Reconstructing Rural Chengdu: Urbanization As Development in the Post-Quake Context

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Reconstructing Rural Chengdu: Urbanization as Development in the Post-Quake Context

Jessica Wilczak

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Geography and Planning University of Toronto

Reconstructing Rural Chengdu: Urbanization as Development in the Post-Quake Context

Jessica Wilczak

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Geography and Planning University of Toronto

2017 Abstract

On 12 May 2008 Western China was struck by an 8.0-magnitude earthquake (the Wenchuan

Earthquake) that left over 87,000 people dead or missing, and destroyed nearly 8 million homes.

The epicenter of the quake lay less than 100 km away from Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan

Province. Although the central city itself was not damaged by the quake, many settlements in

Chengdu’s rural periphery had to be completely rebuilt. This dissertation examines how the

Chengdu government used post-quake reconstruction as an opportunity to urbanize rural areas in the metropolitan region under the policy of “urban-rural integration”. But urban-rural integration was not merely urbanization in the sense of an expansion of the built-up urban core; it was a far more comprehensive project that was framed as a means of developing the rural economy, improving living environments, and bolstering peasants’ rights. I argue that Chengdu’s urbanization is best understood as a developmental project—a form of “development qua urbanization”—and as a form of governmental power in the Foucauldian sense. I further interpret the underlying logics of urban-rural integration—that rural areas are best developed through urbanization—in the context of China’s current historical conjuncture. In doing so, I turn to

Polanyi’s description of the transition to a market society, and Lefebvre’s prediction of the transition to an urban society. Drawing on media and policy analysis, academic debates on ii

Chengdu’s urban-rural integration project, and participant observation work and in-depth interviews conducted in peri-urban Chengdu over a period of nearly two years, I examine the multiple forms that post-quake urbanization in Chengdu took, including rationalizing land use throughout the metropolitan region, building concentrated villages, assigning individual titles to rural collective land, developing markets for rural property rights, encouraging large-scale agribusiness, extending social services to rural areas, reforming rural governance institutions, and transforming peasants into self-managing citizens.

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Acknowledgments

This dissertation is the product of collective efforts. I would like, first of all, to express my warmest gratitude to my supervisor, Alana Boland, whose interest and faith in the project have sustained me during this long march. I would also like to thank the members of my dissertation committee—Deb Cowen, Scott Prudham, Katharine Rankin, and Rachel Silvey—for their support over the years.

During my time at the University of Toronto, I have had the good fortune of having many gifted and grounded interlocuters, supporters, and partners in crime. I would like to thank fellow China scholars in the department, particularly Elizabeth Lord, who asks the best questions, and Yu Leqian and Wang Chao, who share my love of Sichuan. Amy Cervenan, Heather Maclean, David Seitz, and Jason Shabaga were tireless cheerleaders when I needed cheering. And there were so many others in our amazing department who inspired me in classes and reading groups, or helped me leave the heady stuff behind when I needed it: thank you for being such kind, fun, and generous spirits.

This work would not have been possible without the support of a number of people in China. I would like to thank Professor Zhu Jiangang at Sun Yat-sen University for welcoming me into his projects in Sichuan and providing an example of dedicated, activist scholarship (and boundless energy). My research assistant Zhao Jianmei not only helped me navigate Sichuan dialect, but also eased my way into the community with her extraordinary people skills. Conversations with Hu Ming, Peng Meng, and Wang Xiao at the community center were invaluable in helping me understand the dynamics in the township. In Chengdu, Xu Jian was one of my first contacts, and proved to be a fun and well-informed companion during our fieldtrips to various development sites around Chengdu. I owe the warmest thanks to Luo Dan and her colleagues at Roots and Shoots, who welcomed me into their networks. Jeff Li also introduced me to planners and developers, and shared insights from his own experiences working in the quake zone. Matt Hale was similarly generous about sharing his experiences in rural China and introducing me to activists and academics in Chengdu. And there were so many people who made my time in Chengdu rich and rewarding beyond my research, including Sophia Kidd, So Han Fan, Kirsten Allen, Jen DeRose, Raffaella Brizuela Sigurdardottir, Svetlana Furman, Lance Pursey, Marc Lajoie, and many, many others.

I have been fortunate enough to receive generous financial support for this project over the years, including an SSHRC Canadian Graduate Scholar Award, an IDRC Ecopolis Research Grant, and an OGS Scholarship. Towards the end of my project, I worked as a Research Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies in Hamburg, Germany, where I received a warm welcome from Karsten Giese and other colleagues at the Institute of Asian Studies. Maria Bondes sustained me with homemade meals and Samuel time, and provided valuable feedback on early drafts. Alex Burilkov always had time for tea, trashy films, and discussions of postsocialist politics. I also want to thank Kaddi Stock for offering me a quiet haven in her home and acting as my gentle guide to German culture.

Finally, I want to thank the endlessly patient women in my family who have supported me through this process. Many thanks to my mother, Judy McClement, whose love of books sent me down this path many years ago. Thanks are also due to my aunt, Marlene McClement, for her clear-sighted advice and reassuring faith in her nieces. And to my remarkable sister, Kate Wilczak, I owe more than thanks for helping me through everything from existential doubts to writers’ block. I really couldn’t have done it without you.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents vi

List of Figures ix

Note on Names and Measures xi

Chapter 1 1

1 Urbanization as development in post-quake Chengdu 1 1.1 Overview 1 1.2 The governmental workings of urbanization qua development 5 1.3 Development and the double movement 9 1.4 The ambiguous role of the state in Polanyi’s Great Transformation 13 1.5 Hegemonic urbanism 18 1.6 Methods and data collection 20 1.7 Organization of the dissertation 23

Chapter 2 25

2 Remaking post-reform Chengdu: from backwards regional capital to World Modern Garden City 25 2.1 Overview 25 2.2 Historical-geographical roots 29 2.3 Open up the West, Build a New Socialist Countryside 33 2.4 Chengdu’s new era of regional planning 36 2.4.1 36 2.4.1 Phase I: Urban-rural integration (2003-2007) 36 2.4.2 Phase II: Metropolitan Chengdu (2007-2009) 39 2.4.3 Phase III: The World Modern Garden City (2009-2011) 41 2.5 Metropolitan planning and the tyranny of abstract space 44

Chapter 3 46

3 “Making the countryside more like the countryside”: the rise of rural planning in post- quake Chengdu 46 3.1 Overview 46 3.2 Rural urbanization and the rise of rural planning 48 3.3 Principles of the new rural planning Error! Bookmark not defined. vi

3.4 Sending planners down to the countryside 54 3.5 The case of Luping Village 58 3.6 Beyond the village plan: the metropolitan politics of land consolidation 62 3.7 A Lefebvrian critique of rural planning 64

Chapter 4 68

4 Unleashing “silent capital”: Urban-rural integration and property rights reforms in Chengdu 68 4.1 Overview 68 4.2 China’s rural property rights system 70 4.3 The first step: verifying rights 76 4.4 The second step: creating markets 79 4.5 A heated debate: growth vs. stability 84 4.6 Can urban and rural development be “integrated”? 90

Chapter 5 92

5 "We give thanks to the quake”: accelerating rural economies in post-quake Chengdu 92 5.1 Overview 92 5.2 Contextualizing the lianjian approach 94 5.3 Anything but “free” 100 5.4 Accumulation by dispossession? 105

Chapter 6 110

6 Cultivating communities: social reconstruction in rural Chengdu 110 6.1 Overview 110 6.2 Are Chengdu’s rural “social management” projects neoliberal? 112 6.3 A century of peasant advocacy 114 6.4 Social management in postsocialist China 115 6.5 Social management in Metropolitan Chengdu 118 6.5.1 Sending urban bureaucrats down to the countryside 119 6.5.2 Establishing villagers’ councils 122 6.5.3 The “new lives, new homes, new habits” campaign 125 6.6 NGOs and social work in the post-quake landscape 127 6.7 The hazards of civil society? 130

Chapter 7 132

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7 Habitation versus Improvement in Longmenshan Town 132 7.1 Overview 132 7.2 Social reconstruction in Longmenshan 135 7.3 Baishuihe Community 138 7.4 Baoshan Village 148 7.5 Guoping Village 153 7.6 Discussion 156

Chapter 8 159

8 The limits of urbanization qua development in Chengdu 159

References 163

Appendix 1: Interviews 200

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List of Figures

Figure 1: New houses in Luping Village (photo by author) ...... 8

Figure 2: Map of Sichuan within China (Wikipedia, Creative Commons License 2.0) ...... 26

Figure 4 GDP per capita, People's Republic of China and Sichuan Province, 1978-2008 (Sichuan Statistical Yearbook, 2009) ...... 32

Figure 5: A linpan settlement in rural Chengdu (photo by author) ...... 39

Figure 6: The Metropolitan Chengdu Plan [Figure 6 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It depicts the regional plan produced by the Chengdu Institute of Planning and Design. Original website: http://www.cdipd.org.cn/pro_chd.aspx?p_id=19&id=150, archived at: http://www.webcitation.org/6tYQuxAHZ] ...... 41

Figure 7: Shifts in China's post-reform urbanization policy ...... 50

Figure 8: Initial plans for Luping Village, Sichuan Sanzhong Architecture Co. [Figure 8 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It depicts a bird’s eye-view of Luping’s initial village plan produced by the Sichuan Sanzhong Company. Original source: http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2008- 09-04/033014399258s.shtml, archived at: http://www.webcitation.org/6tZTOPPss] ...... 60

Figure 9: Spatial layout analysis for Luping Village, Sichuan Sanzhong Architecture Co. [Figure 9 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It depicts the spatial layout plan for Luping Village produced by the Sichuan Sanzhong Company. Original source: http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2008-09-04/033014399258s.shtml, archived at: http://www.webcitation.org/6tZTOPPss] ...... 61

Figure 10: “Traditional Agriculture Transforms into Modern Agriculture”, Chengdu Jiaweita Agriculture Co. Ltd. [Figure 10 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It depicts Pengzhou’s 1+N agricultural development model. Original source: http://www.jiaweita.com/tf_picshow.asp?id=423&ln=1, archived at: http://www.webcitation.org/6taAPKZGK] ...... 63

Figure 11: Rural administrative units and average characteristics, 1974 and 1986 (Jean C. Oi (1989), State and Peasant in Contemporary China: The Political Economy of Village Government, p.5) ...... 72

Figure 12: New homes in Chaping Village (photo by author) ...... 93

Figure 13: Chaping Village Tourist Centre, left, and property rights certificates in the Chaping Village Tourist Centre (photo by author) ...... 101

Figure 15: Position of Longmenshan Town within Chengdu (PowerPoint presentation, Shanshui Longmen Wucai Xiangcun: Longmenshan Shengtai Lüyou Guihua, 20/11/2009) ...... 134

Figure 16: The NGO-established community centre in Baishuihe’s temporary housing (left) and the new community centre built by the Fujian government (right) (photos by author). The sign outside the permanent centre announced it as part of “Chengdu’s public culture” (Chengdu gonggong wenhua)...... 137

Figure 17: A poster of the Baishuihe "Scenic Ecological Community" plan (left), and a billboard showing Baoshan's post-quake tourism plan (right) (photos by author) ...... 141

Figure 18: Pre-quake (left) and post-quake (right) homes in Baishuihe (photos by author) ...... 144

Figure 19: Image from the Baoshan Museum that shows armed Baoshan residents reading a newspaper headline urging support for Chairman Mao's call to establish a people's militia (left). The museum is located in the Baoshan Corporation offices (right). (photos by author) ...... 149

Figure 20: Baoshan's "European-style" villas (left) and temporary earthquake shelters for Baishuihe residents (right), both on the Sanfuping Plateau (photos by author) ...... 151

Figure 21: Baoshan's "Sun and Rain" rural tourism area (photo by author) ...... 152

Figure 22: Guoping Villages offices (left) and Guoping's new post-quake housing settlement (right) (photos by author) ...... 154

Note on Names and Measures

Chinese names are provided in the original order: family name first, given names second.

Chinese measures are also provided in the original:

1 yuan / renminbi (RMB) = 6.95 US dollars1

1 mu = 666.7 m2 or 0.1647 acres

1 The 2008 average, from the World Bank: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/PA.NUS.FCRF?end=2008&locations=CN&start=1960 xi 1

Chapter 1

1 Urbanization as development in post-quake Chengdu

1.1 Overview

On 12 May 2008, southwest China was struck by an 8.0 magnitude earthquake (the Wenchuan Earthquake) that left over 87,000 people dead or missing, and destroyed nearly 8 million homes (Dunford & Li, 2011). Most of the affected areas lay in Sichuan2, a mountainous and densely populated province with over three quarters of its 87.2 million residents registered as agricultural workers (Sichuan Statistical Yearbook 2007). The national government’s response was immediate. Within two hours of the quake, Premier Wen Jiabao flew to the quake area to oversee the emergency response (A. Wang & Zheng, 2008), and within a week, over 100,000 soldiers and armed police were dispatched to the earthquake zone (Mulvenon, 2008). The earthquake also inspired an unprecedented wave of civic participation: thousands of volunteers flocked to Sichuan from across China, and by mid-June over RMB 44 billion in funds had been donated for earthquake relief (A. Wang & Zheng, 2008). In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, the Wenchuan Earthquake became a unifying moment in the Chinese national imaginary (Schneider & Hwang, 2014). Chinese scholars made comparisons to President Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, interpreting the state’s efficient quake response as evidence of the superiority of China’s one-party system (Schneider & Hwang, 2014, p. 645). At the same time, domestic and international media praised the state’s apparent openness to non-governmental participation (Y. Chen & Booth, 2011). From the Wenchuan earthquake, to the Beijing Olympics, to the global financial crisis, the year 2008 was considered by many observers inside and outside of China to be a year when the Chinese government faced—and passed—a number of challenges to its authority (Blecher, 2009; Merkel-Hess, 2009).

2 Direct economic losses were estimated at RMB 845.14 billion (USD 122.85 billion in 2008 dollars), with Sichuan accounting for over 90 per cent of the total (“Over 87,000 feared dead in May 12 earthquake, economic losses hit 845 bln yuan,” 2008)

Geographers and critical disaster researchers across the social sciences have long argued that “there is no such thing as a natural disaster”—that the impact of environmental calamities is shaped by pre-existing inequalities that render some populations more vulnerable than others (Hewitt, 1983; Oliver-Smith, 1999; Quarantelli, 1977; Varley, 1994; Wisner, Blaikie, Cannon, & Davis, 2004). Although this tenet has become widely accepted among governments and global development agencies (Wisner, 2003), the politics of post-disaster interventions remain less closely scrutinized. But in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the obvious inadequacy of the Bush government’s response to the calamity sparked a renewed interest in developing and disseminating a critical framework for understanding post-disaster interventions (Giroux, 2006; N. Smith, 2006). Much of the public and academic discussion was anchored in Naomi Klein’s 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, in which she argues that state and corporate elites use moments of crisis to push through neoliberal projects of de-regulation, privatization, and cuts to government spending on a massive scale. In some ways, Klein’s Shock Doctrine is more about the historical roll out of global neoliberalism than disaster per se. She seems to be recasting neoliberalism as “disaster capitalism”—arguing that natural and manmade disasters are necessary to pave the way for the extreme market logics of neoliberalism (Klein, 2007). Having followed the public and academic discussions that Katrina provoked, these ideas were very much on my mind when the Wenchuan Earthquake struck in May 2008. Given China’s increasing material and ideological imbrication with global capitalism, I wondered, what kinds of projects were being pursued in Sichuan, and what logics were driving them? If, as Klein claims, disasters open up opportunities for large-scale (neoliberal) social re-engineering under capitalism, what was the Wenchuan earthquake an opportunity for?

When I arrived in Sichuan at the end of 2009, post-quake reconstruction was nearly halfway completed. Three months after the quake, the government released a set of guidelines for reconstruction, the “Wenchuan Earthquake Overall Post-quake Reconstruction Plan” (2008). The plan set a timeline of three years for all major reconstruction to be completed, a deadline which was subsequently shortened to two years in Sichuan Province. Reconstruction was backed up by a significant funding commitment: in the national economic stimulus package issued in November 2008, one-quarter of the RMB 4 trillion stimulus was earmarked for post-quake reconstruction (“China’s stimulus package: a breakdown of spending,” 2009). Many towns and villages in the rural areas around the provincial capital of Chengdu had already been completely

3 rebuilt. Like other large Chinese cities, Chengdu’s jurisdiction encompasses a built-up urban core as well as a wide swathe of surrounding rural land and satellite cities. Although the central city itself was not damaged during the quake, many settlements in Chengdu’s northern reaches were decimated. As I learned more about Chengdu’s reconstruction process in these areas, I was surprised to find that the language of the earthquake-as-opportunity had been explicitly adopted in municipal policy documents, in media reports, and in interviews with local officials. It quickly became clear that there was no mystery about what kind of “opportunity” the quake represented in Chengdu’s rural periphery: it was a means for the municipal government to promote and deepen an ongoing project of “urban-rural integration” (chengxiang yitihua).

Urban-rural integration (URI) is a broad policy framework that aims to coordinate urban and rural development throughout the Chengdu region.3 It is, on the one hand, concerned with rational land use planning, or managing development by unifying the entire metropolitan region under a single plan. This leads Abramson and Qi (2011, p. 496) to characterize it as a type of “urbanization planning.” On the other hand, URI is also about extending urban living standards to rural areas, based on the assumption that integration into urban markets and urban administration is the best means of developing rural areas (Abramson & Qi, 2011, p. 507). There are thus two ways we can understand URI in Chengdu. The first is a relatively straightforward political economic reading according to which URI is “really” about land. In this vein, Chengdu follows the same expansionary patterns as other urban governments across China by using its powers of land expropriation and conversion to dispossess rural residents at the urban fringe. This allows entrepreneurial municipal leaders to meet economic growth targets set by the central government, supplement local budgets with development and conveyance fees, and establish administrative authority over the metropolitan region (Hsing, 2010).

But Chengdu’s URI policy was formulated explicitly as an alternative model to the dominant pattern of urbanization in China; it was meant to replace the socially and environmentally unsustainable expansion of large cities with a scientific, planned approach that would ensure the

3 URI, as a metropolitan policy framework, is not unique to Chengdu. Its origins and specific content are discussed further in Chapter 2. It was initially adopted by the Chengdu government in 2003, then repackaged as “urban and rural coordinated development” in 2007 when Chengdu and Chongqing were designated as national pilot areas for urban-rural policy experimentation.

4 economic benefits of urbanization were shared more evenly across urban and rural areas (J. Deng, 2010a). Moreover, Chengdu’s URI was also pitched as part of a far broader project to address urban-rural inequality—the central government’s “New Socialist Countryside” (Shehiuzhuyi Xin Nongcun) project (B. Chen, 2006). 4 As such it included specific targets for closing the gap between urban and rural incomes and public services; modernizing agriculture; improving rural infrastructure and the rural built environment; extending access to high-quality education and health care to rural areas; and enhancing community autonomy and self- management (Legates & Ye, 2013). The centrality of social equity to URI means that it is misleading, or at least partial, to dismiss Chengdu’s URI project “merely” as an example of the extension of neoliberal logics under disaster capitalism or a more run-of-the-mill neoliberal urbanism.

I suggest that we need to take seriously the Chengdu government’s goals to address urban-rural inequalities and build a “New Socialist Countryside” through URI. More than just an urbanization program, URI was also a profoundly developmental scheme, a Utopian project to build a certain vision of society. Current political economic approaches to understanding urbanization as territorialization run the risk of overlooking the intimate impact of URI on rural communities, spaces, and subjectivities. This is evident in the way that political economic critiques frame urbanization as a struggle over land, and view the relationship between farmers and urban governments primarily as an oppositional relationship (Hsing, 2010). Indeed, there is substantial evidence to indicate that this relationship is often marked by antagonism, and sometimes violence: between 1999 and 2009, about 65 percent of rural “mass incidents” (protests) were related to governments’ forced expropriation of villagers’ land (Sargeson, 2013, p. 1064). In post-quake Chengdu, however, the municipal government implemented extensive land reforms and relocation projects with minimal opposition from rural residents.5 We might attribute this to the impact of the quake, except that these reforms were carried out in quake- affected and non quake-affected counties alike. To understand this attenuated opposition, we

4 The central government announced the goal of building a “New Socialist Countryside” in 2006. The New Socialist Countryside, discussed further in Chapter 2, is a broad policy framework aimed at improving rural living standards (Ahlers & Schubert, 2009). 5 Chengdu’s post-quake rural property rights reforms are discussed further in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5.

5 need to look at how the Chengdu government foregrounded the interests of farmers, rhetorically and practically, and tied property reforms to other forms of social and economic development.

1.2 The governmental workings of urbanization qua development

This thesis explores the tangled relations between development and urbanization in Chengdu’s post-quake urban-rural integration project. I bring together theoretical insights and analytical tools from urban geography and critical development studies to propose that we understand URI as a form of “urbanization as development”. “Development” itself is a bit of a schizophrenic term, referring, as it does, to both immanent processes of growth and intentional projects of improvement (Cowen & Shenton, 1996; Wainwright, 2008). Gillian Hart (2001) makes a useful distinction between “little d” development as a process of expanding capitalist social relations and “big D” Development as a project of deliberate intervention. In a sense, this dissertation explores how we might understand Chinese cities not merely as developmental machines, but also as Developmental apparatuses.

Emily Yeh (2013, p. 11) describes the two d/Developments as linked in a sort of Polanyian double movement whereby Development is invoked to manage the chaos induced by capitalist development. This is one way we might read the Developmental aspects of Chengdu’s URI project. But there is also another, perhaps more widespread, understanding of the relationship between the two d/Developments. Emerging in the 1970s, this neoliberal approach to Development considers that the function of the state is less to correct the problems produced by the market, and more as cultivating an environment conducive to capitalist growth and accumulation (G. A. Smith, 2011, p. 6). Contemporary developmental logics can thus seem oddly bifurcated: “big D” Development is needed as a response to global capitalism, but also serves to pave the way for “little d” development. It is the very ambiguity of the term “development” that makes it productive for understanding URI in Chengdu and for assessing the government’s aim to “integrate” urban development with rural Development.

Drawing inspiration from Joel Wainwright’s (2008, p. 12) discussion of “capitalism qua development,” I understand Chengdu’s URI to be a form of “urbanization as development.” Wainwright agrees with Marxist critics that development is nearly interchangeable with capitalism. But in coining the term “capitalism qua development” he seeks to emphasize that D/development, in some sense, exceeds capitalism. As a powerful “denomination of

6 responsibility”, he suggests, borrowing Spivak’s language, D/development lends capitalist expansion a sense of grander purpose. I am not suggesting here a facile exchange of “urbanization” for “capitalism”. I rather use “urbanization as development” to highlight how, in Chengdu, the operation of state power works not merely through an oppositional contest over land, but as a productive, developmental project that operates through multiple forms of power, and a hegemonic common sense that equates urbanization with development.

In line with a number of recent contributions from critical development scholars, I understand Development as a form of government in the Foucauldian sense (T. Li, 2007; Wainwright, 2008; Watts, 2003; E. Yeh, 2013). Foucault analyzes the emergence of modern European state power—governmental power—as distinct from either the disciplinary power of the administrative state of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or an earlier sovereign power. “Government,” Foucault writes, “has as its purpose not the act of government itself, but the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, and so on…” (Foucault, 2000, p. 217). Modern governmental power operates not through overtly supervising and disciplining the population, but through “… seeking to shape conduct by working through the desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs of various actors” (Dean, 1999, p. 18).

Appending the concept of assemblage to Foucault’s suggestive writings on government, Mitchell Dean (1999) lays out an “analytics of government” that seeks to understand how we are governed. These how questions of government— How are different locales constituted as authoritative? How are different agents assembled with specific powers? How are different domains produced as governable?— draw attention to assemblages of practices in which power is not assumed, a priori, to lie in any singular structure. Moreover, conceiving of government as an assemblage of practices suggests that government does not form a coherent totality, but is composed of heterogeneous elements with diverse historical trajectories (Dean, 1999, p. 40). As Tania Li (2007, p. 276) points out, although there are moments when projects of social improvement might resemble the “high modernism” described by James Scott (1998), more often they are bricolages pulled together from existing repertoires of practices.

Dean (1999) identifies four dimensions of an analytics of government for different assemblages (or regimes) of practices: (1) fields of visibility, including maps, charts, and tables, that allow us

7 to picture who and what is to be governed; (2) the techne of government, or the mechanisms and technologies for acting, intervening, and directing; (3) the episteme of government, or the forms of knowledge and calculation employed in governing; and (4) the formation of identities, or the ideal subjects that those who exercise authority seek to produce. While I want to avoid a formulaic application of this framework, a visual artifact might help to highlight the value of an analytics of government in understanding reconfigurations of power in post-quake Chengdu, where a variety of state and non-state actors converged to rebuild rural areas.

The billboard below (Figure 1), posted in newly rebuilt villages throughout Chengdu’s quake zone, reads: “build new homes; create new lives; cultivate new habits” (jianshe xin jiayuan; chuangzao xin shenghuo; peiyu xin fengshang). The slogan refers to a policy enacted in Chengdu’s quake-affected areas during the second year of reconstruction that aimed to turn peasants into self-managing urban citizens. As a field of visibility, the poster depicts the city government’s utopian vision for the modern countryside, with clear demarcations between agricultural land and village residential land, and the modern city ever-present on the horizon. As a techne of government, it reflects a Mao-era reliance on mass campaigns and slogans to effect changes in behavior. One aspect of the episteme illustrated here is the widespread belief that the modernization of the physical environment would bring about improvements in the behavior of rural residents. This was linked to new fields of knowledge that were emerging in the mid- and late- 2000s, including the new discipline of rural planning (xiangcun guihua) (Chapter 3). Finally, the formation of identities here is apparent: the Chengdu government is seeking, through its social campaign, to create modern citizens who participate appropriately in public life and act as good custodians for the rural environment (Chapter 6).

Figure 1: New houses in Luping Village (photo by author)

The above lays out an analytical orientation for understanding some of the ways Developmental power works in Chengdu. But I want to extend this Foucauldian reading by putting it into conversation with two other theorists who shed some light on the current historical conjuncture in China: Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) and Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991). The former speaks to the sense that China is undergoing a “great transformation” to a market society, while the latter’s work addresses a (related) sense that China is becoming an urban society. While the two thinkers are not often paired, I think there are some productive parallels. Both Polanyi and Lefebvre attempted to theorize what they saw as the great transformations of their times, and both formulated their theories under the influence of—and in tension with—a reductionist Marxism that seemed to offer an incomplete frame for understanding social change (Block & Polanyi, 2003; Elden, 2004). Both authors, in the end, embraced a social critique of capitalism that sought to unseat the supremacy of market logics and replace these with an ethics and an analysis of the social. This was also, effectively, a critique of a “science” of political economy that sought understand the economic sphere separately from the social sphere. As Lefebvre writes in La pensée marxiste et la ville:

How much time is it going to take to recognize that the subtitle of Capital (Critique of Political Economy) had to be taken literally? Despite the subtitle, Capital was considered as a treatise of the economy for more than a half- century. After that, it was interpreted as a critique of bourgeois political economy that contained the premise for a political economy called “socialist.” Yet Capital must be taken as a critique of all political economy: of the economic as a separate sphere, a narrow field of science that morphs into a restraining device, of the “discipline” which fixes and immobilizes momentary relations by elevating them to the rank of scientific truths. (Lefebvre, 1970 cited in Kipfer, Goonewardena, Schmid, & Milgrom, 2008, p. 19)

The point here is not to suggest that the two authors should necessarily be read together, or that there is some “natural” complementarity between the two aside from this broad critique of economism. Instead, I propose that both of them can be helpful for thinking through various aspects of Chengdu’s URI project. Rather than undertake a systematic comparison of the two authors, I want to turn now to explore how both might be mobilized in the particular context of postsocialist China.6

1.3 Development and the double movement

Understanding the logics and impacts of Chengdu’s post-quake URI project requires engaging with the changing nature of state socialism in China. That the Wenchuan Earthquake was perceived as an “opportunity” at all is itself indicative of a marked shift in political discourse in China—one that might be illustrated through a comparison with the Tangshan Earthquake of 1976. The Tangshan Earthquake occurred at the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), just before Mao’s death in September 1976 initiated a shift in political power towards market reformers in Beijing. The quake struck the densely populated industrial city of Tangshan on 28 July and claimed over 240,000 lives, making it one of the deadliest earthquakes of the 20th century (Peterson, 2011). But the death toll was not announced until three years later (“From Tangshan to Wenchuan: a faultline through modern China,” 2008), and even the clearing of debris did not begin until 1981 (Peterson, 2011). These delays were partially due to the political

6 I follow Arif Dirlik (1989, 2014) in the use of postsocialism to describe a post-reform China that is shaped both by its socialist legacy and its adoption of certain elements of capitalism. Dirlik (1989, p.364, cited in Dirlik, 2014, p. 265) writes: “Chinese society today is postsocialist because its claims to a socialist future no longer derive their force from socialism as an immanent idea. On the other hand, it is also postsocialist because socialism, as its structural context, remains as a possible option to which it can return if circumstances so demand (this is what distinguishes it from a capitalist or even a postcapitalist society where such options as collectivization, socially, and a socialist culture, ideologically, are foreclosed).”

10 turmoil of the final months of the Cultural Revolution, and the subsequent struggle for power after Mao’s death later in 1976. Media reports at the time focused on how survivors were combining disaster relief with political campaigns under the slogan of “Denounce Deng [Xiaoping] while conducting disaster relief” (“From Tangshan to Wenchuan: a faultline through modern China,” 2008). An article in the People’s Daily, published about a month after the Wenchuan Earthquake, notes (disapprovingly) that “… during the Tangshan earthquake, under the reins of the ultra-left, individual interests and values were neglected, and everything was subject to the needs of the ‘class struggle’.” (“From Tangshan to Wenchuan: a faultline through modern China,” 2008). The central government refused offers of foreign assistance, and foreigners were banned from entering Tangshan for a number of years (Peterson, 2011).

By contrast, in 2008 the central government was praised for its rapid response and openness to domestic and foreign journalists and aid workers (Y. Chen & Booth, 2011, p. 201; “China’s earthquake: days of disaster,” 2008; Peng & Cui, 2008). Moreover, class and politics were nowhere evident in descriptions of the Wenchuan Earthquake. Instead, the government embraced a “people first” (yi ren wei ben) policy that presented a united national front (Liangen Yin & Haiyan Wang, 2010). But this desire for unity undermined the initial openness towards media coverage. For instance, early reports that many children had died in poorly built “tofu-dregs” (doufu zha gongcheng) schools (perceived to be the result of local government corruption) during the quake were quickly suppressed (Choi, 2013). As a result, much of the media coverage of the Wenchuan Earthquake ended up focusing on stories of heroic state actors and personal resilience.7 Liangen Yin, a Professor of Communications in Shenzhen, and Haiyin Wang, a former journalist with the Southern Metropolitan Daily (Nanfang Dushi Bao), note that, in contrast to claims about the “openness” of the state’s response to Wenchuan, any publications that threatened the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were banned or penalized (Liangen Yin & Haiyan Wang, 2010).

Party legitimacy has become a subject of renewed interest for scholars of Chinese politics since the early 2000s (Gilley & Holbig, 2009). The CCP’s founding principles were based on the

7 This was evident as well in the 2010 blockbuster film Aftershock (Tangshan Da Dizhen), which traced the fortunes of a family torn apart during the Tangshan Earthquake, then reunited over thirty years later during the Wenchuan Earthquake. The director eschewed any political commentary on the two events to focus on the personal.

