Neoliberalism and Conflict in Asia After 911 by Garry Rodan & Kevin Hewison

Author:Garry Rodan & Kevin Hewison [Rodan, Garry & Hewison, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, History & Theory, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781317998242
Google: qTTcAAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18565191
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2006-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

Full Circle?

Rural Land Reforms in Globalizing China

SALLY SARGESON

WITH THE EXCEPTION OF RURAL LAND, in the last quarter of the twentieth-century China’s government liberalized factor markets and allowed private ownership of the means of production.1 Rural land was excluded from the government’s agenda for market expansion for several reasons, not least of which was that the Communist Party’s redistribution of land to poor and middle peasants had legitimated, if not actually precipitated, the revolution that brought it to power in 1949. Land redistribution created a constituency supportive of the new Party-state. Proposals to alter villagers’ rights to land were, perforce, ideologically and politically sensitive.

Moreover, it was unclear who actually owned rural land. Collectivization had ensued shortly after land redistribution was completed. A framework of villagers’ collective ownership was created under the people’s communes, but the government repeatedly altered the scale and structure of village administration and the organization of production.2 In the post-Mao period, farming households were granted contractual use-rights to farmland. Rights of ownership, however, lodged with the village collective and were inalienable unless the government first requisitioned the land. Shifts in policy and practice were reflected in successive legislation, including the 1982 Constitution, 1986 Land Management Law, 1993 Agriculture Law, and the 1987 Organic Law of Villagers’ Committees, which stipulated that land is collectively owned, but gave contradictory definitions as to what administrative unit or organization represented the “collective.”3 As Peter Ho has shown, this produced a situation where organizations, townships, village communities, contracting households, and individual villagers all had competing claims to land.4 Ho argues persuasively that the Chinese government preferred to operate with the resulting “legal indeterminacy,” rather than exacerbate conflicts between competing claimants by specifying ownership.

Yet in the 1990s, the Chinese government incrementally introduced legislation and policies to strengthen farmers’ contractual and property rights to collective land. Why? Much of the literature analyzing these changes to land rights suggests that they were motivated by the need to provide incentives for farmers to utilize land more efficiently and to encourage specialization and scale farming as China’s agricultural sector internationalized. In contrast, the argument presented here shifts the focus from land rights reforms as an institutional prerequisite for agricultural efficiency to land rights reforms as a means of resolving complex domestic political conflicts and sustaining the country’s competitiveness as a site of low-cost manufacturing. Specifically, it proposes that the transformation of villagers’ contractual rights into private property rights—and associated administrative, legal, and governance reforms—were directed toward defusing intra-state and state-society competition to use and dispose of rural land in emerging markets for real property, facilitating rural-urban labor flows, and individualizing the social adjustment costs that would be incurred by internationalizing China’s agricultural sector. The land reforms entail an explicitly political program to reconfigure intra-state and state-society relations and adjust the terms under which both state and farmers will participate in world markets.

The argument is presented in four parts. The first explores the linkages between market liberalization, globalization, and political conflict in post-socialist states. This is followed by an

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