve into the following aspects. First off, the future trajectory of China’s urban resettlement hinges upon the distinctive land politics that are rooted in China’s political-economic settings. The recent land reforms have prioritised the longstanding ‘three rural issues’ to advocate for integrated rural-urban development (Gao et al. 2020). To this end, innovative policies such as ‘three rights separation’ (Wang and Zhang 2017) and ‘land coupon’ (Han and Lin 2019) have been deployed to protect farmers’ rights over land and ensure their smooth adaptation to host cities. Moreover, reforms have also aimed at achieving equitable property rights for the peasantry (Cao et al. 2020; Song et al. 2020; Wang and Tan 2020). As such, the socialist neoliberal central state and the entrepreneurial local government may change their roles in urban resettlement in the near future, adopting more humanistic planning approaches. Researchers should also be prudent and attentive to this top-down variation when reading superficial anomalies related to urban resettlement in China. Second, while we briefly mentioned the uneven geography of Chinese cities, scholars have reminded us that the specifics of urban resettlement hinge largely upon local cities’ economic, urbanisation, and political conditions. Besides, small towns and cities are becoming new destinations for rural residents (Qian and Xue 2017; Zhu 2017; Qian 2017; Jian et al. 2018). While megacities are locomotives for China’s urbanisation, they are not ideal places for peasants to settle. Knowledge regarding small cities and town urbanisation and accompanied urban resettlement should be expanded. Third, the voluntary and involuntary dichotomy associated with urban resettlement should be cautiously and critically adopted in future studies. As Wilmsen and Wang (2015) reminded us, ‘what is labelled voluntary may involve manipulation and prior deprivation of the affected’ and ‘resettlement labelled involuntary can include elements of choice’ (p.643). In this sense, whether a certain resettlement project can be perceived of as voluntary or involuntary is under hot debate. In most cases, the local residents may demonstrate varying degrees of satisfaction towards the resettlement project (Chen et al. 2016; Lo and Wang 2018), which complicates the generalisation of post-resettlement appraisal. It is therefore essential to adopt an exploratory approach in investigating urban resettlement in China. Last, the changing attitudes of the transitioning farmers need scrutiny from a comparative perspective. To wit, the radical deregulation of hukou (Zhang et al. 2019) has broken down the binary wall for rural residents, bestowing them with free mobility. While we contend the displaced farmers’ mobility is hindered by the concentrated community, compared to the ‘floating population’ (Li 2006; Zhu 2007; Luo et al. 2018) who have no formal qualifications of residing in cities, they are privileged in mobility to adapt to urban life. Therefore, in investigating new urbanites derived from urban resettlement, researchers must adhere to a relative perspective. Specifically, whether these new urbanites voluntary or involuntary? Whether the resettlement process hinder or facilitate the landless villagers’ mobility? Whether the changed mobility impact landless farmers’ adaptation in terms of employment and social integration? Clues to resolving these questions are buried deep in our discourse of ‘urban resettlement with Chinese characteristics.’

It is not our intention to carry out a comprehensive review on a wide-ranging paper. Instead, we seek to present the defining and typical features of the revolutionary urban resettlement process in China and call for the attention of global audiences with multidisciplinary backgrounds. In an era of ‘planetary urbanization’ (Brenner and Schmid 2015), China’s case is integral to a comprehensive conceptual framework of urbanisation in the Anthropocene. While China’s radical urbanisation and great transformation in the urban-rural landscape are unlikely to be replicated in other regions, the numerous lessons and informative messages are extremely insightful for the sustainable development of humankind in the unpredictable future.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research is funded by the Insight Grant (reference number: 435-2018-0953) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Chen Yang

Chen Yang is a Ph.D. Candidate in the School of Planning, University of Waterloo, Canada. His research interests include urban modelling, space syntax, urban morphology, and urban resettlement in Chinese cities.

Zhu Qian

Zhu Qian is an associate professor in the School of Planning, University of Waterloo, Canada. His primary research interest lies in urban land-use reform and planning, urban morphology, and urban form in Chinese cities.

Notes

1. On 25 February 2021, President Xi Jinping announced China had lifted nearly 100 million people out of poverty during his 8-year tenure. The income standard for extreme poverty is defined as annual income less than 4,000 RMB (around 615 USD). Xi said at the ceremony that ‘All 98.99 million rural poor people have been lifted out of poverty under the current standards, all 832 poor counties have been removed, all 128,000 poor villages have been listed.’

2. In Brenner and Schmid’s formulation of planetary urbanisation, urbanisation unfolds through three constitutive moments: concentrated urbanisation, extended urbanisation, and differential urbanisation (Brenner and Schmid 2015). In theory, extended urbanisation supports the concentrated urbanisation through constantly making operational landscape from the non-urban area; the differential urbanisation involves the creative destruction of socio-spatial configurations to produce new urban potential. In this sense, capitalist development mode always involves a reproduction of social relations and political forms rather than solely production from an untouched territory. Following this conceptualisation, resettlement can be conceived as a manifestation of ‘differential urbanization,’ shouldering the responsibility to reorganise spatial and physical configurations for the affected.

3. Rural revitalisation is a development strategy targeting rural areas. It was first proposed in the 19th Party Congress report in 2017. Some of the existing policies and regulations include China’s Strategic Plan for Rural Revitalisation (2018–2022), Opinions on Accelerating Agricultural and Rural Modernisation by Comprehensively Promoting Rural Revitalisation, and the most recent Promotion Law of the People’s Republic of China on Rural Revitalisation.

4. Oftentimes, developers can be either state-owned or private enterprises. Both forms of developers collaborate with local government form the local growth coalition (Qian 2007a; Wu and Waley 2018; Du 2019). For instance, the developer Greentown China has established a long and stable relationship with Hangzhou municipality in developing resettlement communities since 2005.

5. Zhejiang is a coastal province in eastern China and has long been the pilot of China’s rural reforms. The most-cited policy of facilitating villagers’ transition to urbanites is the ‘two-exchange.’ The policy involves the exchange of farmland for urban social securities and other means of income and the exchange of homestead land for residential allocations or monetary compensations. The policy introduced a rural-urban integrated development strategy that facilitates the urbanisation of peasants without going through the complicated and controversial process of land expropriation (Zhou et al. 2020). The policy, as well as other policy trials such as ‘land ticket’ in Chongqing, ‘homestead land for apartments’ in Tianjin, are devised to add to the flexibility of acquiring rural land by the local governments.

6. Compared to the traditional rural compounds that are mostly low-storey houses, CRCs are of high density (usually from 6 to 33 storeys). The primary reason for adopting this concentrated form of living is to increase land efficiency through consolidating the fragmented rural land and, especially the rural homestead land (Ong 2014). Some (Zhou and Xiong 2019) maintain that CRCs are neither rural resettlements nor urban communities but a transitional community type. It is worth noting that CRCs for landless farmers can take two primary forms in China: those located in rural areas and those located in urban areas. The major difference between the two is whether the resettlement process involves the transition of residents’ hukou status. The CRCs in this paper refer to the urban ones.