11 collective endeavor to achieve national and social liberation, equality, and development (C. Lin, 2013, p. 51). But economic development appeared to take precedence over other goals when Deng Xiaoping, the rightist denounced in the rubble of the Tangshan quake, rose to power in the late 1970s and ushered in a series of market reforms that transformed the country. After a period of unsteady and uneven growth in the 1980s and 1990s8—when the government introduced market pricing mechanisms, privatized and closed state-owned enterprises, disbanded rural collectives, and allowed foreign investment in designated Special Economic Zones—the early 2000s witnessed China’s undisputed rise as a global economic power. Foreign and domestic economists waxed lyrical about the “Chinese miracle” and praised the government for leaving behind the instability-inducing class politics of the Cultural Revolution in favour of a more technocratic style of government. Yet the state remained heavily interventionist in certain economic sectors, and cadres continued to draw on Mao-era tactics like mass mobilization campaigns (Perry, 2011; Sigley, 2006). What had changed was that the Party had explicitly moved from being a “revolutionary party” (gemingdang) to being a “ruling party” (zhizhengdang) (Sigley, 2006, p. 504). Economic growth rather than permanent revolution became the basis of Party legitimacy in the new socialist market economy.

China’s entry into the world market was accompanied by rapid urbanization. Rising urban wages, reduced state investment in rural areas, and the cultural de-valuation of rural areas (and residents) as “backwards” (luohou) impelled millions of peasants to move to coastal cities and their industrial suburbs (Yan, 2003). Inequalities were further entrenched by China’s household registration (hukou) system, which excluded rural migrants from access to social services in cities (Chan, 2009). Mao had extracted, sometimes ruthlessly, agricultural surpluses from the countryside to build up urban industry from the 1950s through the 1970s (Naughton, 2007). But he remained ideologically loyal to the rural base that had helped propel the Party to power in 1949, and suspicious of urban areas as parasitic and consumption-oriented (Visser, 2010, p. 15). After the late 1970s policy makers materially and symbolically recast urban areas not just as engines of national economic growth, but also sites of spectacular display and consumption. The fetishization of cities as fonts of modernization and growth contributed to the significant

8 Real GDP growth went from 7.9 per cent in 1980, to 3.8 per cent in 1990, to 8.4 per cent in 2000 (“China GDP: how it has changed over time,” 2012).

12 inequalities between urban and rural areas.9 “The peasants’ lot is really bitter, the countryside is really poor, and agriculture is in crisis,” wrote Li Changping, a rural cadre from Hubei Province in a widely-cited open letter to Premier Zhu Rongji in 2000 (Li, 2000, cited in A. Day, 2008, p. 49). This sense of a “rural crisis” prompted leaders in the central government to turn their attention to social inequality. With their rise to power in the early 2000s, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao laid out a “scientific developmentalist viewpoint” (kexue fazhan guan) that called for environmentally and socially sustainable growth. Such “scientific” development should “put people first” (yi ren wei ben), with the ultimate aim of establishing a "harmonious society" (hexie shehui) (C. C. Fan, 2006; Naughton, 2005).

This concern for equity and sustainability appeared to represent a notable departure from the Dengist approach to “letting some get rich first”, inspiring some observers to describe the change in the Party leadership’s thinking as “revolutionary” (Naughton, 2005, p. 1).10 Well-known leftist intellectual Wang Shaoguang (2008) draws on Karl Polanyi to characterize the Hu-Wen regime’s focus on social and environmental concerns as a “double movement” aimed at protecting China’s citizens against the post-reform excesses of the market. Urban geographer Wu Fulong (2008) also picks up the Polanyian thread by observing that the country has undergone a “Great Transformation” since 1979, describing a shift from state-led industrialization to urban-based accumulation. But in contrast to Wang, Wu does not use Polanyi to point to a “double movement”. From the vantage of Chinese cities, the state is not playing a protective role, but is rather proactive in building what Polanyi terms a “market society”. The orientation of the state has shifted completely from a redistributive role to an entrepreneurial one. Wu’s view of China’s unfettered neoliberalization is representative of many geographers writing on contemporary urban China (italics added):

Chinese cities, therefore, are emerging institutions, using urban space to absorb surplus capital (which is obvious in the real estate sector). The city is used at the same time to

9 The World Bank reported that the rate at which China’s income gap had risen in the two decades after 1980 was the fastest in the world (C. C. Fan, 2006, p. 713). 10 This may be an overstatement of the magnitude of the policy shift, which remained firmly developmentalist in outlook. It may also overplay Deng’s apparent lack of concern for social inequality. Wang Shaoguang quotes Deng as saying, “The purpose of socialism is to make all people rich instead of [creating] polarization. If our policy leads to polarization, we will fail.” (S. Wang, 2008, p. 21).

foster further marketization, because collective consumption is abolished; the city is commoditized in all facets from its hard to its soft assets: branding and selling the city is a tactic. This has resulted in high house prices and the escalating costs of healthcare and education, which are described as the ‘three new mountains’ for the poor to climb. The asset and capital classes thus exploit the ‘have-nots’ for a second time. (F. Wu, 2008, p. 1095)

According to Wu’s assessment, not only have collective assets in Chinese cities been wholly privatized, but cities themselves have become machines for remaking Chinese society along market principles. Urban governments, working in concert with public and private sector developers, are active players in this process. This seems to completely contradict Wang’s claim that the Chinese government, circa 2008, appeared to be stepping back from its whole-hearted embrace of the market. One way of understanding divergences between Wang and Wu’s understandings of the role of the state vis-à-vis the market is to look at differences in scale: Wang is writing about national-level policies, while Wu focuses on entrepreneurial municipal governments. But a closer examination of Polanyi’s original formulation reveals some fundamental ambiguities surrounding the role of the state, as well as clues about why his approach resonates with observers of contemporary China.

1.4 The ambiguous role of the state in Polanyi’s Great Transformation

In The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, written and published during the final years of the Second World War, Polanyi seeks to understand the origins of the war and the “destruction” of nineteenth- century (European) civilization. The causes, he concludes, lay in efforts to create an impossibly Utopian and inhumane “self- regulating market”, and the social forces that arose in opposition to this project. Polanyi starts by pointing out that, historically, human economic activity has been embedded in social mores, laws, and politics. But the political and intellectual champions of economic liberalism who emerged in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sought to create a market society, which reduced economic behavior to Adam Smith’s “propensity to truck, barter and exchange”. Liberals demonized any perceived effort to inhibit this ostensibly “natural” human behavior and the “economic laws” thus derived. The irony of this position, as Polanyi points out, was that the very creation of a comprehensive system of “self-regulating” markets required concerted effort; Polanyi writes famously that “laissez-faire was planned, planning was not” (Polanyi, 2001, p. 147). In particular, the large-scale productive apparatus that emerged with the

Industrial Revolution required all factors of production to be readily obtainable in the market. But efforts to create markets for certain factors, including land, labour, and money, are prone to failure. Polanyi characterizes these as “fictitious” commodities: unlike “real” commodities, they are not produced expressly for sale in the market. They are, in their origins and their ends, external to the market, and efforts to subjugate them to market logics are fraught with problems. Subjecting human labour power, for instance, to the fluctuations of market demand has an untenable human cost. Nor can the supply of labour power, even under the barest Malthusian scenario, be adjusted with any degree of timeliness. This leads Polanyi to argue that the “self- regulating market” championed by liberals is a dangerous fiction that could not exist without destroying the human and natural world. In order to protect itself, society organizes to resist the extension of pure market logics and to re-embed the market in a system of social mores. The “double movement” that Wang Shaoguang cites refers to this tension between social protectionists and market liberals; between forces to embed the market in society, and those that seek to disembed it.

Polanyi’s key theoretical contributions—the insistence on the social embeddedness of markets and the idea of the double movement—appear to center on the two concepts of “society” and “market”. But in his historical analysis of how the double movement plays out, a third entity— the state—becomes crucial. In contrast to Marx’s class-based analysis of social change, Polanyi reads the counter movement against economic liberalism as a broad-based “spontaneous reaction” rather than a class movement (Polanyi, 2001, p. 159). Though this seems like a rather vague account of resistance, his concrete analysis demonstrates that he saw this broad movement playing out at least partly in the institutions of the state. Whereas Marx viewed the capitalist state primarily as a tool of the bourgeoisie (one that would necessarily wither away after a socialist revolution), Polanyi saw the state as a potentially protective force against the ravages of the market, and by the end of the book he has translated the notion of the double movement into an impassioned plea for government intervention. But the mechanisms through which the state comes to act as the champion of a protectionist countermovement are not specified in Polanyi’s theoretical framework. Rather, market protection takes different forms in different national systems. He traces how, in nineteenth-century England, resistance to the market took root initially in the form of self-organized workers’ movements like trade unions and the Chartist

15 movement. By contrast, in continental Europe, the state itself often acted on behalf of workers.11 The European example seems closer to Wang’s account of the Chinese situation, where non-state social organizations are restricted, and where some form of state intervention is accepted as necessary by both liberals and protectionists who themselves are, for the most part, cadres and intellectuals affiliated (to varying degrees) with the state.

Polanyi’s understanding of what role the state should play is evident in his third chapter of The Great Transformation, “Habitation versus Improvement”, where he examines the catastrophic effect that England’s Industrial Revolution had on the lives of common people. In analyzing the genesis and effects of the enclosures, often credited with creating an industrial labour force by excluding smallholder farmers from the commons and forcing them off the land, he writes:

An official document of 1607, prepared for the use of the Lords of the Realm, set out the problem of change in one powerful phrase: “The poor man shall be satisfied in his end: Habitation; and the gentleman not hindered in his desire: Improvement.” This formula appears to take for granted the essence of purely economic progress, which is to achieve improvement at the price of social dislocation. But it also hints at the tragic necessity by which the poor man clings to his hovel doomed by the rich man’s desire for a public improvement which profits him privately.” (Polanyi, 2001, pp. 36–37).

Polanyi uses the word “habitation” in its common sense, to refer to the homes of the rural poor. But in choosing it for the title to the chapter, and in opposing it to “improvement”, he also opens it up to broader meanings. Polanyi takes a dim view of liberal notions of economic development, or “improvement”, excoriating liberal philosophy for the “utterly materialistic” creed that “…all human problems could be resolved given an unlimited amount of material commodities” (Polanyi, 2001, p. 42). In the excerpt above, he also makes a second critique of improvement by laying bare the hypocrisy of public “improvements” that profit the wealthy few. If improvement here is a synonym for the extension of market logic and private profiteering in the name of progress, habitation can also be read as the counter move to reject a doctrine of progress in favour of an alternate creed of social ethics.

11 Block (2003) interprets Polanyi’s long exegesis of the Speenhamland system (which established a system of rural outdoor relief tied to the price of bread, and which was considered to have kept landless agricultural laborers in an extended state of destitution and depressed wages) as an effort to understand the suspicion with which the English working class regarded state intervention.

Strangely, he suggests that the state’s role here consists not in challenging a liberal doctrine of improvement, but in “altering the rate of change, speeding it up or slowing it down as the case may be” (Polanyi, 2001, p. 39). Although he writes that the state may speed up social and economic change, it is clear that he primarily advocates slowing down the rate of transformation. He writes:

England withstood without grave damage the calamity of the enclosures only because the Tudors and the Stuarts used the power of the Crown to slow down the process of economic improvement until it became socially bearable—employing the power of the central government to relieve the victims of the transformation, and attempting to canalize the process of change so as to make its course less devastating.” (Polanyi, 2001, p. 40)

But here the problems with Polanyi’s largely normative discussion of the state’s role become apparent. The state should act to slow down processes of change and to protect land, labour, and money from the tyranny of the market, but there is no guarantee that the state will do this. In fact, the state also plays a key role in creating markets for land, labour, and money. In England, Polanyi acknowledges, government by the Crown gave way to government by an emergent industrial and commercial class, who could bend state institutions to serve just such purposes.

In some ways though, what appears to be a weakness in Polanyi’s analysis—the open, ambiguous role of the state in the double movement—also makes it productive in the Chinese case. By not fixing a specific role for the state in his theoretical framework, and highlighting the historically and institutionally determined nature of this role in his analysis, Polanyi leaves room for his key concepts (embeddedness, fictitious commodities, and the double movement) to be mobile, to be applied in different national contexts. This invites us to draw parallels between Polanyi’s analysis of the establishment of a “market society” in eighteenth and nineteenth century England and the Chinese Communist Party’s experiments with the market in post-reform China. It also invites us to ask, broadly, “How do societies respond to the expansion of markets, and what role does the state play in both the expansion and the response?” This is what Wang Shaoguang and Wu Fulong have done with their divergent applications of Polanyi.

The contemporary Chinese case differs, of course, from nineteenth century Britain in several respects. The first and most obvious difference lies in the vastly different historical-institutional frameworks of the two countries. Without going too far into excavations of Chinese history, Wang and Wu’s analyses suggest that the legacy of Chinese socialism presents perhaps the most

17 salient point of departure. For Wang and many other Chinese leftists, this legacy allows China’s citizens to make claims on the state in the name of social protectionism. But for Wu, the contemporary Chinese state is a developmental state in the sense that its primary role is in constructing and maintaining markets. He sees this as a necessary survival strategy for a Party that now governs through the market. In fact, he claims that “authoritarian control” is not a legacy of the Maoist state, but a post-reform mode of power: strong state control is a precondition for market development. Efforts by citizens, intellectuals, and leftist cadres to reclaim non-market (socialist) ethics are undermined by the predominantly negative historical assessments of the Cultural Revolution within China, which dismiss much of the Mao era as a “chaotic” (luan) period. Wu’s assessment of the state’s role in creating a market society echoes Lin Chun’s (2006) assessment that the Chinese government is purposely breeding market forces to be “disembedded” from social control. But while she is harsh in her assessment of some current state tendencies, Lin is interesting for her persistent adherence to the belief that Chinese socialism continues to offer an alternative mode of development (C. Lin, 2006, 2013). Her assessments show us a way to hold onto both insights: that the contemporary Chinese state (at multiple scales) is actively creating a market society, and that the legacy of Chinese socialism still offers, for many people, alternate ways to imagine relations between state, society, and market.

The second major distinction we could draw between Industrial Revolution Britain and contemporary China lies in the shift from industrial capitalism to late or post-industrial capitalism during the century that separates the two periods. This shift encompasses multiple dimensions of transformation, including technological and logistical advances that have globalized production in ways that would have been unimaginable in Engels’ Manchester (though Engels certainly would have recognized contemporary working conditions in Shenzhen and Karachi), the explosion of financial markets and the increased clout of the financial sector, and the increasing subsumption of local property markets and urban space itself in global capital circuits. Chengdu’s urban-rural integration policy, while it was framed as a means of improving rural living standards, was also an urbanization project. Moreover, it was carried out at a time when urbanization was being touted, inside China and around the world, as the most significant demographic shift of the twenty-first century. It is this trend—along with the rise of urbanism as both an accumulation strategy and an ideology—that I want to examine next.

1.5 Hegemonic urbanism

The year 2008 was not only the year of the quake, it was also the year the United Nations declared that the world would reach an historic tipping point, with over 50 per cent of the global population living in cities (UNFPA, 2007). The authors of the report describe urbanization as something that is inevitable and dangerous, but ripe with Developmental possibility:

Urbanization—the increase in the urban share of total population—is inevitable, but it can also be positive. The current concentration of poverty, slum growth and social disruption in cities does paint a threatening picture. Yet no country in the industrial age has ever achieved significant economic growth without urbanization. Cities concentrate poverty, but they also represent the best hope of escaping it (UNFPA, 2007, p. 1).

This rehashed version of modernization theory—one that suggests that all countries pass through the same evolutionary process of urbanization—was also evident in a World Bank publication from the same year. The World Development Report for 2008, Agriculture for Development, lays out three country “types”: agriculture-based countries, transforming countries, and urbanized countries. The report’s authors observe that countries follow “evolutionary” paths, and can move from one country type to another in a ladder-like fashion (World Bank, 2007, p. 4). The bulk of the report is dedicated to providing advice for agriculture-based countries to tap into agriculture as an “engine for growth”. For the other country types, agriculture is no longer an important growth sector. Rather, for transforming countries like China, the problem is to reduce the rural- urban income gap while avoiding the “trap” of subsidy-protection, largely through a combination of rural non-farm employment, increasing labour productivity through farm consolidation, and gradual rural outmigration. With urbanization as the endgame, the future of rural settlements looks increasingly residual.

This evolutionary approach to urbanization is very much evident among policymakers in contemporary China, where Emily Yeh (2013, p. 181) has remarked that urbanization has become a “metonym” for development. But I think this in fact understates the role that urbanization is playing in policy imaginaries in China. In 2013, the Chinese government issued the “National New-Type Urbanization Plan (2014-2020)” that aimed to increase the percentage of the population living in cities from 52.6 percent to 60 percent over the six years of the plan (National New Style Urbanization Plan (2014-2020), n.d.). Premier Li Keqiang has promoted planned urbanization as the key to improving living standards and allowing more of China’s

19 people to attain the “Chinese Dream” of middle class prosperity (K. Li, 2013). In addition to increasing incomes, Li seeks to transform China’s macroeconomy: the logic is that widespread urbanization will boost domestic demand, moving the country away from growth that relies on exports and investment to growth rooted in domestic consumption. To a large degree, urbanization has become synonymous with development; it is the inevitable path that will (at last) bring China’s peasantry—and the nation itself—into the folds of modernity.

In some ways, this tendency was anticipated by Lefebvre in The Urban Revolution, where he observes that society has become “completely urbanized” (Lefebvre, 2003). In Lefebvre’s timeline, a diffuse “urban society” is supplanting the industrial city, which in turn had initiated the process of subjugating an earlier agrarian society. With the advent of the new urban society, the idea of the city as a defined object becomes a relic best consigned to the intellectual dustbin as intensified processes of implosion-explosion (the concentration of people and activities in space and the concurrent expansion of borders, suburbs, and satellite towns in space) make a mockery of old city borders. This idea has become popularized recently in urban geography under the term “planetary urbanization” (Brenner, 2014; Brenner & Schmid, 2014). Brenner (2014) writes about processes of “extended urbanization” through which formerly remote spaces (not just suburban areas, but distant mines and vast logistics infrastructures) are being operationalized to support the continued agglomeration of capital, labor and infrastructure within the world’s large cities. Rather than focus on cities themselves, Brenner urges us to examine the relations between agglomeration processes and their operational landscapes.

While I appreciate the suggestion to look beyond city boundaries to understand the influence of the urban, I also work in a bit of tension with Lefebvre and the planetary urbanists here. Specifically, I am concerned that this diffuse notion of the urban-as-process causes us to lose sight of the specific power of the administratively defined city. In the Chinese context the territorially organized hierarchy plays a key role in determining the authority of different levels of government, and the labels “urban” and “rural” demarcate not only different land use and property ownership regimes, but also vastly different social and institutional histories. Second, there is an uncomfortable resonance between this “stages of development” model and Lefebvre’s equation of France’s entry into modernity with a shift from the “rural” to “industrial” to “urban”. His periodization, although perhaps intended more as an heuristic device than a strict

20 demarcation of historic stages, works altogether too neatly alongside the developmental formulae described in the United Nations report cited earlier.

My third concern is related to this, and lies more with tendencies in the recent proponents of “planetary urbanization” than with Lefebvre himself. Lefebvre describes a trend towards the urban society even as he critiques the ideology of urbanism that supports that movement. But Brenner et al. seem to treat planetary urbanization as a pure phenomenon at the expense of acknowledging its ideological valences. As such, a planetary urbanization frame runs the risk of foreclosing any “non-urban” futures (or even acknowledging the existence of a “non-urban” space). Analyzing China’s path of agrarian socialism, Lin Chun (2013, p. 154), for instance, argues that, “[a] developed economy does not have to be prevailingly urban in either theory or reality.” My assessment of Chengdu’s post-quake URI project, then, draws less on these approaches to planetary urbanization and more on Lefebvre’s critiques of urbanism and abstract space, which I elaborate on further in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3.

1.6 Methods and data collection

The exploratory and theoretical nature of my research questions, combined with the personally and politically sensitive nature of the post-quake environment, made a qualitative case study approach a natural choice. Creswell (2007) makes a lengthy case for choosing qualitative research methods when the researcher seeks a complex, holistic view of social phenomena that takes into account the perspectives of participants. Moreover, he argues, qualitative approaches are preferred with the researcher is attempting to understand context, and cannot logically separate participants from this context. This focus on context is re-iterated by Yin (2009) in his popular text on the case study approach. He defines a case study as “… an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon in depth and within its real-life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident.” The point is echoed by Burawoy in his explanation of the extended case method, an approach that attempts to study the everyday world “from the standpoint of its structuration, that is by regarding it as simultaneously shaped by and shaping and external field of forces” (Burawoy, 1998, p. 15). For me, this effort to combine an understanding the everyday world with an account of structuration also translated into a mobile methodology that combined an in-depth qualitative study of one particular site with a broader policy analysis and visits across Chengdu’s quake zone.

I spent a period of nearly two years from November 2009 through December 2011 in Chengdu. I divided my time largely between the central city and a quake-affected township in the city’s northern reaches.12 In addition, I also made shorter visits to other sites in rural Chengdu that had been identified as reconstruction “models” in local media. When I was in the city, I focused on building networks with NGO workers, architects and planners who worked in the quake zone. My initial efforts to build contacts among planners through “snowball” sampling proved more difficult than I had anticipated. There may be a number of reasons for this. When I asked a township government leader about who I should speak to in the city planning department, he advised me that planners would be unwilling to talk because planning had become a “sensitive” subject after the quake. Another reason may be related to my own positionality as a non- Chinese, young-looking woman, in the context of professional culture dominated by men. When I directly approached the Planning Department at a university in Chengdu, the Party Secretary affiliated with the department brushed me off because of my lack of professional credentials: according to his logic, although I had studied planning, I had never actually worked as a planner, so I could not understand what planning was about. I had similar experiences when I tried to contact planners at the Chengdu Planning Bureau directly. Conversations with other female researchers (including Chinese-born researchers) suggest that they have encountered similar challenges to their authority when navigating Chinese planning circles. My sample of planners in Chengdu was thus limited to a previous contact I had in the private sector, and the company he introduced me to.

Yin (2009) stresses that the case study approach relies on the collection of multiple sources of evidence and triangulation between those sources. My relative lack of access to planning professionals reshaped the project, forcing me to rely more heavily on planning documents and media interviews than I had anticipated. In fact, reading the local paper was crucial to my fieldwork. Aside from identifying important policies and model projects, reading the papers performed a number of more mundane functions in developing my vocabulary around quake reconstruction issues and helping me refine my interview questions. And while it is certainly

12 The issue of access was the primary factor in this choice: the Chinese NGO with which I was affiliated had set up a project in one of these communities. The fact that this area had experienced relatively few casualties during the quake also guided my decision.

22 simplistic to use China’s state-monitored papers as a direct guide to what is happening “on the ground,” they do provide a reliable source of information about how the system is supposed to work, and how it is legitimized (Thøgersen, 2006, p. 197).

The NGO world was comparatively easy to access; first, because these groups (at the time) actively seek out overseas connections, and second, because gendered hierarchies are flatter than in China’s white-collar business and professional sector. I worked as a volunteer with an NGO project in northern Chengdu, where I stayed in the temporary post-quake shelters with the NGO workers. Aside from participating in the daily routines of the NGO and the community, I conducted structured and semi-structured interviews with residents, residents’ committee heads, planners, and township officials (Appendix 1). I hired one of the social workers at the NGO station as a research assistant when I first arrived to help translate from Sichuan dialect into Mandarin (I also enrolled in Sichuan dialect classes at a university in Chengdu). Her assistance was invaluable to my work: she was from a rural community herself, and had already established excellent relations with local residents.

As is common among researchers who work in China (Solinger, 2006), I made no audio recordings of interviews in an effort to help participants feel more at ease. The potential political sensitivity of post-quake reconstruction made this a particular concern.13 Recording can also be tricky in many contexts in rural China where one might be conducting less formal interviews (in market places, or in evolving social situations with participants dropping in and out of the conversation) (Loubere, 2017). Much of my reluctance to record and transcribe also arose from a concern about how a “clinical” style of interacting might alienate people who had lived through not only an earthquake, but also the (perhaps equally traumatic) flood of outside experts, volunteers, and researchers who arrived in the wake of the quake. In formal, pre-arranged interviews with officials and community leaders (conducted in their offices), I would take hand- written notes during interviews. In these instances, I was not seeking any information beyond the official line on post-quake reconstruction. However, when speaking more informally with residents (in their homes, in the community centre, or in teahouses) I waited to write down my

13 Immediately following the quake there was widespread reporting on “tofu-dreg schools” (doufuzha xiaoshe), schools that had not been built to standard as a result of either local incompetence or corruption.

23 impressions until I returned to the NGO offices, where I could compare notes with my research assistant. This in some way resembles Nicholas Loubere’s (2017) “systematic and reflexive interviewing and reporting” method in rural China, in which he worked with two research assistants during and after interviews to jointly produce data outputs.

1.7 Organization of the dissertation

The second and third chapters analyze the spatial planning aspects of Chengdu’s urban-rural integration and post-quake reconstruction projects: Chapter 2 examines metropolitan-scale planning, while Chapter 3 looks at post-quake site planning in a village that was celebrated as a model for a new approach to rural planning. I draw on Lefebvre in these chapters to highlight the themes of both urbanization (as a process of explosion-implosion, and an extension of the core’s control over the periphery) and urbanism (as a professionalized ideology).

Chapter 2 provides geographic and historic background for Chengdu’s twentieth-century identity as suffering from a double burden of “underdevelopment” because of its agrarian economy and geographical location in China’s poorer interior. Since the early 2000s city officials have attempted to position Chengdu as a growth hub in Western China and have embarked on an ambitious program of regional planning. The city’s successive regional plans can be read as efforts to establish control over surrounding areas in the newly minted city-region.

In the third chapter I look at the role that rural planners played in rebuilding rural Chengdu after the quake. I trace the rise of a science of rural planning in China since the early 2000s, and the growing concern for preserving rural lifestyles and traditions. I also examine Chengdu’s project to “send planners down to the countryside”, focusing on the market rationalities that planners attempted to propagate, as well as the difficulties they faced in enacting their plans. I then analyze the case of a model planned village (Luping Village) in Chengdu’s quake zone, and demonstrate how the new rural planning, despite its concerns for preserving an imagined rurality, is tied to political economic imperatives originating in the metropolitan core.

In Chapters 4 and 5 I shift from planning to the question of property. Chapter 4 focuses on the rural property rights reforms that the Chengdu government had been experimenting with when the quake struck, which were facilitated by the quake. I start with an overview of the current system of rural property rights in China, and the ongoing debates over property rights reform. I

24 examine Chengdu’s rural property rights reforms, which included verifying and assigning individual land titles and establishing limited markets for rural property rights. I then outline the heated debate over these reforms between “liberal” and “left” scholars in China, drawing on their work to analyze the effects of property reform in Chengdu.

Chapter 5 turns to economic development projects in post-quake villages, which often relied heavily on tourism and real estate development projects. The chapter examines a model site for tourism development and individual real estate investment, Chaping Village. These projects reconfigured the value of rural land, as well as residents’ relation to the land. The chapter asks whether and how the concept of primitive accumulation/ accumulation by dispossession is useful in understanding post-quake dynamics. If we understand property as a social relation, then it seems clear that some form of dispossession is at work in rural Chengdu.

In Chapters 6 and 7 I focus on questions of the social: both social reconstruction projects initiated by state and NGO actors, and residents’ responses to reconstruction. Chapter 6 examines state and NGO efforts to rebuild “rural communities” after the quake, and places these projects in the broader context of the recent concern for “social management”. What social visions for rural Chengdu are state and NGO actors attempting to realize, and how are they attempting to realize them? How are state and non-state visions linked, and what concept of relations between state, society, and market do these visions reflect?

In Chapter 7 I draw on participant-observation work in northern Chengdu to take a closer look at residents’ responses to efforts to rebuild their community, both socially and physically. I focus in particular on the mismatch between the priorities of residents and the priorities of experts and officials, and on the ways that residents mobilized older socialist institutions and ethics to try to influence the reconstruction process. Here I return to Polanyi’s pairing of habitation versus improvement to frame the disconnect between residents on the one hand and local state actors on the other.

The final chapter summarizes key findings from each of the different facets of Chengdu’s post- quake reconstruction, and reflects on the implications of China’s approach to urbanization-qua- development for rural residents and spaces.

Chapter 2

2 Remaking post-reform Chengdu: from backwards regional capital to World Modern Garden City

Historically, Chengdu has been a regional city, so it could serve as the center of the western region as it is transformed during the urbanization process… Development of this region, which is home to one-tenth of the nation's population, is vital to the overall growth of China.

-- Fan Gang, Director of China’s National Economic Research Institute (quoted in Wei, 2013)

Not to develop is to become backward. Even to develop slowly is to become backward.

-- Zhou Yongkang, Sichuan Provincial Party Secretary (quoted in McNally, 2004, p. 433)

2.1 Overview

Chengdu is the capital city of Sichuan Province, and boasts a history of settlement dating back over 2300 years (Qin, 2015). Located in the fertile, well-irrigated Sichuan Basin, the city’s early prosperity was tied to the region’s agricultural productivity—a long-standing identity reflected in Chengdu’s nickname, “Land of Abundance” (Tianfu zhi Guo) (Deying Li, 2007). But prior to the early 2000s, Chengdu, like many interior cities, lagged behind eastern coastal cities in terms of urbanization and economic growth. The initiation of the national “Open up the West” (Xibu Da Kaifa) campaign in 2000 marked the beginning of a dramatic socio-spatial transformation. “Open up the West” was intended to address the inequalities between eastern and western China through significant investments in infrastructure, education, agricultural modernization, and urbanization (Goodman, 2004). Chengdu officials used the new policy to position the city as a key growth pole and financial center in Western China, sparking a new round of both extensive urban growth and intensive urban redevelopment (Meng, 2001). From 2000 to 2012, the city’s GDP grew at an annual rate of over 15 percent, and the city’s population increased from 11.11 million to 14.18 million (Qin, 2015, p. 22).

People’s Republic of China

Sichuan Province

Chengdu

Figure 2: Map of Sichuan within China (Wikipedia, Creative Commons License 2.0)

Part of the city’s growth was spatial: in 2002 the boundaries of Chengdu expanded from 382.5 km2 of core urban districts to encompass 12, 400 km2 of rural land and satellite cities (Cheng, Lu, & Kang, 2009). As a result of this expanded jurisdiction, in 2003 the city made urban-rural integration (chengxiang yitihua) the guiding principle for urban policy (Abramson & Qi, 2011). Urban-rural integration pairs the goal of “scientific” land use planning with the goal of improving rural living standards. Both are achieved through concentrating farmers in planned settlements, consolidating their former housing and agricultural land, and creating (limited) property markets for the newly “freed” land. Residential concentration not only makes it easier to provide infrastructure and social services in rural areas, it also helps generate the funds to pay for those investments. Urban-rural integration has thus resulted in dramatic changes for rural residents in the Chengdu metropolitan region, and has also opened up new land reserves around the city (Ye, LeGates, & Qin, 2013).

For companies seeking to “go West”, Chengdu offers not only an abundance of developable land, but also a supply of cheap labour. Sichuan Province has been a key source of the migrant labour fueling the economic boom on China’s east coast. With labour costs rising in the east coast, many companies are turning towards Western China as a new investment frontier (Taylor, Ni, & Liu, 2016, p. 180). Chengdu, as the capital of Sichuan Province, is well poised to take advantage of this shift. By 2010, Chengdu was being hailed by global analysts as one of the world’s fastest-growing “cities of the future” (Kotkin, 2010), and in 2013 the city government reported that 252 Fortune 500 companies had opened offices in Chengdu (Chengdu Investment Promotion Commission, 2014, p. 10). Along with nearby Chongqing, the city aims to form a core western urban agglomeration zone that will rival the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta to the east (Fang & Yu, 2016, p. 207).

The first epigraph at the beginning of the chapter, pronounced during the 2013 Fortune Global Forum held in Chengdu, is thus illuminating for several reasons. First, it highlights Chengdu’s history as a regional city. Second, it suggests that, through urbanization, Chengdu will act as a growth hub for all of western China. Finally, it stresses the importance of Sichuan (and the western provinces) to the current round of national development. But this image of Chengdu as China’s Western boomtown belies a longer-standing narrative of Sichuan’s developmental “backwardness”, and hides the work that Chengdu’s municipal boosters have had to do to turn the region’s western location and rural roots into assets rather than liabilities for urban development. In this chapter, I describe Chengdu’s twentieth-century development in its regional and national contexts. I then offer a critique of the city’s metropolitan policy and planning efforts since the early 2000s, which set the stage for post-quake reconstruction of Chengdu’s rural areas after May 2008. Drawing on Lefebvre’s critiques of cities as centers of “colonial” power and abstract space as a form of that power, and You-tien Hsing’s (2010, p. 6) suggestion that urban expansion in contemporary China is no longer merely an accumulation strategy, but also a territorial project of local state building, I argue that these plans are best understood as political technologies establishing the city government’s authority over an ever- larger territory in the surrounding Chengdu Plain.

As centers of governmental, financial, and ideological control, capitalist cities are continuously expanding their influence over the countryside in a process that Lefebvre likens to colonization:

The state determines and congeals the decision-making centres. At the same time, space is distributed into peripheries which are hierarchized in relation to the centres; it is atomized. Colonization, which like industrial production and consumption as formerly localized, is made general. Around the centres there are nothing but subjected, exploited and dependent spaces: neo-colonial spaces (Lefebvre, 1976, pp. 84–85).

The state’s role in “congealing” decision-making centers is very much evident in China’s large cities. Since the early 1990s, Chinese cities have taken center stage in national policy as the key engines of national economic growth. This has been accompanied by the devolution of power to urban governments, as well as the expansion of urban jurisdictions to create large city-regions. This form of “administrative urbanization” has been criticized for over-inflating Chinese urbanization figures (Chan, 2007). But “real” urbanization—in the sense of the expansion of built-up urban cores—has been continuing apace. China’s cities are under a particular compulsion to expand because local government budgets depend heavily upon revenue generated from the land leasing (Hsing, 2006, 2010). This growth imperative is exacerbated by inter-urban competition at the national and global scales, as well as economic growth targets set by the central government. China’s “urban growth machines” are often the instigators of rural dispossession at the urban fringe, and the relationship between urban governments and peri- urban residents is fraught with tension.

You-tien Hsing (2010) accordingly puts land at the center of metropolitan politics in China today. She builds a typology of land-based politics in metropolitan regions, distinguishing between three types of place (marked by different political economies of land): the urban core, the urban fringe, and the rural fringe. The vast majority of literature on urban politics in contemporary China focuses on the first two areas: the urban core and the urban fringe. As the primary sites of capital accumulation and territorial expansion for cities, struggles over land in these areas are correspondingly intense. Much less attention has been paid to the politics of the rural fringe—the focus of this dissertation. Hsing (2010) devotes only one chapter of her book to the rural fringe, claiming that politics here are dominated by low-ranking township governments engaging in illicit property brokerage. But the case of Chengdu suggests these rural fringes are becoming increasingly important to metropolitan territorial expansion projects, and that the operation of power in these areas deserves closer attention.

2.2 Historical-geographical roots

Internally, Sichuan Province is geographically and culturally divided into two main areas: the fertile Sichuan Basin in the east, covering about 40 per cent of the province’s land area; and the rugged mountainous areas to the west, where much of Sichuan’s minority Tibetan, Qiang, and Yi population live. Chengdu, the province’s capital city, lies in a part of the Sichuan Basin called the Chengdu Plain. By the late 1930s, sustained by high agricultural productivity, population densities in the Chengdu Plain ranked among the highest in the world (Deying Li, 2007). Interestingly, population densities in many of the rural counties surrounding Chengdu were higher than in the central city, pointing to a notably integrated settlement and cultivation pattern.14

Agriculture was the dominant sector in Sichuan’s economy throughout the twentieth century (Bramall, 1993, p. 22). In the early years following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Sichuan ranked below the national average in terms of NDMP per capita (net domestic material product- a proxy for GDP) and urbanization (Bramall, 1993, p. 12).15 During the 1950s, efforts were made to develop heavy industry in the Chengdu area and establish rail links to other provinces. Though much state investment focused on industry, the rural sector also experienced boosts in output as a result of the introduction of new crop varieties, modernized irrigation practices, and gradual collectivization. In his provocatively titled book, In Praise of Maoist Economic Planning, Chris Bramall argues that the early years of economic planning worked fairly well in Sichuan. But the Great Leap Forward campaign (1958-1961), intended to spur industrial development by redirecting farm labour and agricultural surpluses into industry, was a great blow. Rural areas were particularly devastated by the Great Leap Forward, which is estimated to have resulted in the deaths of over 10 million peasants in Sichuan alone (Bramall, 1993, p. 90).

14 Li Deying (2007, pp. 460–461) notes that England, with the world’s highest national population density at the time, reached 262 people per square kilometer on average. By comparison, in 1939 Chengdu had reached a density of 532.8 people per square kilometer, while population densities in the surrounding counties (excluding the northern Guang and Peng Counties) ranged from 373 to 702 people per square kilometer. 15 During the war against Japan (1937-45), the Nationalist Party retreated briefly to Sichuan, spurring the beginnings of a modern industrial system in the province. However, many of the institutions established during that time moved back to eastern China after the victory of the Communist Party and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 (Qin, 2015).

The Great Leap Forward was only the most extreme example of the industrial bias that characterized much Mao-era policy. Kam-Wing Chan (2009, p. 200) writes that the rural sector “… was largely treated as “residual”, with its main functions being a provider of cheap raw materials (including food grain), labor, and capital for the urban-industrial sector.” In an effort to pursue the “Big Push” industrialization then being pursued by other socialist nations, the prices of agricultural products were kept artificially low relative to industrial products, effectively forcing agricultural workers to subsidize industrial workers. The gap between urban and rural living standards quickly became clear. In order to stem the flow of rural residents to urban areas, the state initiated the household registration (hukou) system during the 1950s, with a comprehensive system formalized in 1958. The system assigned every citizen an agricultural or non-agricultural status and a fixed place of residence. Urban hukou gave holders access to food, housing, and welfare provision in the city, while rural hukou were linked to membership in a rural collective and access to collectively owned land. From the 1950s until economic reform at the end of the 1970s, the hukou system kept from 80 to 85 per cent of China’s population in the structurally disadvantaged agricultural sector (Chan, 2009, p. 203).

Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, the central government sought to transform Sichuan from an agricultural into an industrial base through the ambitious Third Front Construction Project (San Xian Gongcheng). Mao’s aim was to establish an area deep in the interior of China that could serve as a strategic reserve in the event of an attack from the United States on the eastern coastal areas (the “first front”), or from the USSR in the north following the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s.16 Sichuan was considered a core province in this Third Front strategy. Factories and workers were relocated from other areas in China, more railways were built, and the province’s rich mining and natural gas resources were exploited in order to develop heavy industry (Naughton, 1988). Many factories were dispersed in remote mountain areas throughout the province (what one observer has termed the scattered “sheep shit” arrangement of enterprises (Gu, 1985, p. 484, cited in Bramall, 1993, p. 94)), which made it difficult to coordinate production. Despite the vast sums invested, by the end of the 1970s many facilities were still not

16 Campanella (2008, p. 178) points out that the Third Front strategy was not dissimilar from American efforts to disperse population and industry during the Cold War, through initiatives like the American Industrial Dispersion Policy approved by President Truman in 1951.

31 operational, and the massive investments produced marginal economic returns (Bramall, 1993, pp. 94–95). Yet the establishment of these enterprises had regional benefits, and laid the foundation for Chengdu’s later industrial development. Bramall (1993, p. 42) writes of the impact of Mao-era policies on the city:

Before 1949, Chengdu was a rather sleepy provincial capital, her only industry of the handicraft variety. By 1978, the city walls had come down, the Min River was spanned by a series of modern road bridges, and parts of the old city had been demolished. The environmental costs were considerable, but by the end of the Maoist period Chengdu was ringed with modern factories and fast approaching the status of industrial metropolis, employing more than a million workers by 1980.

Through the 1980s and 1990s Sichuan province as a whole experienced significant real growth rates of around 9.3 per cent per annum as well as a shift in economic structure (McNally, 2004). The ratio of primary to secondary to tertiary industry as a percentage of GDP shifted from 45:35:20 in 1978 to 25:37:38 in 1999 (China Data Online, 2014) as former agricultural workers were absorbed in a burgeoning (largely urban) service sector. In contrast to China’s eastern coastal cities, however, foreign direct investment (FDI) did not play a role in Chengdu’s development during this time—rather, periurbanization in the Chengdu region was shaped more heavily by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and township-village enterprises (TVEs) (Webster, Cai, Muller, & Luo, 2004). Following economic reform the late 1970s, many Third Front industries had moved from remote areas to more central locations in Sichuan, helping to drive urbanization in the satellite cities around Chengdu (Webster et al., 2004). During the same period, the establishment of township-village enterprises (TVEs) throughout the Chengdu Plain resulted in a wave of rural industrialization similar to what was then occurring around China’s coastal cities, but unique in Western China (Webster et al., 2004). But during the 1990s, many state-owned enterprises (SOEs) across China closed or were privatized. The collapse of the state sector (often a primary source of contracts for rural TVEs), paired with bank restrictions on lending to TVEs, resulted in a slow down in rural industrial development (Buck, 2007).

This decline in rural-based industry, combined with agricultural improvements, produced a large rural surplus population in densely populated Sichuan, and by the early 1990s Sichuan’s rural migrants were leaving the province en masse to work in the booming factories of the eastern

Figure 3 GDP per capita, People's Republic of China and Sichuan Province, 1978-2008 (Sichuan Statistical Yearbook, 2009) coastal provinces.17 In 1993, according to one account, there were ten million Sichuanese rural migrant workers, with 5.5 million working outside the province (Mobrand, 2009, p. 154). The provincial government was overtly supportive of the “Sichuan army” (Chuan jun) of migrant workers whose labour and remittances would reinvigorate the provincial economy (Mobrand, 2009). But by 1999, Sichuan remained primarily an agrarian economy, and the per capita income of the province stood at RMB 4,540 per person, compared to the national average of RMB 7,199 per person (Figure 4). Thus, though the province had experienced significant growth after reform and opening in 1978, it lagged in a national context. In 2000, Sichuan’s Party Secretary expressed the sense of developmental urgency in stark terms: “Not to develop is to become backward. Even to develop slowly is to become backward” (McNally, 2004, p. 433).

17 Contrary to popular “economic pull” narratives of migration that pit opportunity-seeking migrants against a controlling state, Mobrand (2009) describes how Sichuan’s migration, at least initially, was largely orchestrated by local and provincial government offices through agreements with factories and governments in other provinces and cities.

2.3 Open up the West, Build a New Socialist Countryside

In the geographic imaginaries of Chinese policymakers, Sichuan was doubly burdened by being both “rural” and “Western”. As a result of its developmental “backwardness”, Sichuan became the benefactor of several national policies to address the uneven development that has characterized China’s post-reform era. One of the first was the Open up the West (Xibu Da Kaifa) campaign described at the outset of the chapter. Open up the West (OUW), initiated by the central government under Jiang Zemin in 2000, was a broad directive aimed at addressing the economic gap between China’s wealthy eastern coastal provinces and the less developed interior.18 McNally (2004, p. 447) notes that the OUW campaign “…has often resembled a large- scale marketing drive for China’s west.” As a “marketing drive”, there was no single policy document that summarized the OUW campaign (Goodman, 2004). Instead, a number of “basic objectives” were formulated which, by 2002, included: developing infrastructure; strengthening environmental protection; improving education and technology; adjusting the structure of production; accelerating reform and opening; accelerating urbanization; and reducing rural poverty and regional income disparities (McNally, 2004). In terms of practical outcomes, OUW did not dramatically increase the amount of direct funding from the central government. Rather, it facilitated the central government’s approval of a number of large, province-led infrastructure projects, including dams and highways. In Sichuan, Chengdu’s municipal government took advantage of the OUW campaign to establish a “greater Chengdu economic sphere” (Da Chengdu Jingji Quan) that was intended to propel development throughout the province (Meng, 2001). Guided by this urban-centric trickle-down philosophy, OUW may have served to exacerbate intraprovincial inequalities within Sichuan (McNally, 2004).

Aside from the gap between eastern and western China, the other clear post-reform geographic divide was between urban and rural areas. The Eleventh Five-Year Plan, which outlined the direction for national policy for 2006-2010, aimed to build a “harmonious society” (hexie shehui) according to “the outlook of scientific development” (kexue fazhan guan) (C. Fan, 2007). As

18 Classification as “Western” came to be less geographical than ideological: the provinces included in the Western development strategy were not only lagging in GDP per capita, they are also home to significant populations of ethnic minorities in China’s historic frontier regions. The OUW campaign represented these minority areas as ethnic frontiers and simultaneously re-presented them as investment frontiers, making nation-building inseparable from economic development (Goodman, 2004).

34 described in the previous chapter, rural areas became a priority for national policymakers during this time. The Eleventh Five Year Plan also ushered in the “Building a New Socialist Countryside” (jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun) campaign. The New Countryside campaign was centered around five broad objectives: advanced production (shengchan fazhan); enriched lives (shenghuo kuanyu); civilized rural atmosphere (xiangfeng wenming); clean and tidy villages (cunrong zhengjie); and democratic management (guanli minzhu) (Office of the State Council, 2006). The New Countryside was thus conceived of as a comprehensive program of rural reform that would target not only economic development, but also rural subjectivities, built environments, and local governance structures. In concrete terms, the national policy resulted in direct improvements to rural lives and livelihoods, including the abolition of taxes and fees for rural residents and increased investment in rural infrastructure (Unger, 2012). Jonathan Unger (2012) notes that under the New Countryside policy the central government, for first time in Chinese history, began putting more funds into countryside than it was extracting.

Two representatives of the mainstream thinking on the forms that a “New Socialist Countryside” should take are Lin Yifu and Wen Tiejun (He 2007). Lin Yifu, or Justin Lin, is a Chinese economist who received his PhD from the University of Chicago and served as Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank from 2008-2012. Lin is a proponent of “new structural economics” in development theory: a post-neoliberal/ post-Washington consensus approach that, while acknowledging the market as the most effective mechanism for resource allocation, argues for the government’s role in facilitating structural changes to “upgrade” developing economies based on existing factor endowments of labour, capital, and resources (Y. Lin, 2012). In terms of China’s new socialist countryside, Lin advocates gradual urbanization to fuel a low cost labour market, combined with investment in rural infrastructure to stimulate internal demand in the countryside (X. He, 2007). These patently instrumental views of the Chinese countryside seem to be girding current central policies. In 2008 and 2009 rural areas came to the fore in national media as a locus for absorbing the “surplus” migrant labourers that have been laid off in the wake of the global economic crisis, and a site of productive investment and consumption capable of renewing the national economy. To this end, a number of microfinance-type projects and cash subsidies were initiated to encourage peasants to purchase home electronics and automobiles (China tackles economic crisis with fiscal stimulus, consumption plans 2009). Housing assumed particular importance as part of a larger national

35 economic strategy (China expands rural housing program to boost demand amid financial meltdown 2009).

But there are also “experts” with competing views of the rural as an autonomous social sphere with distinct cultural and economic imperatives. This framing was pioneered in the late 1990s by agricultural economist and rural activist Wen Tiejun, who formulated the condition of the Chinese peasants in terms of the “three rural questions” (sannong wenti)—peasants, rural society, and agriculture—to encourage a discursive shift away from viewing “rural crisis” in purely economic terms towards a more holistic understanding of rural issues (Day, 2008). Wen’s primary concern is how peasants can organize to withstand market fluctuations. He has been joined by other rural activists in China under the name New Rural Reconstruction, a loose movement of scholars and local leaders experimenting with and writing about new forms of rural collectives. Drawing their title and inspiration from an earlier movement in 1930s China, these activists consider that the central problematic of the “rural crisis” as not simply economic, but also as a question of reconstructing rural social life and strengthening the commons (Day, 2008). Many of these activists, like Wen Tiejun, are not officially part of the state apparatus, but have had a powerful effect on the construction of national policy.

Reflecting Wen’s influence, “Building a New Socialist Countryside” was initially framed as a means of addressing the “three rural questions” (Ahlers & Schubert, 2009). Importantly, urban areas were expected to play a key role in the new rural development approach under the slogan, “cities support the countryside, and industry supports agriculture” (“Your guide to ‘new socialist countryside,’” 2006). This was meant to signal a break from Mao era policies, when agricultural surpluses were extracted from rural areas to subsidize rapid industrial development in China’s cities (Bray 2013). Within the national framework, local governments were free to interpret and implement the policy as deemed appropriate for local conditions (Ahlers & Schubert, 2009). But in many places, the broad socio-economic goals of the New Countryside have been whittled down to projects intended to urbanize and modernize the rural built environment (Ahlers & Schubert, 2009; Bray, 2013; H. He, 2013; May, 2011).

Even prior to the institution of the New Socialist Countryside campaign, Chinese policymakers had already ascribed to the philosophy that cities should act as engines of economic growth. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the central government undertook sweeping reforms of the

subnational administrative system that restructured the spatial economy of China into city- centered regions with greatly expanded areas (Laurence J.C. Ma, 2005). Part of the reforms involved expanding the territorial power of cities by putting surrounding counties under the administrative control of large cities (shi guan xian). In line with territorial expansion of large cities across China, in 2002 Chengdu grew to include a vast metropolitan region encompassing nine urban districts, four county-level cities, and six counties covering an area of about 12, 400 km2 (the central built-up urban core covers only about three per cent of that area, or 382.5 km2) (Sichuan Statistical Yearbook, 2013). Chengdu’s planners, facing this newly expanded jurisdiction, began grappling with the problem of metropolitan planning and rural development. Planners describe three phases of urban planning in Chengdu between 2003-2011: “urban and rural planning (chengxiang guihua), Metropolitan Chengdu (quanyu Chengdu), and the World Modern Garden City (Shijie Xiandai Tianyuan Chengshi) (Gong, 2011). The following section traces the rationales behind these plans, which laid the foundation for reconstruction after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake.

2.4 Chengdu’s new era of regional planning

2.4.1

2.4.1 Phase I: Urban-rural integration (2003-2007)

The primary principle guiding urban policy and planning in Chengdu after 2003 was urban-rural integration (chengxiang yitihua). This approach was not unique to Chengdu: in 2003 the central government issued a nation-wide directive to coordinate the planning of urban and rural development (Abramson & Qi, 2011; Legates & Ye, 2013). In their current incarnation, one aim of urban-rural integration (URI) policies is to mitigate the negative impacts of ad hoc rural urbanization through “scientific” planning and development (kexue fazhan), a trend that will be discussed further in Chapter 3. In Chengdu, the municipal government linked the city’s ongoing URI policy to the New Socialist Countryside policy, claiming URI as the “Chengdu approach” to New Countryside construction (xin nongcun jianshe de “Chengdu fangshi”) (B. Chen, 2006). Chengdu’s URI policy thus had the twin goals of promoting planned urbanization and improving rural living standards, with these goals assumed to be synonymous. Consequently, the urban- rural integration approach is mind-bogglingly comprehensive: it involves not only land use

37 planning and infrastructure construction, but also the extension of social services to the countryside and the establishment of grassroots governance organizations.

The theoretical underpinnings for this effort to develop the countryside by “integrating” urban and rural areas stem from a development model first proposed by economist Arthur Lewis in 1954. Lewis’ simplified dual-sector model includes an urban/industrial sector and a rural/agricultural sector. Higher productivity and wages in the urban/industrial sector attract agricultural laborers, and initial inequalities fall as the dual economy becomes a single-sector industrial economy. Kuznets’ famous U-curve, illustrating how income inequality first rises and then falls as a country develops, was implicitly based on this dual-sector model. Though the Kuznets curve has been criticized for it shaky empirical foundations (Anand & Kanbur, 1993) and lack of attention to country-specific institutions (Piketty, 2006), it has demonstrated an astonishing persistence in development theory. China’s economists and policymakers thus claim that the ultimate aim of urban-rural integration is to “break the urban and rural dual structure” (dapo chengxiang er yuan jiegou) (Shih, 2013).19

China’s experiments with URI have been very much applauded by the international development community. In March 2014, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, Managing Director and COO with the World Bank, delivered a speech at the China Development Forum in Beijing entitled “Urbanization and Urban-Rural Integrated Development”. In it, she endorses China’s “integrated” development approach by using Kuznets and Lewis to link development explicitly to urbanization:

History suggests that countries that rapidly urbanize see their rural-urban income gap rise at first, and decline only after a considerable part of the population has shifted to urban centers.

This phenomenon was already observed in the 1950s, empirically by Simon Kuznets, and underpinned by Nobel Prize winner Arthur Lewis’ theory of economic development.

….

19 In China the “dual structure” terminology also refers to the different administrative measures governing urban and rural areas. This duality is further discussed in Chapter 4.

So how can governments manage more inclusive development in the course of urbanization?

Our research shows that economic development will not come to every place at once, but no place needs to remain mired in poverty. The challenge for governments is to further rapid economic growth in urban areas, and yet ensure inclusive development. How can this be done?

First, by ensuring concentration of economic activities in cities. Providing cities the tools and resources that allow for this to happen is crucial, including good city planning, and sound land policies while using fiscal and financial tools for cities to expand (Indrawati, 2014).

Through this curious chain of logic, the best means of extending the promise of development to rural residents is through intensifying urban development and giving more power to urban governments. It is this logic that underpinned Chengdu’s URI project.

More broadly, URI presented the entire metropolitan area of Chengdu as what Foucault terms “a field of intervention” (Foucault, 2000, p. 219) or a problem-space, where the problem to be solved—the gap between urban and rural incomes—called forth a multitude of interventions. Notably, the social welfare goals of the New Socialist Countryside were inextricably bound up with the rearrangement of rural land. Central to Chengdu’s urban-rural integration (URI) policy were the “three concentrations” (san ge jizhong): concentration of industry into designated industrial zones; concentration of rural residents into planned settlements; and concentration of scattered agricultural plots into large parcels of land (G. Zhao & Zhu, 2009). This concentration represented a significant shift for rural society and space in the Chengdu Basin, where peasants did not live in villages as they are understood in other parts of China. Instead, the majority of Chengdu’s peasants lived in linpans, clusters of (usually) two to five houses set among groves of trees or bamboo and surrounded by small plots of intensively farmed agricultural land (Figure 5) (Ye et al., 2013, p. 132).20 Recognizing the multivalent impact of these concentrations, the Chengdu government paired the “three concentrations” with the “four basic projects” (si da jichu gongcheng): comprehensive land-use controls; reforms to rural property rights; improvements in

20 In 2010, the Chengdu Institute of Planning and Design reported that 80 percent (4.44 million people) of Chengdu’s peasants were living in 140,000 linpans. About 7 percent were living in linpans with populations of 10 or more households, while the remaining 93 percent of linpan residents were living in clusters of five households or less (Ye, LeGates, & Qin, 2013, p. 132).

39 public services; and social management21 (Legates & Ye, 2013). Chengdu’s approach was recognized nationally when, in June 2007, Chengdu (along with nearby Chongqing) was designated a “national level pilot zone for overall urban and rural overall planning reform” (quanguo tongchou chengxiang zonghe peitao geige shiyanqu).

Figure 4: A linpan settlement in rural Chengdu (photo by author)

2.4.2 Phase II: Metropolitan Chengdu (2007-2009)

Legates and Ye (2013, p. 125) suggest that with the institution of URI, Chengdu planners began to self-consciously distinguish planning in Chengdu from other cities in China. In fact, URI has become a prominent hallmark of planning in several Chinese metropolitan regions (Bray, 2013). What distinguished Chengdu was the city’s 2007 designation as a “national level pilot zone for overall urban and rural planning.” Similar to the Special Economic Zones established on the east coast during the 1980s, Chengdu and Chongqing were conceived of as areas for policy experimentation. This new round of experimentation was focused on integrating rural metropolitan regions into centralized city planning. While Chengdu received no direct financial

21 “Social management” is discussed further in Chapter 6.

40 support from the central government, as a “pilot zone” the city government was given leeway to experiment with ways of managing land in the extended metropolitan area, including limited privatization of rural property rights (See Chapter 4). By the end of 2007, on the strength of its newly acquired “experimental” powers, Chengdu had signed over RMB 200 billion in financing agreements with China’s major banks (L. Xiao, 2007).

In July 2007, one month after the city’s designation as a pilot zone, the Chengdu Party Committee and government announced a new regional planning strategy: “Metropolitan Chengdu” (Quanyu Chengdu).22 Such regional strategic plans are relatively new policy tools in China. They have no formal status, but are a popular planning approach adopted by China’s mega-city regions to overcome political fragmentation in their increasingly large jurisdictions and to promote space-specific assets (A. G. O. Yeh, Xu, & Liu, 2011, p. 25). Previously, plans for land use, rural development, and economic development across Chengdu’s nine urban districts, four county-level cities, and six counties often had contradictory goals (Legates and Ye 2013). The Metropolitan Chengdu plan was thus conceived of as a continuation of URI, with an emphasis on coordinating spatial planning throughout the metropolitan area.

Conceptually the Metropolitan Chengdu plan divided the city into distinct zones: one district, two belts, and six corridors (yi qu liang dai liu zoulang). The one district referred to the downtown core as the technological, financial, commercial and cultural heart of Chengdu. The two belts were the mountainous areas of Longmen and Longquan, which were designated as environmentally protected areas for ecotourism development. Finally, six corridors were identified as transportation routes with adjacent land zoned as development districts (Figure 6). The Metropolitan Chengdu Plan also drew on planning precedents in Beijing to divide Chengdu into three functional zones: an “urban core” with technological, cultural, and financial functions; an “urban development zone” that includes industrial, agricultural, and new city construction functions; and an “ecological optimization zone” for conservation and tourism (G. Chen, 2007).

22 “Quan” translates as “entire” and “yu” as “region” or “zone”. Ma (2011) translates “quanyu Chengdu” as “panoramic Chengdu”, while Legates and Ye (2013) translate it as “global-city planning”. This latter translation calls to mind Saskia Sassen’s (1991) conceptualization of “global cities” as international nodes of financial power. This is not the “global” that Chengdu planners are referencing in this particular planning approach. Rather, the term quanyu suggests a regional rather than an international system. In keeping with the spirit of how the word is being used in this context, I have translated it here as “metropolitan” to refer to the extended city-region.

Figure 5: The Metropolitan Chengdu Plan [Figure 6 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It depicts the regional plan produced by the Chengdu Institute of Planning and Design. Original website: http://www.cdipd.org.cn/pro_chd.aspx?p_id=19&id=150, archived at: http://www.webcitation.org/6tYQuxAHZ]

Under the rational ecology of Metropolitan Chengdu, the urban core is the center of technology, culture, and bureaucratic management, while the near periphery provides raw materials for growth and the far periphery fulfills environmental functions. Perhaps most importantly, the plan brought all of the land in the Basin under centralized management, and allowed planners and policymakers to view urban and rural land as a “chessboard” upon which to arrange and rearrange land uses (Cheng, 2010).

2.4.3 Phase III: The World Modern Garden City (2009-2011)

When the earthquake struck on 12 May 2008, the principles of URI and the Metropolitan Chengdu strategic plan provided a ready-made set of principles for guiding reconstruction. Chief Planner of the Chengdu Planning Bureau, Zhao Gang, claimed that, “From the beginning, Chengdu’s post-quake reconstruction has not been a simple restoration project, but an upgrading project, and a continuation of the work of deepening overall urban and rural planning” (Gong, 2011). But by the end of 2008 the Chengdu government was already incorporating post-quake reconstruction projects into a new regional strategic plan that was both more ambitious and more globally oriented than the Metropolitan Chengdu scheme: the World Modern Garden City Plan (Shijie Xiandai Tianyuan Chengshi). For Chengdu’s planners and policymakers, “World Modern Garden City” means becoming “an internationalized global city; a central modernized mega-city in Western China; and a garden city with harmonious interactions between humans and nature as well as integration between urban and rural areas” (Q. Zhang & Guo, 2011).

Rather than leaving the authorship of the plan to the city’s own Planning Bureau, the city government invited a number of high-profile consultants from prestigious national planning institutes to offer their input (and authority). The new plan was again presented as an extension and refinement of the city’s core URI policy (Q. Zhang & Guo, 2011). Spatially, the Garden City plan maintains the concept of “one district, two belts and, six corridors” in the Metropolitan

Chengdu plan (Q. Zhang & Guo, 2011). It supplements this broad brush zoning further with nine general guidelines, including: clustering development (buju zutuanhua), upgrading industry (chanye gaoduanhua), promoting high density development and intensive land use (jianshe jiyuehua), building multi-functional settlements (gongneng fuhehua), building people-friendly spaces (kongjian renxinghua), pastoralizing the environment (huanjing tianyuanhua), diversifying (cultural, architectural, etc.) styles (fengmao duoyanghua), strengthening transportation networks (jiaotong wangluohua), and standardizing public services (peitao biaozhunhua) (“Kan! Shijie Xiandai Tianyuan Chengshi de meili lantu,” 2010).

These refinements aside, the primary shift under the Garden City plan is not in its substance but in its orientation towards global capital and inter-urban competition. This is made clear in an interview with economist Ni Pengfei shortly after the announcement of the Garden City plan (T. Zhang, 2009). Ni is the Director of the Centre for City Competitiveness with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and author of the highly influential China Urban Competitiveness Report. He acted as a consultant on Chengdu’s Garden City plan, and has advised several other second- and third-tier Chinese cities on their development strategies, including Xi’an, Dongguan, and Taiyuan (“Ni Pengfei’s Home,” n.d.). In discussing the plan Ni lays out short-, medium-, and long-term goals for developing Chengdu into a “World Modern Garden City”. Within 5-8 years, the city will attain the “three new mosts” (xin san zui): most beautiful living environment, most excellent business environment, and most overall competitiveness. Within 20 years, Chengdu will become a third-tier global city, and within 30-50 years Chengdu will become a second-tier global city (T. Zhang, 2009).

The “world” of “World Modern Garden City” thus signals Chengdu’s ambitions to move towards global city status. In the words of Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong (2011), it represents a “worlding” practice, or an experiment in pursuing world recognition in the midst of international inter-city rivalry. “Modern” indicates the priority on developing high tech and financial services in the city center. In fact, the city has been quite successful in regard to these two aims, benefitting from intense competition and rising labor costs in China’s eastern cities. By the latest count, 262 Fortune 500 companies had set up offices in Chengdu (Y. Li, Peng, & Peng, 2015), and in 2013 the city hosted the Fortune Global Forum with great fanfare (Wei, 2013). The term “garden” requires a bit more attention. One of the ways that Chengdu is competing with cities like Beijing and Shanghai is in terms of livability. “Garden” hints at environmental amenities

43 that are becoming increasingly important to Chinese citizens as the country’s large cities experience record-breaking levels of air pollution. But “Garden City” also refers very explicitly to the utopian planning ideals that originated with British planner Ebenezer Howard in the early 1900s.

In his influential treatise, Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (subsequently republished as Garden Cities of Tomorrow), Howard laid out a vision of small planned settlements scattered around a large metropolitan center (Howard, Hall, Hardy, & Ward, 2003). Connected by transportation networks and surrounded by collectively owned agricultural land, these new cities were intended to be completely self-sufficient. The language (if not always the substance) of Howard’s Garden City has proven popular among planning departments in many Asian cities. The most widely emulated model may be Singapore, where the Garden City has been implemented as a cosmetic greening of city space in the form of parks, trees, and flowerbeds (Hoffman, 2011). Importantly though, Singapore’s planners adopted the term “Huayuan Chengshi” to refer to their Garden City, where huayuan refers to a flower garden. Chengdu’s planners translate Garden City as “Tianyuan Chengshi”, where tianyuan evokes a field or an agriculturally productive plot. This translation, as well as the invocation of a direct lineage with Howard’s Garden City model in policy and media reports23, suggests that Chengdu’s planners are not using the term “Garden” merely as shorthand for urban greenery. Rather, the term points to how the city is resolving a key problem: how to meet the rural development goals established by the central government, while also pursuing inter-city competition at the national and global levels? Through the alchemy of the Garden City plan, Chengdu’s rural hinterlands are turned into competitive assets. Li Xiaojiang, head of the Chinese Academy of Urban Planning and Design and consultant on Chengdu’s plan, claimed that Chengdu’s “mountains, water, fields, and forest” (shan, shui, tian, lin) were the foundation of Chengdu’s Garden City concept. But Li’s particular contribution, according to an interview with Chengdu’s vice-mayor, was the idea that “fields” have many uses: “from the point of view of a modern city they represent the

23 The city government website, for example, provides a background report on the history of Howard’s Garden City idea (“Shijie Xiandai Tianyuan Chengshi beijingcailiao,” 2015). In November 2013 a group of Chengdu planners traveled to London to meet with the Town and Country Planning Association, the successor to the Garden City Association founded by Howard in 1899. They also visited Letchworth, one of Howard’s prototypical Garden Cities (Kolson Hurley, 2014).

44 environment; from the point of view of agricultural development they are the basic foundation” (T. Zhang, 2009). We can hear in this an uncanny (and unintentional) echo of Lefebvre’s (2003, p. 11) claim in The Urban Revolution that “the countryside has become nothing more than the town’s environment.”

2.5 Metropolitan planning and the tyranny of abstract space

Chengdu has long been shaped by its geographical position in Western China and its connections to its rural hinterlands. And just as Western Development experts have constructed the global South as an area in need of saving (Lawson, 2007; Power, 2003), in contemporary China the proper geographical arenas of Development are understood as being the spaces of rural and Western China. Since 2003, the city’s connections to the agrarian communities of the Chengdu Plain have been visualized—and hierarchized—through metropolitan planning. Chengdu’s metropolitan plans can be understood as political technologies that have helped produce a new territory: “Metropolitan Chengdu”. This extension of control over the countryside has been justified by citing the social welfare goals of the New Countryside. But the political economic logics driving urban expansion in contemporary China mean that rural developmental goals become entangled in the competitive logics of a globally- oriented strategic plan. Thus while planning in Chengdu since 2003 has been driven by a concern for addressing rural and urban inequalities at the regional level, it has equally been motived by desires to incorporate rural areas into a unified metropolitan plan and develop a competitive city “brand”. In these plans, rural areas become rendered as “fields” that act as either zones for agricultural production or providers of environmental amenities.

Lefebvre’s work on urban space is helpful here in understanding the power of Chengdu’s plans. Lefebvre saw urbanization as a means of turning space into a concrete abstraction, an historical process of commodification with parallels in the creation of abstract labour (Stanek, 2008) . The emergence of abstract space meant not only the mobilization of space in cycles of capitalist production, but the transformation of space itself into a commodity. Key in this process is a system of representation that depicts different “pieces of space” as both distinct and interchangeable. This form of abstract representation not only serves to commodify land, but also comes to dominate how land can be represented and talked about. Prigge (2008, p. 52) observes that abstract space sets itself up as the space of power, “buttressed by non-critical (positive)

45 knowledge, backed up by a frightening capacity for violence, and maintained by a bureaucracy which has laid hold of the gains of capitalism in the ascendant and turned them to its own profit”. In this light, the Metropolitan Chengdu Plan and the World Modern Garden City Plan seem to lay the groundwork for the rural property markets that the city government began to establish in 2008 (discussed in Chapter 4). But planners’ efforts to bring rural spaces into the regional development plan were not entirely straightforward, and, as the following chapter explains, planning rural areas entailed awkward entanglements at the local level.

Chapter 3

3 “Making the countryside more like the countryside”: the rise of rural planning in post-quake Chengdu

[In 2004] I had only studied urban planning, I didn’t know what a “rural plan” was.

-- Chengdu planner Zhang Qiao (Quoted in Gong, 2011, p. 24).

The new style rural urbanization (xinxing chengzhenhua) is not meant to eradicate the countryside; rather, it is meant to make the city more like the city and the countryside more like the countryside.

-- Member of the Chengdu Municipal Committee (Quoted in G. Liu, 2014)

The new countryside is planned.

-- Grandpa Luo, resident, Longmenshan Township (Interview, 18 March 2010)

3.1 Overview

In September 2008, four months after the devastating Wenchuan Earthquake struck Western China, the city of Chengdu convened a “Planning Battle Conference” (Guihua Dahui Zhan). According to local newspaper accounts, the conference attracted more than 2000 planners from 147 planning and design firms (Xie, 2010). Over the twelve days of the conference they created plans for 361 new villages throughout the Chengdu metropolitan area. The language of a planning “battle” is itself revealing in that it suggests a war against the countryside in the high modernist style decried by James C. Scott (1998). Read in the light of critical development studies, this appears to be a case of state-led expertise being unleashed to reshape rural spaces. But in some ways the approach that planners and officials adopted appears more nuanced than such critiques might suggest. There was widespread recognition that residents themselves should have a say in reconstruction, for instance, and that “traditional rural culture” should be preserved. One of the stated intents of the planning battle was to prevent planners from “cloning” city neighborhoods when rebuilding rural areas. This concern for designing distinctive rural communities was reiterated at the highest levels by

Chengdu’s Party Secretary Li Chuncheng, who expressed the somewhat patronizing concern that, “If everything looks the same, villagers won’t be able to find their own door when they come home at night” (Deng, 2012).

The concentrated rural planning that occurred during the Planning Battle described above, while carried out at an unusually large scale, is by no means unique to post-quake Chengdu. As described in previous chapters, since 2006, rural residents and spaces across China have been subject to the “Building a New Socialist Countryside” program, a broad “macro-policy” (Ahlers & Schubert, 2009) aimed at addressing the income gap between rural and urban residents. In Chengdu, the municipal government explicitly claimed urban-rural integration (URI) as the “Chengdu approach to New Countryside construction” (xinnongcun jianshe de Chengdu fangshi) (Chen 2006). Daniel Abramson and Yu Qi (2011) have described Chengdu’s urban-rural integration policy as a project of “urbanization planning”. At the same time, urbanization may be a bit of a misnomer: China’s current rural urbanization policies focus largely on moving rural residents into planned or existing towns and small cities, meaning that this is not urbanization in the traditional sense of expanding built-up urban centers. Moreover, the intent of contemporary rural urbanization is not necessarily to reproduce the city in the countryside, but to create an integrated urban and rural system in which city and countryside play distinct roles. As one Chengdu official was quoted as saying, “The new style rural urbanization (xinxing chengzhenhua) is not meant to eradicate the countryside; rather, it is meant to make the city more like the city and the countryside more like the countryside” (G. Liu, 2014).

This chapter explores the characteristics and contradictions of rural planning in China’s peri-urban areas after the Wenchuan earthquake. I argue that these projects to “make the countryside more like the countryside” are crucial to territorial politics in China’s globally ambitious city-regions. I first examine the rise of rural urbanization as a guiding principle for rural development in contemporary China. This has given rise to a new discipline of rural planning (xiangcun guihua), as well as a concomitant set of principles and goals. I then turn to the case of Chengdu to describe how a system of rural planners was implemented after the adoption of the World Modern Garden City Plan. Finally, I look at a case study site in the northern reaches Chengdu as part of a critique of the pastoral aesthetic embraced by the new rural planners. The case study highlights how planning is intimately tied to the political economy of rural land in the metropolitan region. First, rural planning is seen as a way of making rural assets legible to both residents and investors. Second, the

48 primary tools of rural planning—the concentration and classification of land—pave the way for large-scale state and private investment.

3.2 Rural urbanization and the rise of rural planning

There are a number of Chinese terms that are generally translated as “urbanization” in English, though in Chinese each conveys different meanings. For instance, chengshihua means, literally, “becoming urban”. Very broadly the term refers to processes associated with urbanization— including agglomeration, the growth of non-agricultural employment, and increasing imbrication in modern infrastructure networks—occurring in areas that are categorized as “rural.” This “rural” categorization carries particular weight in China because of the dualistic policies governing town and country. Perhaps the most well known example of this is the household registration (hukou) system that assigns every citizen an agricultural or non-agricultural status. Historically only non- agricultural/urban hukou holders were entitled to state-provided social security benefits, though since the early 2000s efforts have been made to enroll rural residents in pension and healthcare insurance schemes. A second key policy difference is the dual-track land administration system. Under Chinese law, urban land belongs to the state, while rural land belongs to rural collective economic organizations. This appears to give the rural collectives control over land management, but there are limits on what these groups can do with the land. First, while state-owned urban land has been more or less fully marketized through the conceit of long-term leases for use rights, the central government has been reluctant to allow rural land to be brought fully into the market. Access to collectively owned rural land is considered a “safety net” for rural residents- a rough form of social security. Moreover, there are strict limits on the uses and conversion of arable land in China. This duality leads some scholars to suggest we approach China’s urbanization through two separate analytical categories: one describing the expansion of urban cores, and the other focusing on urban change in rural areas (D. Zhou, 1997).

The dynamics of rural urbanization have changed significantly since economic reform in the late 1970s. What was initially an ad hoc process driven largely by rural industrialization has become a planned, state-led developmental project. In the early 1980s and 1990s, rural urbanization was

49 driven by the success of township-village enterprises (TVEs).24 This form of industrialization fostered the emergence of a rural-urban continuum similar to the desakota development in Southeast Asian cities described by McGee (1989) (Guldin, 1996). Characterized by high population densities, well-developed transportation infrastructure, and a mix of industrial and smallholder farming areas, these ostensibly rural areas challenged conceptions of an urban-rural dichotomy. Chinese scholars at the time labeled the new spatial formation “urban-rural integration” (chengxiang yitihua) (Abramson & Qi, 2011). Other terms include “urbanization from below”, indicating that the central government played a secondary role in this locally-driven growth (Lawrence J. C. Ma & Fan, 1994), and “in situ urbanization”, highlighting how rural industrialization allowed some farmers to “leave the fields without leaving their land” (Zhu, 2000). But by the mid-1990s rural industry was stagnating due in part to increased competition from urban enterprises (Kung & Lin, 2007) and restrictions on bank credit to TVEs (Guo, 2001), and the promise of urbanization “in place” appeared to recede.

A form of administrative rural urbanization took hold in the 1990s as the government undertook sweeping reforms of China’s territorial system. By contrast with the TVE-led industrialization of the 1980s, this form of rural urbanization was largely state-led. The new territorial reforms included the “abolishing counties and establishing cities” (chexian gaishi) system, which promoted rural counties to city status. Another influential reform was the “cities leading counties” (shidaixian) system that incorporated peri-urban counties into existing cities (Li Zhang, 2008). This means that many cities in China came to include large tracts of rural land and residents. Such administrative reshuffling was not merely a matter of nomenclature: it also resulted in changes to funding, policy priorities, and economic development opportunities for local governments. For instance, Guo (2001) found that under the “abolishing counties and establishing cities” system, newly minted city governments in Yunnan Province were pursuing city-building projects at the expense of poverty alleviation policies or investment in agricultural infrastructure. Local governments were encouraged to undertake urbanization projects as a series of national policies urged the development of small cities and towns.

24 Until the mid-1990s, the TVE sector contributed significantly to the national economy, accounting for a quarter of China’s GNP in 1990 (A. G. O. Yeh, Xu, & Liu, 2011).

More recently, the term chengzhenhua has been used to describe national urbanization policies. Chengzhenhua means, literally, city- and town- ization, and points to the central government’s desire to avoid the creation of slum-ridden mega-cities by focusing urban growth in small cities and towns. In 2001 the central government formalized urbanization (chengzhenhua) as a key national development policy in the 10th Five-Year Plan (2001-2005) and again in the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-2010) (A. G. O. Yeh et al., 2011). In 2013, the central government issued a national urbanization plan for the first time: the “National New-Type Urbanization Plan (2014-2020)” (described in Chapter 1). The new national plan also uses the term chengzhenhua in the title, underlining the government’s goals of trying to direct urban growth away from large cities. Mi Shih (2013) uses the Chinese term chengzhenhua (city- and town-ization) rather than urbanization to describe contemporary processes of rural urbanization in China. She points out that “urbanization” evokes the image of built-up urban cores, and forecloses the possibility of imagining the rural as a potentially urban site (Ibid.) I agree with her proposition that we imagine the rural as a site of urban processes, but suggest that the term chengzhenhua may conceal important ways in which spatial change in the countryside is linked to political and economic imperatives originating in urban centers, particularly through urban-rural integration policies.

Time period Names Characteristics

1980s - early 1990s Urban-rural integration, Rural industrialization of peri-urban urbanization from below, in areas driven by growth of TVEs, mix of situ urbanization, desakota industrial and agricultural uses

1990s Administrative urbanization Growth in number and size of cities driven by administrative reforms, including “promoting” counties to city status and redrawing administrative borders

Early 2000s onward City- and town-ization Central government policy to promote (chengzhenhua) growth of small cities and towns rather than large cities

Figure 6: Shifts in China's post-reform urbanization policy

As described in the previous chapter, many of China’s newly expanded city-regions adopted policies of “urban-rural integration” (URI) as a means of administering newly expanded territories. By contrast with the 1980s, when Chinese academics used urban-rural integration as a descriptor for industrially- driven rural urbanization, the term is now used to refer to “…a normative policy objective to seek a new balance of urban and agricultural land uses, and to mitigate the negative environmental and social impacts of urbanization through more comprehensive planning” (Abramson & Qi, 2011, p. 496) . Many URI plans are characterized by the creation of concentrated rural communities, an approach pioneered in the mid-1990s in Jiangsu Province and Shanghai municipality (Bray, 2013). The demolition of previously scattered rural houses opens up new arable land and allows individually managed plots to be consolidated into larger parcels of land. This in turn facilitates the development of large-scale mechanized agriculture. Moreover, residential concentration also makes it less costly for local governments to provide infrastructure like running water, electricity, internet services, and paved roads (G. Zhao & Zhu, 2009). Building concentrated settlements helps local governments meet both agricultural modernization and rural welfare goals, making the logic of concentration almost irresistible. This focus on building concentrated settlements has in turn spurred a new demand for spatial planners in rural China.

The need for rural planners was reinforced when, in 2008, the central government replaced the National Urban Planning Law with a unified National Urban and Rural Planning Law. For the first time, rural jurisdictions at the township and village levels were required to consult with professional planning units to produce overall land use and development plans. This is new terrain, both literally and figuratively, for rural residents, officials, and planning professionals. Planners are not necessarily well equipped to deal with the broader developmental goals of the New Socialist Countryside. Until 2011, planning was considered a second-level discipline (erji xueke) under architecture. This means that training for China’s urban planners has developed under the influence of architecture programs, and tends to foster a technicist approach to planning (Huang, 2012; Leaf & Hou, 2006).25 In 2011 the Academic Degree Committee of the State Council deemed

25 The profession has come under fire within China for both its profit orientation as well as its role vis-à-vis local city governments. In 2004, for instance, journalist Wang Jun published a widely circulated commentary arguing that planning was being used as a tool by local governments to illegally enclose farmland and increase land-based revenue through expansive master plans (Huang 2012). In 2011 a series of commentaries was published in the Southern Metropolis Weekly (NanfangDushiBao) citing the marketization of the profession as the key reason for planners’ lack of concern about the public interest (Ibid.)

52 urban-rural planning (xiangcun guihua) to be a first-level discipline (yiji xueke). The higher status of planning, combined with its new role in rural areas, has sparked a debate among planning professionals about whether the knowledge base of planning should expand beyond its primarily physical approach (Huang, 2012). Yet until recently, training for China’s urban and rural planners has remained largely focused on technical issues of design and zoning.

This technical, modernist orientation was evident in the initial efforts at New Countryside construction. In the rural concentration process, several natural villages (ziran cun) or villager small groups (cunmin xiaozu) are combined to form larger concentrated settlements, and remote villages are often abandoned in favor of settlements closer to larger urban centers (Ahlers & Schubert, 2009; Bray, 2013). The new village plans vary in their conception and implementation, with a range of public, private, and non-profit involvement. But the plans generally share important commonalities, including: residential concentration; infrastructure provision (including paved roads, electricity, running water, cooking gas, sewerage, and digital broadband cable); formal classification and separation of land uses; regulation or removal of “disorderly” spaces (including household gardens, sheds, and livestock pens); and construction of new public spaces and public buildings (including parks, clinics, community centers, and government offices) (Bray, 2013; H. He, 2013; May, 2011). This radical reorganization of village space has had a significant impact on rural lives and livelihoods. In a Jiangsu case study, David Bray (2013) observes that family compounds clustered around household courtyards (yuanzi) were replaced with suburban-style detached single-family homes without yards. The loss of the yuanzi not only hindered residents’ ability to plant household gardens and raise animals, it also meant that a fluid, semi-communal social space made way for the rigid public-private binary of planned space.

Such plans for the New Countryside came under criticism within China for attempting to recreate urban spaces in the countryside, making villages resemble “concrete forests” of homogenous housing blocks lined up like “barracks” (G. Liu, 2014). Particularly in the wake of the quake, many observers called for more culturally and environmentally sensitive approaches to rebuilding rural settlements—a sort of “New Countryside 2.0” (G. Liu, 2014). The Beijing-based Green Cross Society, one of the few NGOs to participate in the physical reconstruction process, also advocated similar principles of “building the countryside so that it looks even more like the countryside” (ba nongcun jianshe geng xiang nongcun) (. By 2008, the year of the quake, the emerging consensus among newly minted “rural planners” was that rural plans should not clone urban designs, but

53 preserve some distinctive rural form. The following excerpt from a handbook on rural planning, published in 2008, epitomizes some of the thinking on the new discipline:

If you go to the countryside, you will quickly discover that the layout of villages is varied and disorganized. Often you find some houses that are teetering and some houses that have been “renovated” beyond recognition; some houses that have left behind their traditional scattered layout and have been concentrated in a single location with the same design, the same construction… (Yang, 2008, p. 13).

The author is criticizing the older houses that are on the point of collapse; the ad hoc construction and renovation that villagers themselves have undertaken outside of the village plan; and the homogenous new planned settlements. Yet although the style of contemporary planning comes under fire, the need for rural planning is not questioned: planning is required to address the “varied and disorganized” layout of unplanned rural villages. The main problem with current rural planning is that some planners’ conceptions of rural planning are “shallow”:

For instance, some places use the village building plan as the comprehensive village plan, only paying attention to the physical appearance and ignoring the development of production. Some villages use urban residential designs rather than rural community planning, ignoring the rural courtyard economy and folk customs.26

Rural planning is a comprehensive form of socio-economic planning. Its basis is collectively owned rural land and household responsibility land, as well as peasant households, rural lifestyles, and the natural resources involved in family (household-based) production. Transferring the methods and procedures of urban planning—and using the blueprints of urban communities for rural planning—is clearly unreasonable (Ibid).

According to the author, rural planning is more comprehensive than urban planning, and must include a holistic consideration of rural household production. This is all well and good. But the form of production described above—traditional household-based production—appears to be rooted in a timeless vision of China’s countryside that has little to do with economic conditions in actually existing rural areas, many of which have been transformed by rural industrialization and widespread outmigration. The author appears to ascribe to a rather nationalistic romanticism:

The countryside provides us with a living space that is intimately tied to nature and ecology. In this kind of environment, no matter whether we’re talking about daily life or production,

26 The “courtyard economy” (tingyuan jingji) refers to the yards around rural houses where residents plant vegetables, raise livestock, dry and process grains and vegetables, and make handicrafts.

peasants feel a harmonious coexistence with nature. It’s hard to imagine what the human spirit would be like if our countryside and our cities became the same!

The countryside is a type of culture, at the same time it is also a type of feeling; it is the physical manifestation of our nation’s traditional culture… How to help this valuable asset retain long-term viability is the responsibility placed on the shoulders of planners and designers; it is a task of great urgency and long-term significance (Yang, 2008, pp. 13–14).

This idealization of a traditionally harmonious relationship between peasants and nature does not bode well for rural futures. Moreover, this kind of rhetoric begs the question, for whom are the new settlements being built? The romanticized countryside is deemed to be a repository of traditional values and a spiritual asset for the nation. But hiding behind this language of preserving traditional natural and cultural resources is a radically transformative project to rationalize the “scattered” and “disorganized” layout of villages and render them part of “the environment”—a project that has the potential to wrest control over rural land away from peasants themselves.

3.3 Sending planners down to the countryside

Prior to the mid-2000s, Chengdu’s urban planners had little or no experience working in rural areas. Chengdu planner Zhang Qiao commented that, “[In 2004] I had only studied urban planning, I didn’t know what a “rural plan” was” (Gong, 2011, p. 24). This was not just a problem faced by planners in Chengdu: at that time, there were no clear models for rural planning to study in China. The 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake became a key moment in defining new models of rural urbanization and rural planning in China. First, the quake occurred at the beginning of a dramatic state-led spatial transformation of China’s rural areas. As highlighted in previous chapters, this was driven by the New Socialist Countryside Policy announced in 2006; the ongoing expansion of China’s city-regions combined with central decrees that these metropolitan governments adopt policies of “coordinated urban and rural development” (tongchou chengxiang) in 2002 and “urban- rural integration” (chengxiang yitihua) in 2008 (Sheng, 2011); and the passage of a new Urban and Rural Planning Law in 2008. Second, post-quake reconstruction was backed by a trillion-yuan influx of capital that drew thousands of domestic and international planners to the quake affected areas (Y. Chen & Booth, 2011, p. 20). This influx of human and financial capital turned the earthquake zone into an experimental field for the new rural planning.

To deal with the lack of experience most planning firms had in the countryside, the city of Chengdu published reconstruction guidelines for rural planning that focused on village layout and

55 architectural style. In the introduction to the Guidelines, the authors clearly draw a link to national policy in laying out a “Chengdu approach” to post-quake rural planning. The authors claim to have drawn up the “Chengdu New Socialist Countryside Planning and Construction Technical Guidelines” (Chengdushi Shehuizhuyi Xin Nongcun Guihua Jianshe Jishu Daoze) in order to accelerate the establishment of the New Socialist Countryside across the metropolitan area, according to Hu Jintao’s exhortation to “use integrated urban and rural thinking and methods to promote post-quake reconstruction.” (Chengdu Planning Bureau, 2009). To avoid “cloning” urban areas, the Chengdu guidelines articulated the "four principles" for post-quake rural planning. These principles, articulated at the “Planning Battle” described at the beginning of this chapter, included development (of industry), diversity (of built form), blending (harmony with the landscape), and sharing (rural areas enjoying the same level of public services and infrastructure as cities and towns) (Legates & Ye, 2013). Though the terminology seems cumbersome, the planners I spoke with were able to name and describe these four principles, which they claimed were used as criteria for selecting contractors to undertake post-quake projects.

These principles were reinforced in 2010 when Chengdu implemented a comprehensive rural planning system. A key part of this project was sending planners “down to the countryside” to help plan rural communities (guihuashi xiaxiang). The aim was to achieve planning throughout Chengdu in all of the city’s 196 rural villages and towns by deploying 150 rural planners (Su, 2011). The new rural planners belonged to one of three categories: private-sector planning firms assigned to plan rural areas by the city; individual planners recruited by the Municipal Planning Bureau to work in particular towns; and volunteer planners who receive “subsidies” from the city government (Ibid). Rural planning is not just about bringing rural areas in line with the metropolitan plan, it is also seen as the first step (longtou) in attracting outside investment. This is evident in a blog post written by Yang Bo, a planner hired by the Chengdu Planning Bureau to work in Longmenshan (one of the tourism zones under the Regional Chengdu and Garden City plans). Yang’s Weibo site (a popular Chinese blog service) indicates that he sees his role as not only as educating rural residents about planning, but also laying inroads for the market in Chengdu’s rural hinterlands. He writes, “The Longmenshan Natural Protected area is Chengdu’s richest tourism resource, and its development is a necessity. With such ideal resources, we need to reflect and act upon how to harness market forces to use local natural and cultural resources. This is also the way to explore the broad goals of the World Modern Garden City” (B. Yang, 2010).

The language of being “sent down” deliberately echoes the “down to the countryside movement” (xiaxiang shangshan) during the Cultural Revolution, when educated youth were sent to the countryside to be re-educated by the peasantry. In contrast with Mao’s era, however, the transmission of values during the recent iteration of the “down to the countryside” campaign is largely one-directional. In the words of Chengdu’s head planner, the task of rural planners is “…to help people really understand rural planning… to really tap into township resource endowments, to take the language of the ‘World Modern Garden City’ and translate it from “Mandarin” into the ‘local dialect’” (M. Wang & Yuan, 2010). In a newspaper interview, planner Yang Bo echoed this idea that planners should educate residents and officials, claiming that, "[p]lanning should allow people to understand and even to participate in the entire planning work… only in this way will the local government and people be satisfied with planning." But the question of who should create, approve, and implement the new rural plans becomes complicated at the local level (Di & Zhu, 2014). Article 22 of the 2008 National Urban and Rural Planning Law states that the government of a town or township shall take charge of establishing village planning, and shall file these plans with the people’s government at the next higher level. 27 Before being submitted for approval, the Law stipulates that plans must be approved in a villagers’ meeting or villagers’ representative meeting. Yet often the primary director of the plans is the town Party Secretary: one village committee member in the quake zone told me that, in his view, planners were “basically hired to draw up some of the ideas of the [town-level] Party Secretary.”

The question of authority is further complicated by the fuzzy status of rural property rights after the decollectivization process in the 1980s that replaced communes and brigades with territorially defined townships and administrative villages. Production teams, retitled as “villager small groups” (cunmin xiaozu), became less significant in organizing agricultural production as farming activities were managed by individual households. Yet production teams continue to hold land rights, and many periodically carry out crop field redistribution among members (Unger 2012).

27 The town is the lowest level of official government administration in China. Self-governing village committees (cunmin weiyuanhui) are in charge of day-to-day village administration, and members of these villagers’ committees have been chosen through elections since the late 1990s. These elections, however, are rarely openly competitive, and may be heavily influenced by township officials, or dominated by incumbents and powerful local lineage groups (O’Brien and Han, 2009). Moreover, village committees are often treated by township officials as tools for carrying out higher-level policy goals (Ibid.). In terms of planning, this means that town-level cadres collaborate with planning firms to draw up overall plans for the town, as well as village-level plans.

These villager small groups still exert control over their land that impacts the ability of town- and township-level authorities to implement land use plans. In villages with greater financial and social capital, village leaders may hire planners to draw up their own plans within the framework of town- level direction.28

For planners who have trained and worked in urban environments, the process of negotiating between village groups and town leaders is far from straightforward. In interviews, planners stress that their primary obstacles in rural areas are not technical but political. The news stories that are circulated are ones of compromise at each stage of design, implementation, and inhabitation: blueprints are redrawn, building materials are changed, and manicured gardens are replaced with agricultural plots. For instance, villagers often have a different conception of “public space” than planners, and use planned public areas for household agricultural production. In one area, the roses planted in public areas were uprooted to plant chives (Su, 2011). Planner Xiao Xi described his experience submitting a plan for public buildings using high-quality materials. When the plans were submitted to the village council, they decided to use lower-quality materials because of the cost (Su, 2011). Planners felt they had to educate both village residents and local officials about the necessity for planning. They are hampered in this by their lack of political clout in the countryside: planners are able to make recommendations, but at the village level, the village councils or local officials make the final decisions. In the initial stage of rolling out the system of rural planners, lower level officials didn’t place any importance on the opinions of planners. Xiao described the situation:

In theory, we would have the right to review, recommend, and make decisions. In reality, we must respect the wishes of the town-level leaders, and find space to provide subtle guidance and communication… Now at least we have the right to speak, and there’s been some move from one-way commands to a two-way interactive process. There are still ways that the local government’s approach must improve. They must be clear that planning is not just drawing pictures; it’s the law. But we are a long way from having this concept really take root. (Su, 2011)

28 One village at my primary research site had incorporated after economic reform in the 1980s, and subsequently invested in its own hydroelectric and mining projects. The committee leader in this village-corporation, a high-ranking cadre in Beijing under Mao, had built lavish modern offices for the village and operated more or less independently of the township government. After the quake, the village committee hired separate planning and tourism consultants to create a development plan for the village.

Rural planning in China is a new field. In the wake of the 2008 earthquake, the Chengdu government attempted to delineate the contours and functions of the new discipline by laying out guidelines for rural planning and establishing a system of rural planners throughout the metropolitan region. What emerged was a form of planning that was seen to be distinct from urban planning in both form and process. Planners across the zone came up with ways of increasing density and providing modern infrastructure while preserving elements of an imagined or idealized rural vernacular architecture. At the same time, rural plans were not intended to re-create existing rural forms, but to lay out a new vision of Chengdu’s countryside that coincided with the World Modern Garden City Plan. Moreover, rural planners were expected to take a more participatory approach to planning in rural areas, moving beyond a top-down, technicist approach to spatial planning. To what extent, though, were local residents’ groups able to influence the planning process?

3.4 The case of Luping Village

This section traces how rural planning principles and methods played out in the case of Luping Village in Cifeng Town, the location of the Planning Battle Conference described at the outset of the chapter. Luping deserves particular consideration since it made frequent appearances in local and national newspapers as a model for rural planning after the quake (Y. Deng, 2010; R. Pei & Wang, 2008; Xie, 2010). Cifeng and Luping lie in Pengzhou City, one of four satellite cities that have been under the jurisdiction of Chengdu since 2003. The villages that make up Cifeng Town are scattered across the Longmen Mountains, the former coalmining region mentioned in the blog of “sent down” planner Yang Bo that was designated for ecotourism as one of the “two belts” under the Metropolitan Chengdu and World Modern Garden City Plans. In speaking about the sixth of the nine guidelines for Garden City construction— pastoralization (tianyuanhua)—vice-mayor Liu Pu explains that “[t]he most important part of pastoralization is protecting and establishing the two belts, the core is protecting ecological forests (shengtailin); the second is reflecting “a city in the fields” (chengzai tian zhong), the third is “gardens in the city” (yuan zaichengzhong).” Pastoralization, in the Chengdu context, is about preserving and creating a landscape of fields and forests around the city core. But it also appears to suggest a host of cultural, social, economic, and aesthetic assumptions about the future of Chengdu’s peri-urban areas. The broader bearings of the “pastoralization” rhetoric are evident, for example, in the way that many of the villages in these belt

59 areas have been rebuilt in an exaggerated rural style intended to attract urban tourists, including Luping Village.

The initial plan for Luping was drawn up by the Sichuan Sanzhong Architectural Design Co. Ltd., one of the private sector planning firms designated to plan rural areas, during the summer of 2008. This plan brought residents from several scattered villager small groups together in a collection of bucolic one- or two-story houses (Figure 8). But because the building footprints were too large, this original plan didn’t accord with the intensive land use requirements set the Bureau of Land and Resources. The next plan reduced the total settlement area by two thirds, and consisted of blocks of four- to six- story apartments. This was approved by the Bureau of Land and Resources, but was rejected by residents after the village committee plans publicly posted the plans. In media interviews, planners explain the shortcomings of their initial plans as a result of not understanding rural lifestyles. They quote one resident asking them, “Where will our tools, chicken coop, and pig pen go?” (Y. Deng, 2010). Planners then went door to door to solicit residents’ input. The higher buildings were converted into three-story buildings with courtyards, space for laundry, and areas for drying grains and vegetables. According to newspaper accounts, the third version of the plan, with these modifications, was finally accepted by a majority of villagers.

In my own interviews, though no one appeared to have joined in (or was even aware of) the elaborate participatory planning process described by the media, I heard few complaints about the design of the new houses. One elderly woman, Mrs. Zhu29, invited me into her home to show me around. The house was small: only she and her husband lived there, so based on the standard of 35 m2 per person, they were allotted a 70 m2 apartment. Most of the houses were the same size, and families with more than two people had to live in two different units. Even with only two people, the apartment was crowded with furniture, tools, preserved food, and bags of grain. But overall, Mrs. Zhu expressed satisfaction with the new homes. Interestingly, she claimed that they had “an urban planning feeling” (chengshiguihua de ganjue). For Mrs. Zhu, the new village was the

29 A pseudonym.

Figure 7: Initial plans for Luping Village, Sichuan Sanzhong Architecture Co. [Figure 8 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It depicts a bird’s eye-view of Luping’s initial village plan produced by the Sichuan Sanzhong Company. Original source: http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2008-09-04/033014399258s.shtml, archived at: http://www.webcitation.org/6tZTOPPss] opposite of the “pastoral” settlement envisioned by planners: it was a modern urban community. What was interesting to me about her statement was, on the one hand, her awareness of upper-level plans to urbanize rural areas, and on the other hand, her apparent acceptance of the appropriateness or inevitability of these policies. This adoption of the policy language of urbanization and planning was evident in other encounters I had across the quake zone. In a nearby village, when I complimented some of the new houses in casual conversation with an older farmer, he replied, in a rather noncommittal tone, “Yes, the New Countryside is planned” (Xin Nongcun jiu shi guihua de). For residents, there was clearly some kind of equivalence between planned space and urbanization. Thus, although the planners had attempted to make concessions for “rural” lifestyles, the very fact that space was now ordered and regulated represented a move towards the urban.

One part of the “urban planning feeling” of the new life was the promise of urban infrastructure, including water, electricity, and natural gas. But Mrs. Zhu had no natural gas for her new stove, and cooked her meals on a hotplate. She claimed that a year ago, everyone had paid the sign-up fee for the gas, but the community still had no gas service. Other residents complained that the water often stopped, causing particular trouble for residents on the second and third floors. The contractors that built water plant had not planned on such a large number of residents in the new community, and residents joked that they hadn’t had a good bath since moving into the new houses. Still, Mrs. Zhu seemed cheerful about her living situation. Rather than the design of the houses or the erratic utilities, she was more preoccupied by issues of compensation and property rights. She was a member of the villager small group (former production team) whose land had been used to build the new concentrated village. According to her, the village wanted to pay them a lump sum, but didn’t have the cash to make the one-time payment. Residents’ prioritization of property rights over design was also evident in the case of another villager small group that had opted not to join the concentrated plan and had built their own smaller settlement up the road from Luping Village. The other settlement, consisting of a group of isolated five-story apartment blocks with no decoration or landscaping, was more cosmetically “urban” than the main settlement. Yet the team members preferred this approach to rebuilding, which allowed them to retain control of their land.

Interestingly, though, most rural plans focus on site-specific design, and overlook land uses in the areas around the planned settlement- an omission that was recently highlighted in the influential Chinese planning journal, Urban Planning Forum (Z. Zhao & Zheng, 2014).

But planners were not just designing houses; they also drew up an economic development blueprint for Luping (Figure 9). Planners’ development vision included a scenic lotus pond in the center of the village in order to attract tourists, and a series of functional zones intended to foster new livelihood strategies, including a “handicraft and cultural production scenic belt”, a “leisure ring”, and an “economic production ring” (Figure 9). Such “rings”, “belts”, and “corridors” are ubiquitous hallmarks of urban planning in China—in many ways the plan for Luping even echoes the Metropolitan Chengdu Plan, with its language “one core”, “one belt”, and “two rings”. The PowerPoint slide in Figure 9 indicates that, despite the oft-expressed concern that rural planning be distinct from urban planning, in some ways urban planning symbols and techniques are being directly transferred to rural settings. At the same time, there is a clear indication of what types of economic activities are appropriate for rural spaces, including handicrafts, tourism, and light food processing activities. To some extent, these plans are directed at residents themselves. An article in the Beijing-based Economic Observer quotes one former resident, Wu Jiechuan, who was returning to the village after the quake to invest because, “[t]he planners didn’t just help us build houses, they also helped us think about how we will live and develop”.

Figure 8: Spatial layout analysis for Luping Village, Sichuan Sanzhong Architecture Co. [Figure 9 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It depicts the spatial layout plan for Luping Village produced by the Sichuan Sanzhong Company. Original source: http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2008-09-04/033014399258s.shtml, archived at: http://www.webcitation.org/6tZTOPPss]

But we should be cautious about taking these reports about the transformative effect of planning on rural subjectivities at face value. When I visited in 2010 and 2011, there were no hotels or rural homestays, nor any evidence of the handicraft production suggested in the economic plan. On the other hand, there was a great deal of “unplanned” economic activity occurring at the fringes of the planned village, with residents growing mushrooms in the temporary earthquake shelters (despite an ongoing campaign to demolish the shelters once the new residences were built), raising rabbits in the yard of a pre-quake home, and digging a new pond beside the picturesque lotus pond in order to raise fish. Local officials did not seem particularly concerned about these violations of the village plan. This may be because their developmental projects are not as linked to the rings and

62 belts in the village plan as they are to the land freed up by residential concentration. Chengdu’s post-quake reconstruction model has also been marked by efforts to attract private investment, or what is called, in a direct translation, “social capital” (shehui ziben). The Economic Observer article notes that Chengdu’s strategy of attracting “social capital” has been successful in part because “…rural planning comes first to plan out “a big pie” for investors” (xiangcun guihua xianxing gei touzizhe huachu de “dabing”). Rural planning in Luping, as elsewhere in Chengdu, is seen as a key tool in making newly available rural property legible to investors.

3.5 Beyond the village plan: the metropolitan politics of land consolidation

Cifeng Town (where Luping Village is located) is not just a model for rural planning, it is also the first area in Sichuan Province to experiment with a “land bank” (tudi yinhang) after the quake (B. Jiang & Liu, 2010). While rural land in China cannot be bought and sold on the open market, rural collectives can lease limited use rights to rural land. Through the land bank, farmers (on a voluntary basis) pool together their individual contractual land use rights (tudi chengbao jingying quan) to attract outside investors— the idea is that rather than deal with many separate small groups, investors can decrease transactions costs by dealing with a single entity (the land bank) to carry out large-scale projects. Similar experiments with the quasi-marketization of rural property rights were sanctioned with the designation of Chengdu as a national pilot zone for overall urban and rural planning in 2007, and were given further impetus by the quake in 2008 (Ximing Wang, 2011). According to the village head, the investors who joined in the land bank experiment in Cifeng created new agribusiness companies after the earthquake specifically in order to take advantage of new opportunities in the quake-affected areas. The companies reached a cooperative agreement to sell kiwifruit for export, and together have about 825 acres of kiwis under cultivation in Cifeng Town.

The kiwifruit in Cifeng are part of a much larger agricultural modernization program being spearheaded across Pengzhou City, the “1+ N” model. Here, “1” refers to “a vast (wanmu) orchard of organic kiwi cultivation”. The “N” is a more abstract signifier, pointing to the innumerable natural and institutional “support platforms” for modern kiwi cultivation in Pengzhou including the favorable geography of the Longmen Mountains, the Chengdu Kiwi Association, the land banks, new agricultural management professionals, and private investors (“Pengzhou mihoutao fumin da chanye (Pengzhou kiwis- a key industry that enriches the people),” 2012). The Pengzhou

63 government also plans on developing the Longmen Mountain area as a specialized large-scale kiwi production base by building a centralized processing facility and developing kiwi varieties with protected intellectual property rights. This strategy has so far proven highly effective in increasing the amount of kiwis under cultivation. In the three years after the quake, from 2009 to 2012, the amount of kiwis planted throughout Pengzhou reportedly rose a hundredfold, from about 66 acres (400 mu) to 6600 acres (40,000 mu) (Liao & Chen, 2012).

Figure 9: “Traditional Agriculture Transforms into Modern Agriculture”, Chengdu Jiaweita Agriculture Co. Ltd. [Figure 10 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It depicts Pengzhou’s 1+N agricultural development model. Original source: http://www.jiaweita.com/tf_picshow.asp?id=423&ln=1, archived at: http://www.webcitation.org/6taAPKZGK]

The link between planning, land use rationalization, urbanization, and agricultural modernization is made clear in this graphic (Figure 10) on the website of the Chengdu Jiaweita Agriculture Company, the major investor in Cifeng’s kiwi project. The caption at the top reads, “Traditional agriculture transforms into modern agriculture”, and a compass poised over a map of the area, along with a collection of skyscrapers on the horizon, emphasize the modern rationality of the new agriculture. The connection to Chengdu’s Garden City Plan was iterated by Zhang Qiang, the Head of the Pengzhou Office of Agricultural Development:

At the beginning of post-quake reconstruction, we thought that once farmers were concentrated [in the new planned settlements], their production methods and lifestyles would undergo great changes. How could we revitalize production and develop strong industries for mountainous areas according to the guidance of overall urban and rural planning? ... We want to create a paramount industrial belt to realize the dream of the Garden City, and take Pengzhou’s kiwi production to over 80,000 mu [13,200 acres] during the period of the national 12th year plan (Liao & Chen, 2012).

Local officials in the Chengdu area interpret the rhetoric of “urban and rural planning” and “the Garden City” as an opportunity for attracting investors to ambitious projects, including, in this case, large-scale kiwi production. This is made possible by the relocation of residents to concentrated settlements, as well as the spread of a planning rationality that renders land abstract, and turns it into something to be disposed of rationally in the name of development. For residents, the long- term effects of the kiwi scheme in Cifeng Town are unclear. Rural property rights owners (villager small group members) are treated as shareholders (contractual land right holders hold 25 per cent of shares), and receive dividends from the land bank. The village head claimed that about 70 per cent of households in Cifeng had joined the land bank, and several villagers were also employed by the

64 companies to tend the kiwi trees. He declared that this arrangement was helping to “free the farmers from the land”. But rather than “freeing” the farmers from the land, the land bank system has reconfigured their relationship to the land by making them into shareholders or wage workers and reducing their direct management of the land.

The critiques of this switch to commercial crops are familiar: farmers are trading the flexibility and autonomy of subsistence farming for uncertain salaries and new houses. For many, the price they are being paid for this trade-off is insufficient, particularly now that they have electricity, gas, and water bills to pay. Yet China’s rural households have been diversifying their income sources since economic reform, with remittances from family members working in urban areas playing a large role in household incomes. Moreover, this shift towards “modern” large-scale agriculture is not unique to rural Chengdu: across China, rural collectives are entering into contracts with private companies and experimenting with different mixes of shareholding and wage work (Q. F. Zhang & Donaldson, 2008). What distinguishes rural communities in Chengdu is the role that upper levels of government—in this case, Cifeng Township, Pengzhou City, and Chengdu—are playing in shaping development decisions at the village level. And this in turn is tied to a broader metropolitan political economy of land.

3.6 A Lefebvrian critique of rural planning

How then are we to understand the Planning Battle described at the outset of the chapter? Here I think Henri Lefebvre’s critiques of urbanism are helpful in thinking through the production of space under China’s emerging discipline of rural planning. Christian Schmid (2008) neatly characterizes Lefebvre’s famous trifold dialectic as three “moments” in the production of space: material production, the production of knowledge, and the production of meaning.30 It is the second moment- the production of a domain of knowledge (savoir) about space- that is the realm of what Lefebvre labels “urbanists”— practitioners of spatial disciplines including city planners, architects, and urban theorists. Lefebvre’s critique of urbanism is twofold. The first is a humanist critique that recoils from the modernist triumphalism and bare functionalism of France’s post-war New Towns.

30 The three moments are alternatively characterized as: spatial practice/ representations of space/ spaces of representation; or l’espace perçu/ l’espace conçu / l’espace vécu (Shields, 1999). The latter provides a nicely parallel list, but appears to solidify space into “types”, as opposed to Schmid’s more fluid expression of the dialectic as interrelated “moments” in an ongoing process of spatial production.

In Notes on the New Towns, Lefebvre describes looking down on the recently built town of Mourenx in the Pyrenees, an experience that prompted his initial shift from rural sociology to the study of “urban society” writ large (Stanek, 2011, p. 17). He captures the tension between modern conveniences and the particularly modern boredom that infects the new community:

The overall plan (the master blueprint) has a certain attractiveness: the lines of the tower blocks alternate horizontals and verticals…The blocks of flats look well planned and properly built; we know that the are very inexpensive, and offer their residents bathrooms or showers, drying rooms, well-lit accommodation where they can sit with their radios and television sets and contemplate the world from the comfort of their own homes… Yet every time I see these ‘machines for living in’ I feel terrified (Lefebvre, 1995, p. 118).

In this humanist critique, urbanists deploy their expertise over space to extirpate fully lived spaces of possibility (spaces of representation, or l’espace vécu).

This act of abstraction is linked to Lefebvre’s second, related critique of urbanism: its concealed ideology. In The Urban Revolution Lefebvre asks, playfully, what is urbanism? He responds to his own question in the form of several answer-questions: “An ideology? An uncertain and incomplete practice that claims to be global? A system that implies the presence of technological elements and relies on authority to assert itself? A heavy, opaque body, an obstacle on a path, a false model?” (Lefebvre, 2003, p. 58). He resists the claim that urbanism is scientific or technical, instead insisting on its institutional and ideological nature. For Lefebvre, urbanism is ideological in the sense that it contributes to the reproduction of existing (capitalist) relations of production (Saunders, 1986, p. 152). It is the very act of depoliticizing space—denying the fundamentally social and political nature of space—that renders urbanism ideological. Uncritical urbanism is thus a key tool for an urbanization process that is nothing more or less than the contemporary spatial extension of capitalist relations of production.

Lefebvre’s first, humanist, critique of modernist planning and abstract space resonates with David Bray’s (2013) observations about how the erasure of courtyard (yuanzi) space reshaped communal and private life in his case study site. This is an important critique of rural planning, and I do not disagree with Bray’s claims about the significant impacts of spatial planning on everyday life in many rural communities. But my approach to developing a critique of rural planning is somewhat different. First, Bray (2013, p. 62) explicitly eschews a political economic analysis of village planning to focus on the micro-level effects of socio-spatial change. But the case of Luping suggests that the metropolitan political economy of land shaped rural planning decisions and had a

66 significant impact on lives and livelihoods. Second, cosmetically, many of China’s rural planners now espouse a humanism that appears to depart from the modernist, technicist approach to planning that has dominated post-reform China. The move to develop a “New Countryside 2.0” was explicitly intended to counteract the impression that the concentrated villages were mere “machines for living in”.

Despite these efforts, residents themselves perceived the new villages as part of a policy of urbanization, rather than an attempt to preserve rural lifeworlds. At the same time, they were not necessarily opposed to village planning and urbanization. Residents did, however, express concern about the loss of control over their land and compensation for their land. In the wake of the quake, there was a strong impulse among practitioners, academics, and activists to include residents in the planning process as part of the “people first” (yi ren wei ben) principles laid out in the national Overall Reconstruction Plan. But the case of Cifeng Village demonstrates that, if such participation is limited to depoliticized issues of design, it will fall short of addressing residents’ substantive concerns about land, compensation, financing, livelihoods, and collective resources.

Finally, a humanist critique may obscure the fact that “rural China” contains a diverse array of communities, many of which have long been “urbanized” in terms of infrastructure and lifestyles.31 While I do not think that this is what Bray does, many Chinese planners’ efforts to categorize and preserve elements of a “traditional” rural society runs the risk of consigning rural residents to an imaginary past, trapping them in a theme park-like landscape dedicated to the national imaginary of China as an agrarian society.

My own critique leans more heavily on Lefebvre’s second critique of planning-as-ideology. Recent imperatives to develop and nurture rural areas under the New Countryside policy may be modifying the modernizing impulse of spatial planning in China. But even though newly minted rural planners challenge the reproduction of a modernist aesthetic in the countryside, a broader drive towards land use rationalization is still very much at work in rural Chengdu. The plans produced by the Sanzhong Architecture Company and the Chengdu Jiaweita Agriculture Company indicate a

31 . My own (admittedly romantic) assumptions about rural life were challenged when I walked into a convenience store at my primary research site that was being run by a middle-aged woman and her elderly mother out of their temporary home. Both were seated in front of a computer screen filled with complex-looking graphs and charts. When I asked what they were doing, they explained that they were following the stock market.

67 continuity in the tools and representations deployed by urban planners and by rural planners. These images also suggest that a key function in rural planning is the abstraction of space, which drastically simplifies the layers of communal and household claims that characterize China’s rural land. This in turn allowed land in Cifeng Township to enter into the “land bank”, a creation that highlights, in a very obvious way, a conceptual equivalence between land and money. Land is thereby transformed into a concrete abstraction, into a repository of “value” with properties of equivalence and alienability that allow it to be exchanged in the manner of any other commodity. This facilitates the entry of outside investors like the kiwi agribusinesses. Thus it hardly matters that that villagers are not adhering to the “zones” and “belts” planners have assigned as part of a contextually sensitive “economic blueprint” in the village itself. Planning, with its pseudo- scientific authority, has already succeeded in rendering the space around the village legible for the metropolitan land market. This power of planning to render land abstract, legible, and alienable became particularly important for the development of property rights markets for rural land, discussed in the following chapter.

Chapter 4

4 Unleashing “silent capital”: Urban-rural integration and property rights reforms in Chengdu

The reform of rural property rights is the biggest attractor of investment; several million mu of land have entered into the market, and how many trillions [of investment money] can then enter Chengdu… In less than two years, Chengdu’s rural areas will be the main battlefield for investment.

-- Sun Ping, Vice Mayor of Chengdu (Quoted in J. Deng, 2010a)

Property rights are the magic power that turns government policy into capital.

-- Zhu Ke, Secretary of Tianma Township

4.1 Overview

The question of rural property rights reform is one of the most intensely debated issues in contemporary China (Gao, 2015). Constitutionally, most rural land in China is owned by the rural collective economic organizations. Urban land, by contrast, is owned by the state. In 1988, the Constitution was amended to permit a separation between ownership rights and use rights to land, initiating the development of a lease market for use rights and essentially commercializing urban land (S. P. Ho & Lin, 2003). No such market emerged for rural land: use rights to rural land are allocated to members of the rural collectives for agricultural and residential purposes, but it is much more difficult to lease land use rights outside the collective, particularly for non-agricultural purposes. Liberal economists inside and outside of China have blamed economic stagnation in rural areas on farmers’ inability to sell land or use it as collateral for loans. Following the by-now canonical arguments laid out by Hernando De Soto, 32 this group suggests that clarifying property

32 In fact, De Soto’s arguments could also be used to strengthen collective rather than individual rights. He writes, “The importance of property rights is not that they provide assets which benefit their holders exclusively, but that they

69 rights will increase farmers’ willingness to make long-term investments in the land, improve agricultural efficiency, and allow land to be transferred to higher-value uses (A. Day, 2013).

On the other side of the debate is the coterie of Marxist rural sociologists associated with the New Rural Reconstruction movement (described in Chapter 1), most notably Wen Tiejun. This group claims that the commodification of rural land would have a disastrous effect on both rural residents and the nation as a whole. According to Wen, collective property rights should be strengthened (rather than weakened through the individualization and commodification of land rights) because they act as a form of “social protection” (shehui baozhang). In times of economic crisis, rural migrants can always return to their land, which provides both an individual safety net and a social pressure valve. The debate can, in some sense, be characterized as one between “growth and efficiency” on the one hand and “stability and welfare” on the other, with both sides claiming to have the best interests of farmers in mind. For their part, leaders in the central government have appeared wary of large-scale commodification of rural land, although they have allowed a number of localized experiments with rural land rights transfers to take place.

It is this context that the Chengdu government initiated a series of rural land reforms as part of its urban-rural integration (URI) policy. The reforms were justified in terms of providing funds for promoting rural development and improving rural social welfare systems. The city claimed that it was willing to “integrate” and “nurture” (fanying) rural areas as part of the “cities support the countryside” mandate, but lacked the funds to do so. As a journalist from the Southern Weekend reported:

The biggest dilemma was the lack of money. The central government provided no additional funding, but it was not possible to rely solely on the city of Chengdu to nurture the rural areas. At the time, the city government calculated that if half of Chengdu’s six million rural residents became urban citizens, this would require a total investment of about

give their owners sufficient incentive to add value to their resources by investing, innovating, or pooling them productively for the prosperity and progress of the entire community. (...) if a government cannot give its citizens secure property rights and efficient means of organizing and transferring them – namely contracts – it is denying them one of the main incentives for modernizing and developing their operations” (De Soto, 1989, p.178 cited in Pils, 2009, p. 4) (emphasis added).

RMB 600 billion. In 2007, Chengdu's fiscal revenue, even under the best conditions, was not more than RMB 70 billion. "You say nurture [rural areas]? What government can afford that?" a senior Chengdu government official told the Southern Weekend:

“At the time, rural land, especially rural construction land, had become a sort of massive "silent capital" [chenmo de ziben] because of the existing land policies. How to allow this "silent capital" to be transferred, to be traded, to attain the same huge values as urban construction land—this was the focus of discussion.”

When, in 2007, the city was designated as a “national pilot site for coordinated urban and rural planning”, the government used the opportunity to experiment with a limited exchange of rural property rights in a few villages. But it was the Wenchuan Earthquake that really intensified the reforms when the city government received permission from the national Ministry of Land and Resources to take a number of risky and politically sensitive steps toward the marketization of rural land use rights.

This chapter analyzes the reforms to rural property rights that were undertaken in Chengdu in the wake of the earthquake, which included, first, “ unpackaging” collective rural property rights and assigning them to individual households, and second, creating direct markets for rural construction land and indirect markets for arable land quotas. These reforms were framed as being crucial to funding post-quake reconstruction and rural development in Chengdu’s peri-urban areas. The first section outlines the complex system of rural property rights in China, and why reforms are considered such a sensitive issue. This helps illuminate how property rights, rural development, and social security were so easily naturalized during Chengdu’s reforms, but also why they were highly contentious. I examine the heated academic debate that emerged around Chengdu’s rural property rights reforms that pitched two very different visions of rural development against each other. The tangled and twinned goals of rural and urban development highlight the risks inherent when state developmental projects are downloaded to—or claimed by—metropolitan governments.

4.2 China’s rural property rights system

The so-called “dual structure” governing urban and rural spaces and residents is often blamed for the gap between urban and rural living standards in China (Zhang, 2008, p. 15).33 Perhaps the most well known example of the dual policy structure is the household registration (hukou) system that assigns every citizen an agricultural or non-agricultural status, as well as a place of residence. The system was instituted under Mao during the 1950s as a deliberate effort to stem rural outmigration and create a dual-sector economy in which the state could control agricultural surpluses to fund its “Big Push” industrialization strategy (Chan, 2009). While urban hukou holders were embedded in a centrally- managed industrial system that provided them with employment, housing, grain rations, healthcare, and education, rural hukou holders were excluded from these state supports. It was assumed that the rural communes would perform these functions, albeit at a lower standard. After economic reform in the late 1970s, when the market began to play a larger role in providing food, housing, jobs, and services in the city, lack of an urban hukou ceased to be an effective deterrent to migration. Yet despite the declining importance of state-provided benefits, holders of rural hukou continue to face challenges accessing important resources when they migrate to the city—like education for their children—and this translates into persistent social inequalities (Y. Lu, 2008).

A second policy difference between urban and rural areas is the dual-track land administration system. The Chinese constitution establishes two types of land ownership: state-owned land and collectively owned land. Most urban land belongs to the state, while rural land belongs to the rural collective economic organizations. This appears to give rural collectives control over rural land, but the system is significantly more complicated than it seems at first glance. First, there is some uncertainty about what actually constitutes the “rural collective economic organization” in the post- communal era. Following the victory of the Communists in 1949, land reforms focused on dismantling the feudal system and distributing land to peasant households. But by the 1950s, the Party was advocating the formation of larger rural cooperatives to scale up production. During the disastrous industrial and agricultural modernization campaigns of the Great Leap Forward (1958-

33 Rather confusingly, this terminology also reflects W. Arthur Lewis’ well-known formulation of developing economies as composed of a backwards “subsistence” (rural/agricultural) sector and an advanced “capitalist” (urban/manufacturing) sector (Fields, 2004). In this model, agriculture is characterized by low wages, low productivity, and an abundance of surplus labour. Agricultural workers move into the higher-wage manufacturing sector until a “turning point” is reached and wages begin to rise steeply across sectors, resulting in a developed and largely industrial national economy. Lewis focused on dualism in the labour market, and this dual-sector concept is pervasive among Chinese policymakers, particularly in terms of whether a “Lewis turning point” has reached that will drive up the country’s wage bill.

1962), the rural cooperatives made way for the much larger rural communes. From 1958, China’s rural production was organized into the following units (in decreasing order of size): communes (gongshe), production brigades (shengchan dadui), and production teams (shengchan xiaodui) (Figure 10) (Oi, 1989, p. 4). During the economic reform process that began in the late 1970s, the communes were disbanded and rural society became organized around spatially defined jurisdictions rather than production units. Communes became townships (xiang or zhen); production brigades became villages (cun); and production teams either disappeared or became village small groups (cun xiaozu). Which of these groups owns the land? Legal and policy decrees seem to indicate the villagers’ groups own rural land, while the right to redistribute use rights is reserved for the administrative villages (P. Ho, 2001). At the same time, however, the township (the lowest official level of government representation in China) issues land use plans that the administrative villages and villager groups must follow (Pieke, 2005). Peter Ho (2001) describes the situation as “deliberate institutional ambiguity,” and suggests that the government accepts this ambiguity in order to avoid conflict among the three levels of the former peasants’ collective groups.

Collectivized Agriculture, 1974 Household Responsibility System, 1986

Commune (gongshe) Township (xiang/ zhen) 15 brigades 12 villages 3,346 households 2,737 households 14, 720 persons 11, 886 persons

Brigade (shengchan dadui) Village (cun) 7 teams 231 households 220 households 1,002 persons 980 persons

Production Team (shengchan xiaodui) Village Small Group (cun xiaozu) 33 households irregularly organized 145 persons

Figure 10: Rural administrative units and average characteristics, 1974 and 1986 (Jean C. Oi (1989), State and Peasant in Contemporary China: The Political Economy of Village Government, p.5)

A second restriction on China’s rural land relates to land use. The revised Land Management Law of 1998 sets strict limits on the conversion of agricultural land (S. P. Ho & Lin, 2003). Collectively owned rural land is divided into three basic use types: agricultural land (including cultivated land, forest, and pasture), construction land (including land for public works, housing, and rural enterprises), and unused land (mostly wasteland) (Ibid). During the 1980s, local governments (county and township level) and village groups enjoyed a certain amount of autonomy in converting agricultural to non-agricultural uses (S. P. Ho & Lin, 2003). Rural land conversion, combined with growing urbanization, fuelled fears about arable land loss and the erosion of China’s self-sufficiency in grain production. In 1986 the government enacted the Land Management Law and established the State Land Administration Bureau, with branches at the provincial, prefecture, county, and township levels. The revised 1998 Land Management Law required rural collectives to comply with the township overall land use plan, and to secure the approval of the county-level Land Bureau concerning any land use decisions (S. P. Ho & Lin, 2003). In the late 1990s, amid a national discussion about China’s food security, the government also established a national Land Use Master Plan. In 2008, the Master Plan established a “red line” (hongxian) to maintain total arable land area at no less than 1.8 billion mu (120 million ha) in the period until 2020. By 2007, arable land area was already at 1.826 billion mu, leaving little room for further loss (Long, Li, Liu, Woods, & Zou, 2012, p. 12).

A third notable characteristic of rural land in contemporary China is the predominance of intensive cultivation by smallholder farmers. While the collective (however defined) owns rural land, since the early 1980s the collectives have contracted use rights to agricultural land to individual households under Household Contract Responsibility System. Initially individual plots of land were leased to households for five years, but this period was extended to 15 years in 1984 and 30 years in 1994 (P. Ho, 2001). These successively longer contract periods were instituted in the context of a discussion among liberal economists around how to incentivize farmers to make long-term investments in the land by providing greater tenure security (Ibid.). Yet surveys conducted since the late 1980s find that farmers themselves support periodic redistribution of land leases among members of the collective to account for births, deaths, and migration, rather than long-term leases (P. Ho, 2005, pp. 18–19). The individualization of landholdings under the Household Responsibility System has resulted in a generally fragmented pattern of cultivation, and it also

74 means that larger projects are difficult to carry out as they require consensus among many collective members.

Fourth, while the separation between use rights and ownership rights resulted in the establishment of a clear long-term lease market in urban areas, no such process has occurred in rural areas. Since the Land Management Law of 1998, farmers have been able to contract agricultural land out to non-members of the collective (if at least two-thirds of collective members agree) (Ho and Lin 2003). However, such practices vary from locality to locality, and the pricing of rural land in these transactions is far from transparent. But the central government has been reluctant to establish a national market for rural land. As mentioned earlier, access to collectively owned rural land is considered a safety net for rural residents- a rough form of social security that provides a basic means of subsistence even in the absence of paid work. Rural migrants, it is reasoned, can always return to the land if their urban dreams go awry. But, as critic Qin Hui pointed out early on in the debate, access to farmland back in their hometowns does not help rural migrants deal with sickness, unemployment, or aging in the short run (Qin 2003; 2007, cited in Trappel, 2016, p. 167). Moreover, for those who choose to stay in (or return to) the countryside, subsistence farming can no longer meet even the most basic requirements for social reproduction. The dissolution of the communes in the late 1970s drastically increased farmers’ need for cash incomes. The costs of agricultural inputs like fertilizers and pesticides—needed to sustain China’s typically intensive farming practices—have risen. In addition, farmers must now pay for services like education and healthcare (Trappel, 2016, pp. 162–163). Land as a form of “social protection” may thus be more helpful for bolstering national political stability than for providing material support at the individual or household level.

Finally, rural collectives are generally excluded from a share in the profits generated through urban growth. Expropriation by the state is the only way to shift land from the rural collective sector to the urban state sector (S. P. Ho & Lin, 2003). Urban expansion in China has thus occurred through city governments’ appropriation of rural land, which is then auctioned off to developers. By law, the local government must compensate farmers for the value of the land under its previous use, according to the average agricultural yield on the land over the past three years. But this fails to account for the land’s drastic leap in economic value once it is converted to urban construction land- a rent that accrues to city governments as a “conveyance fee” because of their monopoly power over land conversion. There is a certain amount of flexibility here, and some urban

75 governments are experimenting with sharing this “conveyance fee” more fairly with rural collective organizations (G. C. S. Lin, 2009, p. 53). But such sharing is limited because of the role that land conversion plays in local government budgets. In the 1990s the central state decentralized responsibility for economic growth and urban development to local governments, while at the same time centralizing the power to collect budgetary revenue. This means that land conversion has become a primary source of revenue for local governments.

Thus although there seems to be an agreement that the dual-track land administration is largely to blame for urban-rural inequalities, the state is reluctant to dismantle the dual structure because of the social instability that such a process might unleash. At a minimum, social security must be extended both to rural migrants and rural residents, and alternate forms of revenue must be found for local governments. On the other hand, there are also significant political pressures to reform the rural land system. As mentioned earlier, China’s current pattern of cultivation is characterized by numerous smallholder farmers—a legacy of the “household responsibility system” instituted in the early 1980s. Since the early 2000s, however, a negative view of smallholder farming has prevailed among policymakers (Trappel, 2016, p. 158). Instead, the central government is promoting the industrialization of agriculture (nongye chanyehua) as a means of improving efficiency and increasing rural incomes. The new vision would see land consolidated and production methods modernized under the direction of specialized, large-scale agro-businesses (Trappel, 2016, pp. 7–8). Proponents of this vision suggest that fragmented household use rights should be bundled together and transferred to the management of specialized farming households within the village or to third- party agro-businesses. The compromise solution appears to be localized land markets based on the transfer of long-term rural land use rights, within the legal framework of collective rural land ownership. Establishing long-term use rights for rural land has been far from straightforward. In 2008 the central government called for the creation of a “perfect market” for the transfer of these land use rights.34 But it is governments at the local level, Trappel argues, that are the key catalysts for agrarian transition in China. The reforms that the Chengdu government undertook following the quake must thus be understood in the context of this mass of contradictory imperatives, visions, and policies.

34 The 2008 “Decisions of Central Committee of the CPC Regarding Several Significant Issues in Promoting the Reform and Development of the Countryside”

4.3 The first step: verifying rights

As outlined in Chapter 2, in 2002 the boundaries of Chengdu expanded from seven core urban districts to include nine districts, four satellite cities, and six counties. In 2003 the Chengdu government adopted a policy of overall urban and rural planning (chengxiang tongchou) to coordinate planning across the metropolitan region. Initially the project focused on land use rationalization through the “three concentrations” (san ge jizhong) policy: the concentration of industry in industrial zones; the concentration of rural residents in cities and towns; and the concentration of land for large-scale management. Because of the dual track land administration system described above, the last two “concentrations” were particularly tricky areas to navigate. In 2005 the city government adopted the “two surrenders” (shuang fangqi) policy, that is, households whose income was over 80% from non-land sources could voluntarily give up their use rights to contract land (chengbao di) and homestead land (zhaiji di) in exchange for financial compensation, an urban hukou that would give them access to urban social services, and 35 m2 of commodity housing in the city. Rural sociologist He Xuefeng (2013b) writes that Chengdu’s “two surrenders” policy did not have a significant effect because farmers were wary about the combined pressure of higher living expenses in the city and the difficulty of obtaining stable employment. The government subsequently experimented with a “demolishing small compounds to create large compounds” policy (chai yuan bing yuan, or chai xiaoyuan bing dayuan) in suburban counties near the urban core. Under this policy, farmers moved from their scattered houses into new planned communities; they could enjoy urban living standards without moving into the city. The demolition of scattered houses “released” construction land, which the collective organizations could either convert to agricultural land or lease out for commercial projects and real estate development. For suburban areas around the city centre, where these experiments were initially conducted, the latter was obviously a higher-value option. He Xuefeng (2013) claims that the opportunity to have a direct share in the higher value of non-agricultural land mobilized more farmers to participate in the new policies.

Realizing the full (market) value of the newly available rural land created through residential concentration required the creation of a market for such land, and the creation of a market required clear property rights titles. The 2007 designation of Chengdu and Chongqing as “national pilot zones for comprehensive urban and rural planning” was seen as a license to experiment in this direction. In early 2008 the Chengdu Party Committee issued a Number 1 policy document

77 entitled, "Opinions on strengthening arable land protection and promoting the reform of the rural land and housing rights system (for trial implementation)." The document laid out the goal of “establishing a sound modern rural property rights system with clear ownership, clear rights and responsibilities, strict protection, and smooth circulation [of property rights],” taking “market orientation as the guiding principle, and peasant empowerment and autonomy as the core” (Y. Zhang, Li, & Zheng, 2012). Specifically, the document advocated the circulation of contract land management rights, use rights to rural construction land, and use rights to rural housing. These property reforms were linked to Chengdu’s broader rural development plan, and were described as the “first stone cast into the deep water” (shenshui li de di yi kuai ying shetou) of overall urban and rural planning, or the “fulcrum” for the entire project (Y. Zhang et al., 2012). The marketization of rural land was going to be justified as a means of unlocking funds for rural development.

But because the reform of the rural property rights system was still considered a sensitive issue, the Number 1 Document was not issued publicly and was only issued to the county-level standing committees (Ximing Wang, 2011). Rural sociologist Wang Ximing (2011) thus identifies three stages in Chengdu’s rural property rights system reforms:

1. The first pilot phase, from January 2008 to May 2008, focused in Wenjiang County (a near suburb of Chengdu). This stage was characterized by the lack of a clearly-defined overall programme, and was based on small-scale village-level experiments.

à The Wenchuan Earthquake strikes on 12 May 2008.

2. An expanding pilot phase, from June 2008 to October 2008, focused on the earthquake- affected areas, with the township as the basic unit. The main characteristic of this stage was the combination of rural property rights reform with post-quake reconstruction.

à The central government issues a formal resolution in support of rural property rights reforms.

3. A deeper institutionalization of the reforms beginning in November 2008. By the end of 2008, the five earthquake-affected counties in Chengdu (Chongzhou, Dayi, Dujiangyan, Pengzhou, and Qionglai) had completed the process of surveying rural land and issuing rural residential land rights certificates. The land titling process was subsequently carried out throughout rural Chengdu.

This third stage was characterized by combining property rights reform with the improvement of rural public services, and establishing a rural property rights trading system.

Each of these “phases” required the city government to undertake a process of verifying rural property rights (que quan)—a project whose complexity cannot be overstated. First, farmers in China are guaranteed an array of land use rights, and verification involved assigning five types of rights to farmers and rural collectives: rural land ownership (nongcun tudi de suoyouquan), contractual land management rights (tudi chengbao jingyingquan), residential plot use rights (zhaijidi shiyongquan), housing property rights (fangwu chanquan), and woodland rights (linquan). Second, household land use rights are periodically re-assessed and re-distributed by the rural collectives based on increases or decreases in household size. Moreover, families whose members work in the city will often transfer their use rights to other households within the same village group outside of these formal re-assessments. Third, most rural areas in China lack cadastral surveys and up-to-date land registries; field surveys in Chengdu indicated widespread inconsistency among land titles, official records, and land parcels (Lixing Li, 2012).

In February 2008 Heming Village in Dujiangyan was chosen as a pilot site for Chengdu’s land- titling project. The initial land survey was completed in one week, and the results, when posted, triggered a number of disputes (Lixing Li, 2012). But rather than rely on existing collective organizations to handle the land disputes, the municipal government established new “villagers’ councils” (cunmin yishihui), discussed further in Chapter 6. This helped to bypass some of the uncertainty over which level of rural governance—the township, the administrative village, or the village group—could best represent the interests of farmers. Members of the new councils were chosen by a secret ballot and worked with household heads to measure the land and settle disputes between households. A journalist described an example of such a dispute to illustrate the important role of these councils. One Heming Village resident, Liu Huaijun, had gone to the city to work in 2001, transferring his land use rights to another resident, Wang Mingxiang. When use rights were being verified under Chengdu’s property reforms, Liu reclaimed his land and an argument broke out between him and Wang. The council decided to divide the land equally between the two claimants, and this settlement was eventually accepted by both. Heming Village’s Number Eight village group became a poster child to demonstrate the “grassroots” nature—and validity— of Chengdu’s land titling process. Once the household responsibility land (chengbao di) in the group had been assigned, farmers signaled their agreement to the boundaries by placing their thumbprints

79 on each parcel of land on the map. Images of this “fish scale map” (yulin tu) were widely circulated in the media. And while this does not necessarily indicate that the individualization of property rights received widespread support across rural Chengdu, it does signal that the appearance of “grassroots” participation was important to the Chengdu government during the politically sensitive reform process.

By the end of 2010, nearly two and half years later, the Chengdu government announced that the land titling process was nearly finished: ownership titles were issued to over 33,800 village groups; agricultural land use rights certificates were issued to 1.8 million households; and construction land (mostly housing land) use rights certificates were issued to 1.66 million households (Lixing Li, 2012, p. 56). Considering the complicated nature of the process, the government managed to complete the land titling process in a remarkably short amount of time, with very few disputes. We might partly attribute this to the effect of the quake, and a combination of the trauma of the event and the desire to rebuild quickly. But this process was carried out in non-quake counties as well, suggesting that there was something more than “disaster capitalism” at work. To explain the smoothness of land titling, Wang Ximing (2011) notes the active involvement of the villages and villager groups, which had a fair degree of power in deciding how rights were allocated. He further attributes the success of the policy to the fact that all affected parties—the state, the collectives, and the farmers—benefitted from the process. He writes that, “the state has been able to acquire more construction land for development without any decrease in arable land; collective land ownership rights have been clarified and the collective economy has grown; and farmers’ contract land rights, forest ownership, property rights and land use rights have been clarified, farmers have seen significant increases in income, and the rural social insurance system has improved.” It is worth examining how each of these aims has been achieved through the titling and commodification of rural land.

4.4 The second step: creating markets

Because the loss of rural social security is a key concern in commodifying rural land, the Chengdu government went to great lengths to link property rights reforms to improvement in the rural social insurance system. For instance, social insurance, land rights, and arable land protection were tied together under the “five certificates and one card” system. The five certificates refer to the five types of use rights listed above: rural land ownership (for collectives, not individuals), contractual

80 land management rights, residential plot use rights, housing property rights, and woodland rights. The one card refers to the “arable land protection funds” card (gengbao jijin ka) that offers farmers basic social security, mostly in the form of subsidized pensions. Each county-level government signed an “Arable Land Protection Contract” with each rural household, village group, and village. After the area of arable land had been registered and confirmed, farmland protection funds were issued. Shares of the Arable Land Protection Fund are distributed to households each year according to the number of mu of land, mainly to subsidize farmers’ pensions.35 Farmers were issued physical cards that provided tangible evidence of the link between property rights and social welfare benefits.

Aside from being linked to social welfare provision, property rights reforms were also seen as crucial to funding urban-rural integration (URI) project. As described in Chapter 2, URI was pitched as the Chengdu approach to rural development under the “Building a New Socialist Countryside” policy. This was seen (in Chengdu and elsewhere in China) as best pursued through the literal construction of new rural settlements. Concentrated villages, as opposed to more scattered settlement patterns, facilitate the provision of infrastructure and services. The remediation of former scattered homestead land also opens up “new” collective construction land (or agricultural land, if the land is converted). This logic informed the “concentrated resettlement” system (jizhong anzhi zhidu) established after the earthquake. Similar to the “demolishing small compounds to create large compounds” policy that the Chengdu government had been experimenting with prior to the quake, the “concentrated resettlement” system stipulated that, in places where houses were badly damaged during the earthquake, households that voluntarily left their residential land could receive houses of 35 m2 per person in concentrated settlements. But the earthquake-affected counties lay in the distant peri-urban reaches of Chengdu, not in the suburban counties where residential concentration could open up access to valuable development land. In certain peri-urban locations—for instance, the tourism hotspots in Dujiangyan—“new” land might

35 Subsidies were divided into first-class land (RMB 400 per mu) and second-class land (RMB 300 per mu). Under Chengdu’s rural pension system, with a one-time payment of RMB 10, 250 per person, women over 50 and men over 60 were able to receive a monthly pension of RMB 280. Men under 60 years of age and women under 50 could pay a yearly or monthly standard contribution, and could claim a monthly pension after 15 years of contributions. A rural medical insurance system was also established. Regardless of age, the annual payment covers both inpatient and outpatient treatments during the insurance period. Each person can choose to pay either RMB 40 per year or RMB 140 per year to combine with a subsidy of RMB 160 per year, and enjoy the corresponding level of medical insurance benefits.

81 attract investors for resort or real estate development. But in most peri-urban areas the creation of “new” land was not in itself a generator of value. Instead, what really served to finance the new planned settlements was the quasi-marketization of rural land through the “land ticket” (dipiao) system introduced as a pilot project in Chengdu and the nearby city of Chongqing.

The land ticket system is a variant of the “balanced rural-urban construction land-use scheme” (chengxiang jianshe yongdi zengjian guagou) introduced nationally in 2006 (Yuen, 2014). Recall that the National Land Use Master Plan limits the amount of agricultural land that can be converted to construction land—the so-called “red line”. Annual Land Use Plans determine land-use targets and assign conversion quotas for jurisdictions from the provincial to the township levels. The aim of these plans is farmland preservation; the amount of agricultural land that each jurisdiction must maintain is thus fixed. Similar to a carbon-trading scheme, the balanced land-use system allows county-level governments to offset increases in urban construction land by decreasing rural construction land (Long et al., 2012). This occurs largely through consolidating rural residents in planned villages. Once rural residents are relocated, their former homestead land can be converted from (rural) construction land to agricultural land. This process generates a net ‘gain’ by resettling villagers in housing that has less surrounding space (yards), and where possible, by constructing multi-level units. The newly reclaimed land (minus the land needed for the new concentrated residences) augments the total area of agricultural land belonging to the county, and gives them the ability to create more urban construction land while maintaining their total quota of agricultural land as laid out in the Annual Land Use Plan. But Chengdu’s land ticket system differs from the balanced land-use system in two key respects. First, while elsewhere in China the balanced land- use scheme relied on county-level governments to allocate land, the land ticket system in Chengdu and Chongqing is, ostensibly, a market-based system.36 Second, under the old balanced land use scheme, land transfer could only take place within a small territory, usually a single county. The new land ticket system allows land use rights to be transferred within the entire municipal region of

36 The state at various levels plays a key role in creating arable land and quota markets. According to Zhang, township governments generally organize the construction of the new villages, the allocation of housing, and relocation of villagers. Once that is done then demolition and farmland reclamation may be outsourced to private companies. The municipal government inspects the new farmland, and grants an agricultural land quota (gengdi mianji zhibiao, or just zhibiao). These agricultural land quotas are auctioned in newly established Rural Property Rights Exchanges, where the municipal government sets a base price. The base price for suburban land was set at RMB 300,000 per mu, while the base price for peri-urban land was set at RMB 150,000 per mu (J. Deng, 2010a).

Chengdu (Yuen 2014). As Yuan Xiao evocatively phrases it, the land ticket system “made land fly” from peri-urban to suburban counties.

We can see how this played out in the example of Tianma Township, widely cited in government, media, and academic accounts of Chengdu’s post-quake reconstruction process as an innovator in land-based reconstruction financing (Ge, 2010). Tianma lies about an hour’s drive north of urban Chengdu, in the jurisdiction of Dujiangyan. The township was one of the hardest hit areas in Dujiangyan after the Wenchuan Earthquake: 80 per cent of houses were damaged, and more than 30,000 people were in need of rehousing (J. Deng, 2010a). Tianma Township was one of the pilot sites for property rights reforms, and when the quake struck the 12 villages in the township were about one-third of the way through the property rights verification (quequan) process. At that time, the township mayor claimed, villagers didn’t feel that the process was particularly important. It was only after the quake that they realized how difficult it would have been to ascertain boundaries and receive compensation in the absence of property rights clarification. Less than a month and a half after the quake, the remaining two-thirds of property rights certificates were issued. The majority of the township’s residents chose the “plan together, build independently” (tonggui zijian) model. The new concentrated settlements, consisting of tidy rows of two-story houses with large garages on the lower level, were basically finished by the end of 2009. Through concentration, 1,835 mu of former village housing land was converted to agricultural land. Quotas for this “new” agricultural land were sold to Wenjiang District’s Land Reserve Center at a price of RMB 150,000 per mu. Purchasing arable land quotas in peri-urban Tianma Township allowed suburban Wenjiang District to pursue its own commercial development projects while also meeting its nationally- established arable land quota. The quota money was used to help Tianma residents rebuild: residents paid an average of RMB 20,000-40,000 per person for their new houses; the remainder was covered by government subsidies (RMB 16,000-20,000 per person) and quota sales (about RMB 15,000 per person) (J. Deng, 2010a).

It seems, as Wang Ximing suggests, to be a winning proposition for all parties: farmers get modern new homes at a subsidized price; village collectives get a new, one-time source of funds through selling arable land quotas; and the city government is able to both meet its New Countryside construction goals and promote development around the urban core. Zhang and Wu (2016) similarly describe the land ticket system as a successful policy innovation that allowed the Chengdu government to leverage rural land to improve rural public service provision. But while it is true that

83 the Chengdu government has made significant improvements to the rural social insurance system and investments in improving rural infrastructure, it is naïve to assess Chengdu’s property rights reforms without also considering how significantly the land ticket system increased the amount of developable land for the city. The Southern Weekly noted that in 2010, the national government set the total amount of newly available construction land at 6.4 million mu, with large western cities receiving an annual quota of only 30,000- 40,000 mu of construction land (J. Deng, 2010b). This is far from meeting local development needs. In 2010, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn settled in Chengdu, building an enormous manufacturing complex that covered an area of 15,000 mu (J. Deng, 2010b): such a project alone might consume half of the city’s annual construction quota.

There is thus a certain amount of pressure on the city government to find “new” land for development. In 2009 the Chengdu Bureau of Land and Resources issued the "White Paper on Comprehensive Land Management in Rural Areas of Chengdu (2009-2015)” (J. Deng, 2010b). According to the White Paper, Chengdu currently encompasses five million mu of agricultural land and 500,000 mu of construction land. Through concentrated resettlement, the Paper claims that 368, 000 mu of construction land can be transferred from peri-rural to urban or suburban areas. This is nearly ten times the nationally issued annual quota of 30,000-40,000 mu. But the White Paper also claims that such a land remediation project would require a total of at least RMB 86.6 billion of investment, or RMB 14.5 billion per year. There is no way for the government to cover this cost from their budget; only by drawing on funds raised through the land ticket system could the White Paper’s “comprehensive land management” scheme be realized.

In the context of Chengdu’s fuzzy “experimental” status, the White Paper should not be read (merely) as a “land management” plan, but as a bargaining tool in the city’s ongoing negotiation with the central government and the national Ministry of Land and Resources. As mentioned earlier, after the Wenchuan Earthquake, the national Ministry of Land and Resources gave the city permission to undertake a number of experiments with the land ticket system, including transferring quotas across counties and using the income from quota exchange for post-quake housing reconstruction without having to secure national approval. The city actively petitioned the Ministry for an extension of the special policy beyond 2010, but was turned down. This resulted in a frenzy of activity towards the end of 2010 that provoked the ire of leaders in Beijing (Y. Jiang, 2010). On November 16 2010, the Chengdu Land Bureau announced that beginning in 2011, any developer

84 seeking to undertake a real estate project in Chengdu must first acquire the corresponding area in rural land quotas. Developers could acquire quotas either by directly undertaking rural improvement projects (including demolition and reconstruction of new villages), or by purchasing quotas on the Chengdu Rural Property Exchange. Due to the difficulties associated with rural reconstruction work, almost all developers chose to purchase quotas. On December 17 the first land quotas were auctioned after an intense round of bidding. According to a journalist with the Economic Observer, 179 developers (and speculators) participated, purchasing 2000 mu of quotas with the average transaction price reaching RMB 730,000 per mu (nearly 5 times the starting price of RMB 150,000 per mu) (Y. Jiang, 2010). On December 24 2010 a research team from the national-level Ministry of Land and Resources arrived in Chengdu, and four days later, on December 28 2010, the Chengdu Rural Property Exchange issued a notice saying that the second round of bidding had been suspended. The Economic Observer reported that the reason for the suspension, according to the Chengdu Bureau of Land and Resources, was that Chengdu’s land ticket system violated the previously established “balanced land-use system” that authorized land use changes within a single county. Clearly Party leaders in Beijing had decided that Chengdu’s new land ticket market was exceeding its initial mandate.

4.5 A heated debate: growth vs. stability

It is not surprising, then, that the “Chengdu experiment” has sparked a heated debate, with a dividing line drawn roughly between economic liberals who view the clarification and commodification of individual property rights as crucial to rural and national development, and rural sociologists who see collective land rights as crucial to rural socio-economic stability and the continued survival of China’s “rural culture”. Two key protagonists in the Chengdu debate were Zhou Qiren, a UCLA-educated professor of economics based at the Beijing University National Development Research Institute, and He Xuefeng, a rural sociologist at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, where he directs the Centre for Rural Governance Studies. He and his colleagues are sometimes referred to as the xiangtu (earthbound) school of rural sociology.37 This group, particularly He Xuefeng and Wen Tiejun, had a great deal of influence

37 The xiangtu school draws its inspiration from China’s most famous sociologist, Fei Xiaotong, and the ethnographic studies of rural life that he carried out during the 1930s and 1940s. Like Fei, the xiangtu school stresses the importance

85 over discussions about China’s new rural reconstruction in the early 2000s. The debate between He and Zhou has ranged across a number of prominent magazines and websites, and acts as an important lens through which to examine the framing (and limitations) of current discussions about China’s rural property rights system and the future of rural development. More significantly for this discussion is the particular critique of the Chengdu land reforms that He Xuefeng develops over the course of his exchanges with Zhou Qiren.

In 2008 Zhou led a research team from Beijing University to investigate Chengdu’s land reforms, and in 2010 they published a report entitled, Restoring Rights and Bestowing Capabilities: A Report on Chengdu’s Exploration of Land System Reforms (Huanquan Funeng: Chengdu Tudi Zhidu Gaige Tansuo de Diaocha Yanjiu). The title itself, drawn from Chengdu’s own slogan for its rural property reforms, is indicative of the authors’ liberal economic stance: secure, individual land rights give farmers the “capability” to participate in the market and directly benefit from the value of land. But according to Zhou, Chengdu’s land rights system does not just benefit farmers: through the magic of the market, it generates value for “society” as a whole. Zhou and his colleagues explain this value creation as being fundamentally linked to the right to transfer property rights, rather than merely use property:

Property rights to capital only provide the possibility for increasing income; they don’t guarantee that higher production income will result. This is because although the resource owner may be willing, they may not be able. If they use their own capital to engage in production, in terms of technological or economic efficiency this may not be as effective as passing resource rights over to an outside expert. As anyone can easily understand, if the resource owner gets added income beyond what they could have produced themselves, and the outside expert also gets additional income beyond what they initially paid, then society’s overall income will increase as a result of the transfer of resources. Looked at in this light, although the use rights to resources and capital are important, the ability to transfer [my italics] these rights is even more important, because it’s only the latter that increases the specialization and division of labour and sustains the widespread increase in income under this system (Beijing Daxue Guojia Fazhan Yanjiuyuan Zonghe Ketizu (Study Group on China’s Land Reform, National School of Development, Beijing University), 2010, p. 84).

of long-term, committed research in rural areas, and emphasizes the distinctiveness of the Chinese peasant economy and society.

Based on this logic, Zhou and his colleagues claim that “bestowing capabilities” is more important than “returning rights”. The “capabilities” in the title of the report is thus used in a very restricted sense to refer to the “capability” to transfer rights to an “outside expert” (wailai de gaoshou) who will put rural resources to higher-value uses. In the end, Zhou and his team come out in full support of Chengdu’s experiments, and argue they provide a model for other areas of how to leverage rural land resources.

Unsurprisingly, He Xuefeng produces a rather different assessment of the Chengdu experiment. At the end of 2010 He published a book, The Logic of Land Rights: Whither China’s Rural Land System? (Diquan de Luoji: Zhongguo Nongcun Tudi Zhidu Xiang Hechu Qu). One chapter of the book criticizes Chengdu’s reforms, claiming that Chengdu’s land reform model is not transferrable to other areas, and may not be sustainable in the long run (X. He, 2010). He characterizes officials as suffering from “utopian” thinking, and suggests that farmers, once given the “capability” to sell their land, will lose both land and livelihood security. When He’s critique was brought to his attention, Zhou wrote a scathing editorial piece entitled, “Can giving farmers greater land rights really harm their interests?”, in which he claims that He’s analysis is founded on scant empirical evidence and adopts a “lifeless logic” (siji luoji) to understand market dynamics (Q. Zhou, 2011). Zhou argues that not all farmers are interested in selling their land, and as prices change according to supply and demand, they themselves can decide whether or not it is profitable to sell their land. He Xuefeng responded to these charges in the unambiguously titled piece, “Why Zhou Qiren's views of property rights are wrong”. He insists that in the short term, laws of supply and demand dominate when it comes to determining rural land prices in Chengdu, and the government’s rapid creation of a new supply of commercially available rural land must necessarily result in lower prices (X. He, 2013a). Moreover, making a Polanyian argument without citing Polanyi, He also points out that land differs from other commodities in being immovable. Land with locational advantages, such as the suburban areas of Chengdu or the rural areas around the Dujiangyan Tourism Area, will be able to command a high price for tourism and commercial real estate development. But the majority of rural land will not be able to command such a high price (X. He, 2013a).

Perhaps more interesting than this intellectual tit-for-tat is the comprehensive critique of the “Chengdu model” that He Xuefeng develops as a result of these exchanges. Elaborating on what he means by saying that giving farmers greater land rights will harm their interests, He admits that

87 there are drawbacks to smallholder farming on scattered plots of land, and that there is a strong need for the coordinating production among households. But He points out that the village collectives can overcome many of these problems through organizing joint irrigation projects or investing in capital (like tractors) that might be beyond the scope of a single family. However, since the national abolition of agricultural taxes, the village collectives have been unable to collect fees for these types of projects. Moreover, with the strengthening of individual property rights, it has become more difficult to achieve consensus about the disposal of village land, particularly since many land rights holders migrate out of the village for work. He describes this stalemate as a “tragedy of the anti-commons”.

He is also critical about the logic that increasing the scale of agricultural production under specialized agribusinesses and focusing on high-profit cash crops will automatically generate higher incomes for farmers:

Does the Chinese government's policy not allow farmers to grow more cash crops today? The problem in Chengdu is not in whether to allow more cash crops to be cultivated, the problem lies in government officials mistakenly thinking that as long as rural land rights are clarified, as long as land is allowed to circulate, as long as farming operations can be scaled up, as long as loans, investment, and capital are present, as long as cash crops are planted, then farmers can become rich. On this basis they use administrative measures to promote rural land rights clarification and high-risk cash crops. This judgement is wrong, and promoting the circulation of rural land in the hopes of improving farmers’ incomes based on such an erroneous assessment will necessarily fail. Whether to plant cash crops or not, whether cash crops will earn more profits, farmers themselves can make these decisions— they are the actual subjects of the market economy (X. He, 2013a).

The government, according to He, is mistaking the farmers’ logical risk aversion for ignorance. The participation of large-scale agribusinesses in cash crops does not reduce the risk of such crops, particularly if they are being grown for a global export market (as was the case in several of my research sites, where kiwis were being cultivated for export). Making farmers dependent on such monocropping practices, even under the management of a “modern” agribusiness, only increases the uncertainty of their future income streams.

He Xuefeng also critiques the government’s attempt to equalize land income through the land ticket system, which allows arable land quotas in distant peri-urban areas to stand in for arable land in suburban areas. He points out that it is this artificial system, which itself is intended to address the regulatory scarcity created by the central government’s “red line” policy, that is generating wealth,

88 rather than market liberalization and Zhou Qiren’s “experts” and “division and specialization of labour.” He points out that the government borrows the language of the market, but not the actual mechanisms. As a result, He argues that currently in Chengdu, it is not the market that dominates, but the state:

Overall, Chengdu is trying to undertake land reform by promoting land circulation à scaling up farming operations à planting cash crops and releasing farmer's homestead land à auctioning land à building commodity housing. This is typical government conduct, not business behavior. The government pursues short-term bureaucratic performance goals38, while enterprises pursue long-term interests. The Chengdu government hopes to promote these two lines of radical land reform in Chengdu; they are not slowly and naturally allowing market forces to allocate resources, but rather trying to use state power to promote short term reform, and at the same time they make a big show of rural land circulation and the release of homestead land. The problem is that farmers and entrepreneurs will not be fooled. So I think that Chengdu leaders are being unrealistic (X. He, 2013a).

Part of He’s argument, in effect, is that the Chengdu government has not actually created “real” markets for either rural construction land or agricultural land quotas. The Chengdu government is hoping to pass the cost of its urban-rural integration project on to developers by requiring them to buy quotas in order to develop land. But both Zhang and Wu (2017) and Xiao (2015) observe that the main buyers of these quotas are not developers, but county-level governments in the Chengdu metropolitan area (mostly the suburban counties). And, as Xiao (2015) notes, these local governments have very different policies towards industrial developers in comparison to residential or commercial developers. Commercial and residential development is booming in China, and these sectors have a fairly inelastic demand when it comes to location. By contrast, cities and counties compete fiercely for industrial development, and try to entice industrial development by offering cheap land and services. Thus while the city government requires residential and commercial developers to purchase quotas prior to developing a piece of land, it purchases quotas itself to attract industry. But residential and commercial development account for only 10 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively, of newly converted urban land in China each year, while industrial development accounts for more than half (Y. Xiao, 2015, p. 20). This means that local

38 When He talks of the short-term bureaucratic performance goals, he is referring to the internal promotion system within the Party and government apparatus, whereby the performances of individual cadres officials are assessed through metrics that prioritize economic growth figures and large flagship projects.

89 governments (either the city government or the county-level governments) end up paying the bulk of the quota fees. Most of these transactions occur through Urban Development Investment Corporations (UDICs), quasi-private corporations established by local governments to obtain loans from state banks. Thus rather than being financed by developers, rural development in Chengdu may effectively be financed through local government debt.

This is the background for He’s primary conclusion, namely that the Chengdu experiment is neither fiscally sustainable nor replicable in other areas of China (where the urban real estate market is not as “hot” as in Chengdu). But in other ways, He stops short of making a more general critique of rural urbanization. In a long article on the leftist website “Red Culture Network”, He Xuefeng elaborates further on the Chengdu urban-rural integrated development model by characterizing it as being based on land as the medium (yi tudi wei meijie) and linking urban and rural construction land (the land ticket system) as the main policy tool (yi chengxiang jianshe yongdi zengjian guagou wei zhuyao zhengce gongju) (X. He, 2013b). In other words, the Chengdu government is trying to rely on the commodification of rural land through quota trading to fund its rural development projects. But ultimately He believes that it is not necessary or desirable to reform the existing rural property rights system. In place of the existing Chengdu model, He proposes an urban-rural integrated development model with “planning as the medium and direct transfer payments as the main policy tool” (yi guihua wei mejie; yi zhuanyi zhifu wei zhengce gongju). Interestingly, He does not object to the construction of concentrated rural settlements per se- he sees these as having the potential to promote a gentle transition to an urban-based society. He does stress that relocation into planned communities should be voluntary and gradual. But the question is not merely one of farmers’ rights, He claims, it is also a question of giving China a mechanism for dealing with crisis by making sure that rural areas continue to act as “stabilizers and reservoirs” for China’s modernization.

To summarize, one part of He Xuefeng’s critique of the Chengdu experiment centers on the government’s promotion of large-scale agribusiness and cash crops. Here He makes no radical critique of the market: as “market subjects”, farmers are equally as rational as the agri- entrepreneurs the Chengdu government wants to foster, and should be allowed to act in the market without the “artificial” interference of the state’s agricultural modernization project. The other part of He Xuefeng’s critique focuses on the problems with land markets and the land-based financing of rural development, either through the direct sale of land or the sale of quotas. Direct land sales in

90 a “free” market will mean that the price of land is driven down as rural land floods the market under Chengdu’s urban-rural integration drive. Moreover, because of the variable distribution of locational advantages, direct land sales have the possibility for exacerbating inequality throughout the metropolitan area. On the other hand, the “artificially” constructed, state-dominated land ticket (dipiao) markets mean that quota sales do not actually succeed in transferring the costs of rural development from the state to developers. What is significant about this stance is that even a “leftist” critic like He Xuefeng (as opposed to “liberal” like Zhou Qiren) has accepted the inevitable logics of rural urbanization and marketization.

4.6 Can urban and rural development be “integrated”?

Since the adoption of the urban-rural integration (URI) policy in 2003, the Chengdu government had been wrestling with the problem of funding rural development. Rural property rights reforms were pitched as a way to leverage the “silent capital” embedded in rural land. But the commodification of rural land remains a politically sensitive issue, and it was not until the city was designated a pilot site for urban and rural integrated planning in 2007 that headway could be made with rural property reforms in a handful of village-level experiments. The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake aggravated the need for funds for rural development and provided a further justification for property reforms. Property reforms involved two stages: clarifying and assigning property rights (que quan), and developing markets for new rights. This involved not just direct sales of rural land rights, but also a more immaterial “land ticket” system that allowed agricultural land in peri- urban areas to stand in for agricultural land in the suburban counties. The partial commodification of rural land through the land ticket system allowed the city to have its cake and eat it too—to meet rural reconstruction goals and also pursue intensive urban development. But these reforms were also clearly a step towards the marketization of rural land in Chengdu, and an effort to reorganize rural spaces to satisfy the demands of the real estate market.

The Chengdu government made great efforts to legitimize these reforms by demonstrating the voluntary, “grassroots” nature of the reforms, as well as the ways in which the reforms contributed to rural development and the improvement of rural welfare systems. Visual artifacts like the “fish scale map” and the “five certificates and one card” were an important part of this legitimation process. As He Xuefeng’s critique suggests, though, the Chengdu government’s attempt to fund rural development through the commodification of rural land may be undermining the longer-term

91 viability of collective agriculture in China. Lin Chun (2013, p. 141) claims that it is “naïve or deliberately deceptive” on the part of Chinese liberal reformers to imagine assigning property rights can protect farmers or offer them a “fair share” of urban development. Historically, she points out, such moves towards land privatization only result in the concentration of land in the hands of real estate gamblers or agroindustrial capitalists (Ibid.).

My claim here is not that the Chengdu government’s interest in rural development was “false”, but rather that we need to examine the claims that the two goals—urban development and rural development—are complementary. Property rights reforms—particularly the land ticket system— have already had a significant impact on Chengdu’s peri-urban landscapes, linking development in the urban core and suburban counties to agricultural land in the city’s rural hinterlands. This is a form of urbanization that ties peri-urban areas more closely to political and economic imperatives originating in the urban core. But the rural property rights markets were not the only way that peasants’ relations to the land were reconfigured. The following chapter examines more intimate, small-scale forms of investment in rural property, as well as efforts to remake rural economies.

Chapter 5

5 "We give thanks to the quake”: accelerating rural economies in post-quake Chengdu

Post-quake reconstruction and property rights reforms have helped speed up development in rural Chengdu by twenty years.

-- Mayor of Daguan Township

Reconstruction has sped up development by twenty years.

--Wang Quan, resident of Chaping Village, Daguan Township

5.1 Overview

Post-quake Chaping Village challenged my stark images of rural China. With smooth new roads winding through lushly forested hills and past large single-family homes, Chaping could have been a prosperous American suburb (Figure 11). My guide, local resident Wang Quan, was clearly proud of the place. “Here we say, ‘We give thanks to the quake,’” he declared. Then, after a slight pause, he continued, “I was the first to say that” (Wang, September 26 2010, Personal Interview).39 Perhaps Wang was thinking—in light of the widespread media attention that Chaping had received—that I had heard the phrase before, and he was eager to assert his originality. Located in the tourism belt around Dujiangyan, the village proper covers an area of 3.5 km2 and has a population of about 572 people (Liangjun Zhang, 2011). Although there were no casualties in Chaping as a result of the quake, most of the village’s 147 houses needed to be rebuilt: 14 houses collapsed, 81 were seriously damaged, and 52 were moderately damaged (Liangjun Zhang, 2011). In order to rebuild, Chaping’s residents adopted an experimental approach of “joint reconstruction”

39 The couplet posted on either side of the door to Wang’s new home reads: “When the quake destroyed homes, the Party’s policies came to the rescue/ The people of Chaping love the [high] standards of their small villas” (Da dizhen hui jiayuan dang de zhengce lai jienan/ xiao bieshu biaozhun jian Chaping baixing hao xihuan). Above the door is the phrase, “A new life after the disaster” (zaihou xin sheng) (Peng Sun, 2010).

(lianjian) through attracting “social funding” (shehui zijin), and thereby made the village a widely cited model in Chengdu’s post-quake reconstruction project (S. Chen, 2009; Liang, 2008; T. Ma, 2009; Liangjun Zhang, 2011).

Figure 11: New homes in Chaping Village (photo by author)

According to newspaper accounts and interviews, the lianjian approach arose spontaneously out of a relationship between Wang Quan and Zhang Zhonggui, a businessman from the nearby city of Pengzhou (also a quake-affected part of the Chengdu metropolitan area). Prior to the earthquake, Zhang Zhonggui had a habit of driving out to Chaping Village to buy pork from Wang Quan. Zhang had always enjoyed his country visits, and had talked about building a retirement home for his parents there. So when Chengdu’s rural property rights reforms were announced and Wang was given the title to his homestead land, Wang called up Zhang to propose a plan. Wang would lease part of his land to Zhang to build a house, and in return, Zhang would pay for the reconstruction of Wang’s house. Wang’s house and yard now cover an area of 132 m2, and Zhang Zhonggui’s house occupies the remaining 100 m2 of Wang’s homestead land (T. Ma, 2009; Liangjun Zhang, 2011). After Wang’s success, aside from one family that chose to rebuild themselves and a few that only required minor repairs, the remainder of the village’s quake- affected households chose lianjian

(Liangjun Zhang, 2011). While the development of the lianjian approach may not be quite as spontaneous as Wang Quan’s narrative implies, it is not an entirely misleading account how particular individuals attempted to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the policy flexibility around rural property rights that characterized the post-quake moment in Chengdu.

Over 2000 of these lianjian projects were carried out in Chengdu’s quake affected rural areas, attracting RMB 5 billion in “social funds” (Ge, 2010). Chaping Village’s project alone reportedly attracted RMB 100 million in “social funds”—not an insignificant sum for a small village (Ibid.). This chapter explores the genesis of the lianjian approach in Chaping as well as some of its longer- term impacts on rural residents. I argue that although the scale of the projects seems relatively small in the overall reconstruction project, the implications for local rural landscapes and livelihoods are significant. Moreover, the fact that Chaping was touted as a model of reconstruction is indicative of the tourism- and real estate-based future that many state actors envision for China’s rural areas. Finally I ask what we might gain by looking at reconstruction in Chaping through the lens of “accumulation by dispossession.”

5.2 Contextualizing the lianjian approach

The lianjian, or “joint reconstruction,” approach was one of six options for rebuilding damaged houses in Chengdu’s rural areas, which included:

(1) repairing mildly damaged houses

(2) voluntary relocation (to another town or city) after a one-time payment for homestead land use rights

(3) rebuilding independently on the original homestead site

(4) “unified planning, independent construction” (tonggui, zijian), or rebuilding independently in a new residential settlement in accordance with the village plan

(5) “unified planning, unified construction” (tonggui, tongjian), or rebuilding collectively in a new, concentrated residential settlement in accordance with the village plan

(6) “joint reconstruction” (lianjian), or rebuilding on the original homestead land through attracting “social funds” (shehui zijin)

Unlike the “unified planning” approach of Luping Village in Chapter 3, the last option, lianjian, did not require farmers to move into planned settlements. However, like the concentrated settlements, lianjian was made possible through Chengdu’s rural property rights reforms. Under lianjian, once

95 farmers were assigned the title to their homestead land, they could lease part of their construction use rights to an outside buyer (or small group of buyers), generally for a period of 40 years.

The buyers often built single-family summer vacation homes, as in the case of Wang Quan and Zhang Zhonggui, though sometimes a group of urban buyers pooled their money together to build a multi-family building (Liang, 2008). Not all transactions are on such an intimate scale; the largest buyer in Chaping is the Chengdu-based China Construction Technology Group Co., Ltd. In October 2008, the company entered into land transfer contracts with 35 farmers in Chaping Village in the form of a group purchase: 35 households arranged for the transfer of 23.35 mu of collective construction land, of which about 3 mu was used to resettle farmers, and 20.35 mu of which was transferred to the company for the development of tourism projects (Liangjun Zhang, 2011). In this case, the lianjian approach operated similarly to the unified planning approach, with residents being moved into a concentrated settlement. In general though, the lianjian relationships were established between a single buyer and a single seller. There is no visually identifiable difference between the houses built for the farmers and the houses built for the urban buyers. In Chaping, this has resulted in a landscape of twinned villas, small apartment complexes, and modern hotels along the sides of the new road.

Though this paired housing situation seems like an oddly intimate configuration—physically, socially, and financially speaking—there were socio-spatial and legal-institutional precedents for this arrangement. The rural areas around Chengdu have been pioneers in a form of tourism known as “rural homestays” (nongjiale, literally rural home delight) over the past two decades. These homestays involve rural households opening up their homes to urban guests (for a fee), and providing them with “home-style” food and lodging. In Chengdu, a nongjiale visit is a fairly passive activity; in the words of a popular saying, urban residents simply like to get out of the city to “look at wildflowers, eat rustic food, and play mahjong” (kankan yehua, chichi yecai, dada majiang). Choon-Hwan Park (2014) writes that this new form of tourism reflects recent shifts in the cultural register of rural-urban relations in China since economic reform. In the eyes of contemporary urbanites, the old associations of rural areas with “feudal backwardness” are receding, and being replaced by a nostalgic view of the rural as a repository of values that are authentic, familial, and ecologically sustainable (Ibid.). Chengdu’s nongjiale range in style and and professionalism: at one suburban site I visited— touted as the first nongjiale in all of China—a new “rustic” hotel has been built in a traditional courtyard-style layout, with both a museum for farm

96 implements and technological facilities for hosting conferences. At the opposite end of the spectrum are rural residents who simply rent out spare rooms in their otherwise “modern” houses, though generally nowadays the houses and rooms are purpose-built for rural homestays. Thus the idea of “hosting” an urban family would not have seemed a strange idea for Chaping residents.

The other precedent for the lianjian approach is the national phenomenon of “minor property rights housing” (xiao chanquan fang). Recall that urban development can only occur through the state’s requisition of rural land and subsequent conversion of that land to state-owned urban construction land. This has resulted in conflicts with rural collectives in suburban areas, where residents are unable to capture much of the new value of their land. To circumvent this system, individual rural households and collectives in suburban areas have been leasing land (illegally) to developers for housing construction. This housing is “minor” only in the sense that buyers may have a title to the apartment, but no legal right to occupy the land it sits on. The developments themselves can be physically quite large—often apartment complexes housing hundreds or thousands of residents. Despite their legal ambiguity, minor property rights houses have been playing an increasingly significant role in urban property markets over the past two decades: a July 2007 report by the Xinhua News Agency estimated that fully 18 per cent of the 400 residential developments then on sale in Beijing were minor property rights projects. Buyers of minor property rights housing appeared to hope that their property rights would eventually be recognized by law (Pils, 2009, pp. 40–41). But this hope foundered in the summer of 2007, when minor property rights housing became a hot topic nationwide.

Minor property rights housing is generally sold below the going market price, causing some authors to suggest that the popularity of these legally gray apartments is driven by a high demand for low- cost housing in China’s largest cities (Xiaoqiao Wang, 2007). While it is true that housing prices in urban China have been rising faster than incomes—between 2004 and 2009, housing prices in China tripled (Ding, Chong, & Park, 2014)—the demand for minor property rights housing is driven as much by speculative investment as a need for housing as such. With no sustained downturn since the creation of a private urban housing market in the 1990s, real estate appears to represent a much more reliable store of value for China’s wealthy than the limited and volatile stock exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen (Chovanec, 2010). Patrick Chovanec (2009), a professor at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management, also points out that the absence of any annual property tax in China means that the holding costs for idle property are

97 minimal. It is this demand for real estate as an investment vehicle, he argues, that is behind China’s infamous “ghost towns”—vast, empty new housing complexes that can be found across the country, in large and small cities alike. Concerned both by the potential for a bubble in the housing market, as well as loss of control over the conversion of arable land, in June 2007 the Ministry of Construction issued a “risk warning” related to the purchase of minor property rights housing. Two weeks later, the Head of the Beijing Bureau of Land and Resources announced that an investigation into minor property rights housing and other illegal construction had begun (Xiaoqiao Wang, 2007).

The situation was even more complex in Chengdu, where in 2007 it was estimated that minor property rights housing made up 20 per cent (J. Yang & Wang, 2007) to 30 per cent (P. Wu, 2007) of the commercial housing market. The substantial role of minor property rights housing was partly the result of deliberate municipal policy ambiguity. By 2007, the city had already embarked on its urban-rural integration project, including land consolidation and rural residential concentration in suburban areas. Many collectives and township governments were approaching developers and investors directly to lease collective construction land (without going through the legally required steps of state land acquisition and conversion) in exchange for building new concentrated villages (J. Yang & Wang, 2007). This resulted in an explosion of new residential complexes in suburban Chengdu. But many actors in the municipal government—for the reasons cited above—seemed wary of this development. Shortly after the designation of the city as a national “pilot site” for urban and rural integrated planning in July 2007, the Chengdu Bureau of Land and Resources issued the “Measures for managing the transfer of Chengdu collective construction land use rights (trial)” (J. Yang & Wang, 2007). The “Measures” stipulated that after concentration, collective construction land rights could enter the land index market (under the supervision of county- and municipal-level government departments). Collective construction land that entered the market this way could not be used for commercial real estate projects, but became in other ways comparable to urban construction land (i.e. it could be used for other industrial, tourism, and commercial purposes) (Ibid.).

Feng Zongrong, an economist at Sichuan University, framed this new ability to use collective land as urban construction land as an “icebreaker” that would allow “rural land resources to solve the problem of rural development” (J. Yang & Wang, 2007). But in light of the thorny problem of limited property rights housing, the “Measures” also represented an effort to limit the potential for a

98 local real estate bubble by allowing other forms of development on collective land. In September 2007 the Chengdu Land and Resources, Housing, Construction, and Planning Bureaus announced that they were studying ways to address already-built minor property rights housing, but made no official statement for or against minor property rights (Ibid.). The Chengdu government’s apparent policy of accepting these lapses in order to facilitate its urban-rural integration project lent these projects a “quasi-legal” status (P. Wu, 2007). Buyers assumed that the government would accept minor property rights housing as a fait accompli in order to avoid the social unrest that demolitions might provoke (J. Yang & Wang, 2007). The lianjian policy was thus an opportunity for addressing a phenomenon that was already growing in rural Chengdu, and would likely have increased in light of farmers’ pressing need for funds after the quake.

But while the initial limited property rights housing developments were located in suburban areas, the post-quake lianjian projects were in peri-urban areas. These areas were too far from the city center—or too poorly connected—to make them attractive for commercial real estate development. Instead, small-scale vacation and retirement housing for urban residents predominated, as in the case of Wang Quan and his urban partner Zhang Zhonggui. This form of lianjian development was also shaped by Chaping Village’s natural and manmade locational advantages: Chaping is located in the green and pleasant hills near the satellite city of Dujiangyan, an area that was designated as an ecological and tourism zone in Chengdu’s “Garden City” Plan. Prior to the quake, residents in the area were already participating in an informal tourism economy by operating rural homestays. After the quake, Dujiangyan was paired with the city of Shanghai as a reconstruction partner. One of the main projects funded and managed by the Shanghai government was a new high-speed train to Chengdu, which reduced travel time between Chengdu and Dujiangyan to about half an hour. The mayor of Daguan Township, where Chaping Village is located, claimed that the development of these new transportation links, along with the new transfer mechanisms for rural land, was the most significant post-quake change for Daguan. He envisioned the new high-speed train as a means of transforming the township into a residential satellite community for the city.

The entrepreneurial Daguan township mayor himself has been an important factor in shaping Chaping’s development. While China’s villages are led by locally-elected leaders, the township mayors are appointed from Party ranks and generally come from outside the county (Daguan’s mayor is originally from Chongqing, the other city-region designated as a pilot zone for urban and rural overall planning and rural property rights reforms). The behavior of local officials and cadres

99 is to a large extent motivated by a centrally-mandated evaluation system that determines salary bonuses and promotions. The indicators in this evaluation system shift over time and across geographical regions, but the primary or “hard” indicators since economic reform have centered on economic development, local income levels, birth control, and social stability (Heberer & Trappel, 2013, p. 1056). Aside from simply meeting the evaluation requirements, ambitious county, township, and even village leaders will often attempt to create new policy models for emulation elsewhere in the country (Ibid.). This means that local cadres and officials often focus on growth figures and flagship projects at the expense of “softer” and less quantifiable social and environmental concerns. Moreover, in the wake of the quake, government cadres at all levels viewed reconstruction as a “once-in-a-career” opportunity for attracting funds and modernizing their jurisdictions (Sorace 2014, p. 406). However, not all officials and cadres are eligible for promotion, a favour that is generally reserved for the relatively young and well educated. Daguan’s Mayor Hu, a slight, polished man in his early forties who had published a number of books and articles related to rural property rights reforms, appeared fit the bill of the upwardly mobile local official.

I was introduced to Mayor Hu through a friend who had met him at a private gathering in Chengdu, where the mayor had been trying to drum up investment from wealthy urbanites. During our discussion at a restaurant in Daguan, the mayor was particularly keen on talking about the new possibilities opened up through rural land transfer (liuzhuan). He listed new agri-business as a key arena for development, explaining that in Daguan Township (as in Cifeng Township, described in Chapter 3), one of the main cash crops is kiwifruit. Village collectives have an arrangement with a Shanghai company through which they ship the entire crop to Shanghai at a fixed price. There are two possible contract types for farmers: they can get a fixed sum from the company, or they can get a share of profits. Farmers prefer the former; although money is less, they prefer to avoid risk. Hu said this is a good example of why the new land arrangements were good. Because kiwi trees take three years to mature before you get a crop, individual farmers would be unlikely to plant on their own. Hu praised post quake reconstruction and property rights reform as a great help to farmers, declaring that together these two phenomena have helped “speed up the development process by twenty years,” a line I heard repeated frequently throughout the quake-affected areas. But the agribusiness contracts that Mayor Hu described were already becoming widespread in other areas of China without the aid property rights reforms. In fact, Zhang and Donaldson (2008) argue in

100 favour of the pre-existing rural property rights system, suggesting that the restrictions on complete alienability from collective ownership provide farmers with a significant degree of control during China’s agricultural modernization process.

Chengdu’s property rights reforms, and the legal gray space associated with both policy experimentation and post-quake reconstruction, were crucial to the other projects the mayor was pursuing. The mayor’s vision for Daguan and Chaping, in line with Chengdu’s Garden City Plan, was as a luxury housing and leisure retreat a comfortable half-hour ride from Chengdu. Plans for a Dutch-style residential area, complete with canals and windmills, were posted along the side of the road. In addition to the new housing development, the mayor claimed that he was also in the process of organizing the construction of three new golf courses to augment the township’s existing golf course. Under the direction of the Chengdu Planning Bureau, Chaping Village has undertaken its own 12th five-year plan for tourism, which includes the construction of a “beer corridor” along the river and the development of rock climbing facilities. The most important aspect of the plan is a road that will reach to the other side of the mountain, making Chaping accessible to visitors to the popular Puzhao Temple. With the support of the Daguan Township government, an entrepreneur from Daguan has established the Chaping Investment Management Group Ltd. (Chaping Touzi Guanli Youxian Gongsi) in order to undertake the tourism-related development, with Chaping Village as 15 per cent shareholder in the new company. For the mayor, Chaping’s lianjian projects represented only a small fraction of the new possibilities opened up through rural property rights reform.

5.3 Anything but “free”

After speaking with the mayor I met Wang Quan, the first peasant to undertake joint reconstruction, at the modern tourism reception centre by the road leading to the Chaping Village. The centre features large photos of the property rights certificates for some of the village’s joint construction partners, as well as a large diorama of the new village (Figure 12). Property rights reform is clearly being billed a key moment in the community’s developmental history. More than that though, the large posters are an effort to legitimize the assignation of household-level property rights and the lianjian system. This is particularly important in the context of the legally gray minor property rights housing that was then becoming an issue elsewhere in Chengdu. When I asked Wang what the biggest change since the quake has been, he responded that incomes and lives have improved,

101 and repeated the claim that the quake had “advanced development in the village by twenty years.” Then he gave some examples: “The two things farmers used to worry about most were getting sick and buying a house. If your luck was good, you could save for years and build a house. If your luck was bad, those savings would be used to pay for an illness.” Now, Wang said, over ninety per cent of people are covered by health insurance. Previously, in order to buy a house, farmers would have to save up for years. These days they can build a new house even if they don’t have the cash at hand. Incomes are much higher, and farmers can even think about going on a vacation somewhere. “But the biggest change,” he said, “is in people’s thinking. Outsiders are coming in. Now people are more confident when they talk; they often even talk to the media.”

Figure 12: Chaping Village Tourist Centre, left, and property rights certificates in the Chaping Village Tourist Centre (photo by author)

It would be easy to disparage Wang’s parroting of the more-or-less official line that the quake “sped up development by twenty years”, and the ways that Wang has benefitted personally from reconstruction through his new house and informal position as the media spokesperson for the village. But the two key concerns he identifies—housing and social welfare—are key parts of Chengdu’s urban-rural integration approach, and help explain the relative ease with which the policy has been unrolled in rural areas. The lianjian system has indeed given Chaping residents “free” houses, built to standards that would previously have been inconceivable for most rural families. The small scale of most of these transactions, as well as the language of “social funding” (shehui zijin) as opposed to “investment” (touzi), contributes to the impression that lianjian

102 relationships represent a helping hand extended to rural residents by their charitable urban counterparts. Even He Xuefeng, the vocal opponent to the commodification of rural property rights discussed in Chapter 3, suggests that as an extra supplement to reconstruction, Chaping’s lianjian model is probably “harmless” (X. He, 2013b). But I suggest that the impacts of the lianjian approach are deeper than He Xuefeng’s dismissive assessment would suggest, and that the new houses are anything but “free”. First, the full long-term costs of the new houses have not been fully accounted for. Perhaps more significantly though, Chaping’s new houses are part of a wider re- valuation of the rural landscape in Chengdu that is altering farmers’ relationships with land and urban capital.

Chaping’s houses are not “free” in the sense that they entailed no monetary cost for farmers. While farmers who adopted the lianjian approach did not have to pay for the construction of their houses, the “high standards” of the new villas bound them to a higher-consumption, higher-cost lifestyle. An assessment of post-quake Chaping by the Chengdu-based environmental NGO, the Chengdu Urban Rivers Association (CURA), notes that with the rise in incomes and living standards since the quake, farmers’ lifestyles have become increasingly urbanized (Gu, 2010). Many residents now have the four connections (si tong) associated with urban life: internet, natural gas, telephone, and cable TV. But, as in the Northern Chinese model eco-village described by Shannon May (2011), the benefits of centrally provided services are accompanied by the costs of regular cash payments. In Chaping, natural gas costs alone added RMB 25 per month to residents’ living costs, plus installation and repair costs. Gu Lei, the author of the CURA report, noted that many lower-income families had already started to resort back to outdoor stoves and fires. Moreover, despite the modern appearance of the houses, the urbanization and service provision process is in many ways incomplete. In Gu’s colonially inflected language, “the top [of the house] looks like Europe, the bottom looks like Africa”. There is no central sewerage system, but rather individual septic tanks. Residential concentration and tourism projects exacerbate the problems associated with this piecemeal approach to sewage treatment, contributing to surface water eutrophication as well as groundwater contamination in cases where substandard septic tanks are buried directly underground. Waste management has also become an issue; instead of being a resource in the rural energy cycle, solid waste now represents yet another cost for residents. Both the monetary and environmental costs of the new villas are proving to be a heavy burden for residents.

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Chaping’s houses are also not “free” in the sense of offering farmers freedom of disposal over their land—one of the key arguments cited by proponents of rural property rights reforms. On the one hand, the lianjian arrangement appears to give farmers more autonomy than the concentrated resettlement approach: they can rebuild on their original homestead land without having to relocate to a planned village. On the other hand, farmers become newly dependent on relations with urban buyers. Despite the apparent equality in the appearance of the houses, and the position of the farmer as the original holder of property rights, relations between the two parties resemble more closely those between worker and employer than landlord and tenant. This is evident in the language used to talk about the lianjian arrangement: farmers refer to the urban homeowners as “laoban” (bosses), and finding a reconstruction partner was called “zhao laoban” (looking for a boss) (Liangjun Zhang, 2011) Although farmers are providing a valuable resource—land—there is a lingering perception that they are indebted to urban buyers. This is reinforced by the fact that after the initial transaction, farmers often act as property managers for the absentee urban homebuyer and receive a salary for this work. Moreover, when the buyers are staying in their villas, farmers also perform other service work for them, including cleaning and cooking.

In some ways this reflects practices in the existing “rural homestays” mentioned above. But in Chaping, as in other quake-affected areas, there was a movement underway to professionalize rural homestays and develop local tourism resources through a mix of government-led initiatives and private investment. In 2009 Chaping Village signed an agreement with the Chengdu-based Hongjie Travel and Holiday Company (Hongjie Lvyou Jiadu Gongsi) to jointly establish the snappily titled Chaping Segel Rural Holiday Chain Inn Service Management Company (Chaping Saige’er Xiangcun Lvyou Dujia Liansuo Kezhan Fuwu Guanli Gongsi) (Chengdu Investment Promotion Commission, 2009). The joint venture was celebrated as a “breakthrough in the history of nongjiale (rural homestays), for the first time bringing the “business hotel” (shangwu jiudian) model to rural tourism”.40 Under the new “chain” or “retail” model, farmers provide rooms in their house in exchange for either a fixed fee or a share of profits. In an article on the Invest Chengdu website, Daguan Township Party Secretary Chai Lin describes a “depressing” pre-quake survey of

40 China’s “business hotel” chains have exploded in popularity over the past two decades, supplementing what was previously an erratic menu of decrepit state-run hostels and international five-star hotels with moderately priced, standardized hotels that provide identical accommodation from Beijing to Lhasa.

104 the state of the local tourism industry (Chengdu Investment Promotion Commission, 2009). The survey revealed that, as a result of vicious competition, the highest price for a nongjiale room was RMB 23 a day. At that rate, he claims, service standards were low and visitors had many complaints. The new Chaping Rural Chain Inn Company offers a means of both improving service and resolving the problem of competition between households. The company manages marketing, online booking, centralized reception, and catering. The company also sets prices (RMB 100 per day), and assures that “star-rated hotel” (xingji jiudian) standards are met in terms of the design of the rooms, the facilities available, and the services provided (S. Chen, 2009).

Secretary Chai claimed that eventually 100 households would be involved in the project, with over 1500 rooms available (S. Chen, 2009). Clearly not all of these are single-family operations renting out a spare room or two (or fifteen, as these figures would imply). Some former nongjiale proprietors established purpose-built hotels after the quake. I visited one “Chaping Rural Chain Inn” that had been established in the expanded home of a former homestay owner, who still lived in the building but had become a salaried employee of the company. At a salary of RMB 2000 per month, she was doing very well by local standards (the per capita annual income for Chaping residents in 2009 was about RMB 5000 (Gu, 2010)). The building itself looked like a business hotel, complete with an anodyne reception area and large restaurant; it was unrecognizable as a single-family home, much less a “rustic” homestay. Individual homestays continue to coexist alongside the new hotels—in fact, the Chaping Village committee required that every household include one or two extra tourist rooms with attached bathrooms in their new villas so that the entire village could participate in the new tourism plan (X. Liu, 2009). The entrepreneurial Wang Quan was one of the first farmers to sign up four bedrooms in his six-bedroom house as part of the new Chaping Rural Chain Inn Company (Liangjun Zhang, 2011). According to a spokesperson, the company has furnished and decorated each room at an average cost of RMB 20,000 per room, so that “they reach the level of a luxury hotel” (S. Chen, 2009). Wang does not need to worry about the needs of his guests because the company manages everything; even meals are no longer provided by households, but in central dining areas (Ibid.).

Despite He Xuefeng’s claims that the lianjian approach was likely “harmless”, it has clearly resulted in significant changes for Chaping’s residents. Chaping’s lianjian approach was closely tied with the widespread consensus that Chengdu’s rural areas could best be modernized through tourism, and the closely allied perception that the key to developing the national economy is by

105 shifting from the primary and secondary sectors to the tertiary or service sector. This sense of a “modern” economy is one that is built on macroeconomic figures; in rural areas the actual quality of labour in the tourism-based service sector—cooking, cleaning, yard maintenance—remains manual in nature. Incomes for some residents, including Wang Quan and the hotel owner- employee, have improved, but it is not clear that living standards are better than before the quake. Farmers now face the extra costs associated with an (incompletely) urbanized livestyle. Moreover, although they may have been able to remain on their homestead land, there are subtler ways in which they become alienated from their property. Now they are sharing space with urban homeowners and maintaining houses and yards according to urban standards, free from kitchen gardens, chicken coops, and pig sties. If they let out rooms in their house (as they have been required to do through the Chaping Village committee’s tourism plan), these are managed and decorated by the Chaping Rural Chain Inn. Through this very intimate act of deterritorialization, the home space is remade as the space of luxury hotel. Although post-quake rural property rights reforms were ostensibly intended to strengthen individual titles to land, to some extent these changes seem uncomfortably close to processes of dispossession.

5.4 Accumulation by dispossession?

Marx coined the term “primitive accumulation” to describe the historical origins of capitalism as a social relation in eighteenth century England. This relationship, in which workers must sell their labour to capitalists who hold the means of production, involves multiple processes and institutions, including, notably, the separation of workers from nonmarket means of reproduction (“the commons”) and the establishment of a legal framework for private property. Since the early 2000s the term has been disinterred to understand the ongoing reproduction of capitalist social relations (Hall, 2012). Perhaps the most popular incarnation of the term, David Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession,” takes a broad view of the commons as all forms of social wealth held in common- including cultural, environmental, and intellectual resources (Harvey, 2003). Harvey frees the term of its historical “primitiveness” by using it to refer not to the origins of capitalist social relations, but to how ongoing overaccumulation crises are resolved under neoliberal capitalism. In A Companion to Marx’s Capital, Harvey refers frequently to the urbanization process in post-reform China as a modern exemplar of primitive accumulation (Harvey, 2010, p. 307). But what work does this term do for us in the Chinese context, and how must we delimit it?

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A handful of scholars have attempted to apply and refine the concept of primitive accumulation to understand agrarian change in post-reform China. Daniel Buck (2007) examines the privatization or collapse of rural township-village enterprises around Shanghai, and insists that this is best understood as a reworking of rural relationships to urban capital, or a subsumption of labour to urban capital. His work leads him to suggest that we expand our scope beyond primitive accumulation to look at a range of processes through which people and places are subordinated to the competitive logics of capital. He further claims that an overly narrow focus on property rights may miss other exploitative spatial relations. This stance is partly echoed by Michael Webber (2008a, 2008b), who notes Harvey’s use of primitive accumulation to refer to contemporary enclosures of the commons, but himself focuses on the separation of people from the means of production (in this case, both land and rural collective enterprises). While Webber is in agreement with Harvey’s view of (a form of) primitive accumulation as an ongoing process (Webber, 2008b, p. 400), he is explicitly opposed to viewing it as part of a global process of dispossession driven by the need to find outlets for capital surpluses (Ibid., p. 416). Webber notes that primitive accumulation is not synonymous with either dispossession or accumulation by force. Instead, Webber conceives of primitive accumulation in China as a locally conditioned process driven by both economic and extra-economic “logics.”

Somewhat provocatively, Webber portrays rural migrants as market agents who leave the countryside voluntarily in order to pursue better opportunities in urban job markets. While his depiction of rural migrants as free market agents is debatable (is economic compulsion not also a form of violence?), Webber’s argument does resonate with Derek Hall’s (2012) case for rethinking the question of agency in primitive accumulation. More specifically, Hall points out that many of the common assumptions about who carries out primitive accumulation and who opposes it are problematic in the Southeast Asian case. Economic elites may have good reason to oppose primitive accumulation in the interest of avoiding social unrest, downloading the costs of social reproduction to workers, or maintaining nonmarket access to social wealth. Similarly, state projects to support agricultural production can be frustrated by the eagerness of direct producers to sell land and carry out the commodification of the commons “from below.” These contributions highlight the need to examine local dynamics in order to understand how the relationship between rural residents and urban capital is being reconfigured in post-socialist China. They further suggest that

107 focusing solely on questions of property rights and involuntary dispossession may obscure our ability to understand a wider range of exploitative relations.

Yet with these caveats, I believe that Harvey’s concept of “accumulation by dispossession” can be usefully applied to the post-quake context. The processes occurring in peri-urban Chengdu not “primitive” in the sense that enclosure and dispossession are necessary to initiate capitalist social relations, which are already highly developed in many sectors of China’s economy. Rather, the central state has explicitly cast China’s rural areas as the means through which the nation will achieve the next stage of capitalist development, through increasing urbanization and boosting domestic consumption. But contra Webber’s insistence on the purely local dynamics of accumulation in China, post-quake reconstruction and urbanization in Chengdu were indeed linked to global cycles of accumulation and crisis. The quake occurred in 2008, just prior to the global financial crisis. In response, at the end of 2008 the central government announced a RMB 4 trillion stimulus package; fully one-quarter of this was earmarked for post-quake reconstruction. The intense development that occurred in peri-urban areas, either directly as in lianjian and tourism projects or indirectly through the guagou system described in Chapter 4, is also symptomatic of China’s intensely speculative real estate market.

The question of agency in this process, as Derek Hall notes, is complicated—as indicated by the widely circulated story of the foundational role played by the entrepreneurial Wang Quan, who realized the potential of the property rights reforms. I encountered similar vacation or retirement houses owned by urban residents in rural areas elsewhere in the quake zone. These had been built prior to the quake, indicating that Wang’s arrangement was not entirely novel. The distinguishing factors in the Chaping case seem to be the improvement in legal clarity for urban homeowners, the expanded scale of urban home ownership, and the links made between lianjian and the larger tourism/ residential development plans of the township government. Did the success of Wang’s “free” villa convince fellow villagers to participate, or were other pressures at work? Certainly the social pressures of keeping up with the neighbours should not be discounted. But there were also financial imperatives at work in the wake of the quake, as well as what appears to be an active village committee, which required that all residents rebuild with extra rooms to join in the Chaping Chain Inn project. Though no overt coercion seems to have been involved, the fact that all but one of the village’s households adopted the lianjian approach at least throws into question the notion of choice.

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To what extent, though, were Chaping’s farmers dispossessed from their land or means of production? Individual rural property rights were ostensibly strengthened through Chengdu’s land titling process, and in Chaping, many farmers were able to remain on (or near) their homestead land. To some extent, the lianjian approach appears to offer more autonomy than the concentrated village approaches. Yet, as Wang Ximing (2011) has noted, because the concentrated villages operate through the parceling together of individual land titles, they have the potential to give the rural collective economic organizations renewed powers over local decision-making. The lianjian system offers no such possibility. Instead, in Chaping the individualization of property contracts has benefitted a certain segment of the village’s more entrepreneurial residents, and has given village leaders and township officials the clout to realize their vision of Chaping as a luxury resort and residential development. What we observe in Chaping Village, as well as in the previous example in Luping Village, is a reconfiguration of relations to urban capital, as well as a more subtle process of alienation from the commons.

Buck’s suggestion—that we expand the scope of our investigations to examine a range of processes through which people and places become imbricated in the logics of capital—seems particularly cogent here. Land is still the primary means of production in Chengdu’s peri-urban areas, but the ways in which income is generated from land have shifted from direct production to a more passive generation of value. Daguan’s Mayor Hu observed during our interview that rural households now have four potential sources of income: earnings from land transfer (to agri-business or tourism companies); salaries from working at one of the new agri-business or tourism companies; rent earned through joining the rural homestay system; and remittances from family members working in the city. Direct production was conspicuously absent from the mayor’s list. Rather than being directly productive, the value of rural land is increasingly dependent on the dynamics of an urban real estate market, global agricultural markets, and tourism. What has changed is not just a matter of livelihoods, but also a certain quality of connection with land that has been re-valued as a tourism and real estate amenity.

If we understand property as a social relation, then it seems clear that some form of dispossession is at work. Although Chaping residents were able to remain on their homestead land, many residents now live next to large villas that are unoccupied for much of the year- villas that are theirs and also not theirs. Pigsties, chicken coops, and vegetable gardens must be dismantled in favour of lawns and parking spaces. Prior to 2008, farmers had fairly clear use rights to land (with the collective as

109 the legal owner). Chengdu’s property rights reforms effectively replace those use rights with transfer rights, in many ways circumscribing the ways that farmers are actually able to use the land. Polanyi (Polanyi, 2001, p. 187) captures the nature of the dramatic shift that the marketization of land entails in terms of narrowing the understanding of land down to merely its economic function: “[Land] invests man’s life with stability; it is the site of his habitation; it is a condition of his physical safety; it is the landscape and the seasons. We might as well imagine his being born without hands and feet as carrying on his life without land. And yet to separate land from man and to organize society in such a way as to satisfy the requirements of a real-estate market was a vital part of the Utopian concept of a market economy.” It is this shift—from viewing land as habitation to viewing land as commodity—that market reformers in Chengdu were proposing. This in turn required the creation of appropriate rural subjectivities, the subject of the following two chapters.

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Chapter 6

6 Cultivating communities: social reconstruction in rural Chengdu

The main reason that peasants lack public consciousness (gonggong yishi) is because their environmental circumstances are different. I also grew up in the countryside, so I am an example. After they move into the (new concentrated) community, there will be facilities management and public services-- these things will implicitly change them. We can create a new group of (urban) citizens (xin shimin). Once the environment improves, people will naturally also improve, like me… After the quake, every level of government in the settlement areas promoted this idea of new citizenship. New citizens value hygiene, respect the environment, and practice self-sufficiency and self-management.

--Township Secretary (Interview)

6.1 Overview

I made my first trip to Longmenshan Township in December 2009 to take part in an NGO conference that was being co-organized by my host institution, the Institute for Civil Society (ICS) at Sun Yat-sen University. We spent two days in the slick conference room of the Baoshan Corporation (a village-turned-corporation) offices as dozens of post-quake experts clicked through PowerPoint presentations of the successes and challenges they had faced during the reconstruction process. The presenters included academics, NGO workers, social workers, architects, government officials, and private consultants from across China. One of the speakers was a representative from a large property management firm in Chengdu. He spoke about the problems in newly built rural settlements as a result of the low education levels and bad habits of the peasants. These habits included raising chickens and dogs in the yard, planting vegetables, throwing trash by the road, and digging open ditches for drainage. In his PowerPoint presentation he showed us labeled photos of all of these phenomena, and argued that there was a need to “urbanize lifestyles” (chengshihua shenghuo fangshi). But the problem was not just one of outside management, he claimed; it also required self-management on the part of village residents (cunmin ziguan). He advised training residents to increase their management capacities, focusing on three aspects: environmental

111 management, facilities management, and security management. A pleasant landscape, he stressed, is an important part of being civilized and attracting tourists.

This concern about “self-management” was echoed by an NGO group that was promoting sustainable design in the quake zone by building “green” homes with local materials. The speaker complained that residents were not receptive to their designs because everyone wanted an urban life and a “little villa” (xiao bieshu). In contrast to the speaker from the property management company, he identified the problem not as the insufficient urbanization of peasant lifestyles, but rather as the aspiration for consumption-heavy urban lifestyles. During discussions, NGO workers and academics linked peasants’ apparent lack of environmental consciousness to a lack of “public consciousness” (quefa gonggong yishi) or “community spirit” (shequ jingshen). Despite cosmetic divergences between these two visions—a tidy, urbanized countryside, and a pastoralized rural community living in harmony with the surrounding environment—there was a remarkable degree of consensus among participants about the need for rebuilding rural society after the quake. There was also some agreement about what an “improved” rural society would look like: a collection of self-governing communities with widespread participation in group decision-making, an entrepreneurial drive for self-development, and a keen sense of environmental stewardship.

In a subsequent interview with the Party Secretary of the township, I asked what he thought about the common claim that I had heard, that peasants “lack public consciousness” (quefa gonggong yishi):

The main reason that peasants lack public consciousness is because their environmental circumstances are different. I also grew up in the countryside, so I am an example. After they move into the (new concentrated) community, there will be facilities management and public services-- these things will implicitly change them. We can create a new group of (urban) citizens (xin shimin). Once the environment improves, people will naturally also improve, like me. After the quake, every level of government in the settlement areas promoted this idea of new citizenship. New citizens value hygiene, respect the environment, and practice self-sufficiency and self-management.

There are two aspects of the secretary’s discussion that I want to highlight. First is the naturalized link between environment and behavior, and the assumption that the new houses themselves will have a “civilizing” effect. At the same time, the ease of this transformation is belied by the municipal government’s extensive training programs (according to the secretary, the leader of the local Women’s Federation (Fulian) branch had been sent to attend one of the “new citizens”

112 training courses), and the sense of frustration expressed by planners, officials, and NGO workers that there was a gap between the new environments and those who inhabited them. The second is the list of characteristics attributed to “new citizens”: hygiene, respect for the environment, self- sufficiency, and self-management.

The question I want to address in this chapter is how such visions for rebuilding rural society played out in Chengdu, where the municipal government espoused a principle of “social management” that introduced new forms of rural governance as well as the participation of non- state actors. By examining three municipal projects to remake rural society, I paint a picture of the types of citizens city officials sought to cultivate, as well as the technologies they used to try to shape them. I then examine how NGO and social work groups fit into the municipal government’s “social management” efforts. I argue that, despite different premises and end-goals, there was a clear overlap between state-led and NGO-led projects. This is not surprising, given a constrained environment for nongovernmental activities in China that requires NGOs to work closely with government sponsors. But the resonance of NGO projects with state projects throws into question claims that NGOs were able to carve out an autonomous space separate from the local government (Teets, 2009).

6.2 Are Chengdu’s rural “social management” projects neoliberal?

For myself, as a Western social scientist immersed in recent academic debates about neoliberalism and neoliberal governmentalities, the NGO conference described above provoked a certain “knee- jerk” analytic framing. Clearly state actors in Chengdu are engaged in active projects of subject formation, some directly informed by market principles. But in discussing whether Chengdu’s efforts to build “self-managing” rural communities might be classified as neoliberal, several points need to be addressed. The first is to highlight the longer intellectual lineage of “peasant advocacy” (described in the following section), which is at least as influential on current policy debates in Chengdu as philosophical liberalism. The second point to consider is that many aspects of these projects are not unique to Chengdu or rural China: similar “civilizational” and “community- building” campaigns have been carried out in urban China since the late 1990s, and are part of a broader shift towards “social management” (shehui guanli) in Chinese governmental practices (discussed in the fourth section). The third point to address is the extensive debate about the appropriateness and applicability of neoliberalism in China, a discussion that is complicated by the

113 variety of ways that the term has been applied. As Ferguson (2010) notes, neoliberalism is often (mis)used as “a sloppy synonym for capitalism itself: the malevolent force that causes everything else to happen.”

For simplicity’s sake, we can identify two major schools of thought on neoliberalism: a Marxist political economy approach and a Foucauldian governmentalities approach. Proponents of the first approach understand neoliberalism to be an historically specific form of capitalism emerging initially in Britain and the United States during the 1970s, and subsequently propagated by international organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. As such, it is characterized by deregulation, privatization, dismantling state welfare commitments, and a shift in power away from the manufacturing classes towards the financial classes—“the financialization of everything” (Harvey, 2006, p. 24). David Harvey (2005) has characterized China’s economy as increasingly neoliberal in this sense, albeit “interdigitated with authoritarian centralized control” (Harvey, 2005, p. 120). Related to this approach is an understanding of neoliberalism as the theoretical or ideological underpinnings of such a system—a belief in markets as the best regulators of human behavior, and a doctrine that seeks to limit the scope of government. Gavin Smith (2011, p. 73) takes this more Gramscian approach in distinguishing capitalism from neoliberalism, which he defines as “…an ideopraxis that seeks to implement the conditions for capitalism’s effective working.” Pieke observes that in China, while markets have certainly been created for a wide range of resources and services (including land, labour, housing, health care, and education), socialism continues to serve as the state’s guiding ideology (Pieke, 2012, p. 150). Thus although China’s political economy is characterized by certain neoliberal trends—including the privatization of certain sectors of the economy, increasing financialization, rising inequality, and growing integration of Party and business elites—at the national level, at least, the state still appeals to a discourse of equality to bolster its legitimacy. This is evident in the Hu-Wen regime’s adoption of the “Harmonious Society” project, which allows the government to embrace the socialist promise of equality even as it erases the Mao-era rhetoric of class struggle.

The second approach to neoliberalism, viewing neoliberalism as a technology of government operating through the cultivation of appropriately aspirational and self-disciplining market subjects, is represented by a number of anthropologists working in China (Anagnost, 2004; Rofel, 2007; Yan, 2003). Ong (2006) sees neoliberalism as an extremely malleable technology of government that “illiberal” or non-Western governments are able to adapt and adopt to compete in a globalized

114 economy. In a similar vein, Pieke (2012) notes that, while socialism continues to be crucial to the Party’s legitimacy, it borrows from a number of different models—some of them neoliberal—to create a government rationality that he calls “neo-socialism”. But other critics caution against applying even a modified neoliberal label to Chinese approaches to government and subject formation (Kipnis, 2008; Nonini, 2008). Kipnis (2008) points out that much of the work on neoliberal governmentalities draws on the writings of Nikolas Rose. He goes on to argue that certain techniques that Rose associates with neoliberal governmentality—including government from a distance, calculability, and the creation of self-disciplining, entrepreneurial subjects—can be found in many government cultures. In the context of Chengdu’s rural “social management” projects, this means that we need to be specific about how we apply neoliberalism as a label, understand how it is imbricated with alternate intellectual and political trajectories, and articulate why using the label might be useful in particular contexts.

6.3 A century of peasant advocacy

Post-quake efforts to rebuild rural communities should be understood in a longer trajectory of elite efforts to reform China’s rural society and governance structures dating back to the last decade of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911)—what Alexander Day (2013, p. 930) calls a “politics of peasant advocacy.” The most recent resurgence of “peasant advocacy” emerged in the 1990s, when there was a growing consensus among scholars of that a major barrier to China’s rural development was the lack of organization at the village level (Cheng et al. 2006, p. 401, cited in Thøgersen, 2012, p. 36). Village life, according to many academics and activists, was twice “de-natured” during China’s long twentieth century: first, during the Mao-era collectivization drive that destroyed traditional social structures; and second, during the decollectivization movement of 1980s, after which villages were left in a state of “atomization” (yuanzihua) (Thøgersen, 2012). Though there is widespread consensus about the “atomization” crisis facing rural China, there is less agreement about how to solve the crisis. Thøgersen (2012) examines two academic figures who exemplify different poles of the debate: Yu Jianrong and He Xuefeng (the critic of Chengdu’s land reforms discussed in Chapter 4). Both Yu and He have extensive experience with research and activism in rural China, and have voiced criticism of the state’s rural policies (within the framework of strengthening the Leninist Party-state) (Thøgersen, 2012).

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Yu Jianrong, head of the Rural Development Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, considers that the major problem facing peasants is the lack of representation and political rights (Thøgersen, 2012). Yu, a liberal populist, ties democracy to property rights, and has advocated turning collectives into shareholding systems (similar to the model that was adopted in Chengdu) (A. F. Day, 2013, p. 945). Yu also advocates establishing peasants’ associations (nongmin xiehui) independent of state organs that would both represent peasant interests to the government and help peasants enter the market (Ibid). He Xuefeng, a major figure in the New Rural Reconstruction movement, is not optimistic about the ability of the peasantry to face the market without a significant bolstering of village cooperative capacity. The solution for him is not merely economic or political, but requires rebuilding traditional rural culture. He draws on Robert Putnam’s idea of social capital to focus on the role of village social and cultural organizations in rural reconstruction. Thøgersen (2012, p. 45) writes:

Calligraphy courses for old men and singing groups for women seem like very modest answers to the towering problems presented by the breakdown of rural communities, but the ultimate goal behind He’s social experiments is actually very ambitious. In his view, China’s hundreds of millions of peasants cannot create a satisfactory future by relying on market reforms and urbanization alone. Furthermore, if all Chinese peasants were to reach the same level of consumption as Westerners, the world’s resources would very soon be exhausted. His ambition is therefore to establish a new way of rural life based on the principle of “low consumption and high welfare” (di xiaofei gao fuli) where the basic material and spiritual needs of rural people can be met.

Both scholars tend to see the peasantry as a unitary class requiring significant interventions to be transformed into an organized “citizenry” (A. F. Day, 2013). For liberal advocates like Yu, the goal is the withdrawal of the state and its replacement with democratic self-governance and market institutions (Ibid.). For left advocates like He, the line between state and society is more blurred. He’s approach, because it is less obviously a challenge to Party authority, has been more widely adopted by NGOs working in rural China. But the two approaches are not incompatible: for many NGO workers I spoke with, women’s singing groups were just a small step in a longer game of building a more politically engaged rural society.

6.4 Social management in postsocialist China

The social goals espoused by state and NGO actors fell under the broad category of “social management” (shehui guanli), which was established as one of Chengdu’s “four basic projects” under urban-rural integration, along with comprehensive land-use controls, rural property rights

116 reform, and public service improvement (Dexu Li, 2013). The importance of social management was reinforced after the quake when, at the end of 2008, the Chengdu Party Committee and Chengdu government issued the “Opinions on deepening overall urban and rural planning and improving village-level public service and social management” (Ibid.). According to Legates and Ye (2013, p. 124), “[s]ocial management refers to services and measures provided by government or NGOs to increase social relations harmony by smoothing the conflicts among individual residents, connecting individuals or a groups of residents with the government, and getting stakeholders to collaborate for the wellbeing of the community”. While this is a good summary of how social management is intended to operate in Chengdu, it misses the context and genealogy of the term, which reflects as much about how the state functions in postsocialist China as it does about the social.

Regularizing government—i.e. moving away from Mao-era popular mobilization campaigns to a more “depoliticized” style of technocratic management—has been a core theme of the Chinese leadership since the 1980s (Heilmann & Perry, 2011). Accordingly, a discipline of “administrative management” (xingzheng guanli) emerged in Chinese universities during the early 1980s that focused on the legal and institutional arrangements of government (Pieke, 2012, p. 152). This professionalization signaled a significant move away from the anti-bureaucratic Mao-era concept of the all-purpose cadre (ganbu), whose work was guided by principles of being both “red and expert” (you hong you zhuan) and “putting politics in command” (yi zhengzhi wei gang) (Sigley, 2016, p. 102). But by the late 1990s, the new administrative science was being criticized by Chinese scholars influenced by Western publications on civil society and the public sphere (Pieke, 2012). A new discipline of public management (gonggong guanli) arose in which the object of management was not the administrative apparatus, but the public itself.

While the language of “public management” continues to dominate in academic settings (for instance, in recent Masters in Public Administration degrees), in government documents the key term is now “social management” (shehui guanli) (Pieke, 2012). This term dates back to 1998, when it was described, along with macro-economic control and public service provisioning, as one of the three basic functions of government. At the time, under the leadership of Jiang Zemin, social management was used in the narrow sense of maintaining public order. It was not until Hu Jintao took power in 2002, ushering a new set of policy priorities aimed at addressing widespread inequality under the slogan of building a “harmonious society” (hexie shehui), that the term

117 appeared to refer to the social as an autonomous sector requiring an arts of government beyond mere coercion. Luigi Tomba (2009, p.594), for example, argues that:

Although “harmonious society” does not appear to constitute a departure from traditional paternalistic patterns of governance, as a goal of social policies, the search for ‘harmony’ is essentially different from the simple call for ‘order’: it argues for the conscious and rational removal of the causes (whether economic, social, or behavioural) of underlying conflicts, rather than for their institutionalization and repression. It is therefore accompanied by a stress on individual behaviour, self-improvement, virtues, and responsibility. As emerges in other articles in this collection, it also defines a disciplinary regime that is different from the capillary penetration of society generally associated with the institutions of authoritarian rule. This disciplinary regime increasingly adopts governmental techniques that envisage the active participation of subjects and the agency of a wide array of players in a virtuous scheme based (when possible) on self-discipline.

For Tomba, then, the move towards “harmonious society” as a slogan—and the adoption of “social management” as a tool—signals an important shift in contemporary Chinese technologies of government. This is echoed by Sigley, who notes a shift in governmental reasoning in contemporary China from jihua to guihua (Sigley, 2006). Both of these terms are translated as “plan” or “planning”. However, in Chinese, jihua is associated with the socialist planned economy, and was used to refer to the five-year plans for national development implemented during the Mao era. Five-year plans are still issued, but under the socialist market economy the role of government is defined more in terms of “guidance”, reflected in the use of the new term guihua. For Sigley, this shift from jihua to guihua indicates a conceptual shift from government to governance; from the capillary systems of control associated with authoritarian rule to a more hands-off, “liberal” approach to government “at a distance”. Guihua is also the term that has always been associated with spatial planning, leading Bray (2016, p. 78) to suggest that the switch to guihua signifies a new recognition of the important link between social and spatial planning.

A key part of social management has been the development of new strategies of governing through “community” (shequ) (Bray, 2006; Sigley, 2016). This approach was partly championed by (the now disgraced) Zhou Yongkang, who, as Minister of Public Security and later a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, was key in developing the concept of “public management.” In a 2006 article in the People’s Daily, he mentions that one of the primary challenges for social stability in post-reform China is the shift from “work unit people” (danwei ren) to “social people” (shehui ren) (Pieke, 2012, p. 158). Prior to economic reform in the late 1970s, Chinese cities were organized largely around work units (factories, universities, etc.) that provided housing, canteens,

118 schools, clinics, and other social services, generally within the same walled compound. This arrangement represented not merely an architectural style, but a socialist spatial mode of urban governance geared towards producing loyal proletarian workers (Bray, 2005).

The privatization of many state-owned enterprises in the 1980s, accompanied by the development of an urban housing market, tore apart the cellular, work unit-oriented socio-spatial structure of China’s cities. In response to the collapse of the work-unit system, the government has turned to “community” (shequ) as a new form of socio-spatial, political, and administrative organization (Bray, 2006). The Ministry of Civil Affairs has defined communities specifically to refer to existing administrative units (Residents’ Committees) with clearly demarcated territories (Ibid). The new community units have a number of tasks, including providing services for vulnerable groups (such as unemployed, elderly, and disabled residents); managing public health, sanitation, and security; and organizing educational and cultural programs. Despite a high degree of government involvement, communities are defined as being “self-organizing” groups. But Bray (2006, p. 543) points out that this term “…does not imply anything like ‘absolute autonomy’, but rather a more limited form of ‘self-governance’ in which the community is expected to manage its own affairs within the operational parameters established by government authorities.”

Drawing on Nikolas Rose’s discussion of “government through community”, Bray (2006) argues that, in China as elsewhere, “community” cannot be viewed simply as a “naturally” occurring formation, but as a deliberately fashioned tool for facilitating more efficient governance. The term social management, then, reflects an experimentation with new “community-based” technologies of government in the face of market reform. The majority of these experiments in community- building have been confined to urban areas. More recently, however, local governments have started rolling out similar projects of building “communities” in urbanized rural settlements, and transforming peasants (nongmin) into residents (jumin) (Bray, 2013). Chengdu’s experiment with social management under its urban-rural integration project represents one such localized experiment.

6.5 Social management in Metropolitan Chengdu

Administrative reform and standardization have been key to Chengdu’s urban-rural integration project since its initiation in 2003 (Municipal Regulations Office, 2007). These reforms have partly been driven by the practical problems of administering the expanded metropolitan area and

119 ensuring that local officials in the newly annexed counties and cities adhere to policies and standards issued by the Chengdu municipal government. This has involved a recalibration of the roles and relations of the various levels of government, with the municipal government emerging as a provider of “guidance” and district/county governments taking on greater responsibilities for service provision and economic development. Echoing a wider trend across China (G. Smith, 2010), township governments appear to have lost a number of powers and responsibilities, while village “grassroots” groups have assumed new decision-making powers.

But the reforms are equally driven by a sense that the state needs to rethink its role in relation to market and social forces. A group of researchers at Chengdu’s Southwest Finance & Economics University describe the essence of administrative reform as “allowing the market to deal with the problems it is able to handle; allowing society to deal with the problems that it is able to handle” (H. Liu, Bian, & Deng, 2008, p. 112). In order to achieve this, the Chengdu government is promoting “the construction of a standardized, service-oriented government” (guifanhua fuwuxing zhengfu jianshe). Although this smacks of a (neo?) liberal understanding of government, practically speaking the state retains a strongly interventionist role in both market and society. For instance, echoing central government decrees, the researchers list the core government functions as: economic regulation (jingji tiaojie), market supervision (shichang jianguan), social management (shehui guanli), and public service provision (gonggong fuwu) (H. Liu et al., 2008). Regardless of the continuing and prominent role of the state, Chengdu’s efforts at “social management” in rural areas are as much about rethinking the role of the state and the market as they are about reshaping rural society. This is evident in several projects to remake the countryside that span pre- and post- quake “New Countryside” construction efforts, including: (1) sending urban officials down to the countryside; (2) establishing villagers’ councils, and (3) the post-quake “new lives; new homes; new habits” campaign.

6.5.1 Sending urban bureaucrats down to the countryside

From January 2007 to May 2007, 605 urban cadres were “sent down” to rural villages in Chengdu (S. Wu, 2007). It has become a common practice throughout rural China to send county- and township-level cadres down to the villages. This not only ensures more centralized control over “grassroots” affairs, but is also part of an effort to streamline upper-level government bureaucracy

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(G. Smith, 2010). But the Chengdu project was somewhat different: government cadres from a range of departments in the city were recruited to spend two years trying to help address the income gap between urban and rural areas by introducing villagers and village-level cadres to market logics. China is not unique in this desire to turn agriculture into a business rather than a way of life. The World Bank Agriculture for Development report cited in the opening chapter of this dissertation asks:

Are farms becoming too small? A related question is whether declining farm sizes widen rural-urban income gaps. With urban wages increasing in many Asian countries, labor productivity in agriculture might have to increase to avoid widening the gap. One way of achieving such productivity gains might be through farm consolidation and mechanization (World Bank, 2007, p. 92).

This postwar fixation on agricultural modernization was propagated most succinctly in a 1967 book published by French sociologist Henri Mendras (1927-2003), The End of the Peasant (La Fin de Paysans). In it, Mendras argued that a new, rational “rural bourgeoisie” of specialists and businesspeople was replacing France’s tradition-bound peasantry—a development that would benefit the nation as a whole (Woodside, 2016). Mendras’s book, translated into Chinese in 1991, became used to argue for state intervention to create a Chinese version of France’s postwar rural bourgeoisie (Woodside, 2016, p. 28). Woodside (2016, p. 29) writes that this desire to engineer a rural bourgeoisie in China represents a “schizoid worldview” that combines neoliberal economics with a passion for management. The problems faced by Chengdu’s “sent-down” cadres suggest that the outcomes for this kind of engineering are far from predetermined.

An article in the Beijing News profiled Duan Xiaojun, a typical “sent down” urban cadre who had recently graduated with an MBA from Sichuan University (S. Wu, 2007). He was sent to a village where residents relied on vegetable farming, and most young people worked in the city. The average income was less than RMB 2000, and he set the goal of raising it by RMB 800 in two years. In order to reach his goal, Duan decided to establish a modern agribusiness. But because of prior experiences with agricultural modernization projects, villagers weren’t willing to invest their own money. In 2003 the township had established an asparagus processing plant jointly funded by residents and the township government. With no money for marketing or distribution, villagers couldn’t sell the product and ended up losing money. This time around, Duan invited agricultural experts who surveyed the terrain and recommended planting fruit trees, peppercorn bushes, and walnut trees, and raising chickens in the orchards. Residents were still reluctant to undertake the

121 project, even after Duan held several village meetings. He was able to acquire some investment funding from his home department (the Municipal Education Bureau), and finally a few farmers agreed to try. He also set up a ginseng processing factory. But he complained that the village cadres assumed it was simply a matter of packaging, and that customers would arrive at the doorstep to purchase their product. “They don’t take any initiative to sell their product or recognize the importance of the market,” he said.

Another urban cadre, Wen Guolin, met with similar challenges, and painted an unintentionally comic scene of his interactions with village cadres:

“When a manager from the project department of the Agricultural Development Bank came to meet with the village cadres, they couldn’t even understand him. The bank representative was really annoyed.” Wen said.

Village cadres have no understanding of the market, nor do they have any sense of branding, he pointed out. None of their motorcycles are licensed, and all their activities take place in a five or six kilometer radius around the village. "They know nothing when it came to finance, banks and corporations," Wen continued, "They even don't know which department to go to in order to register a company."

Wen registered a company to develop the local garlic chive industry. But the village team was too lax about work; they weren’t used to the requirements of the modern enterprise system. They would work a little bit in the morning, drink a bit of alcohol at lunch, and play mahjong in the afternoon. When Wen Guolin saw this, he roared: “’What kind of company is this? Are there no standards here?’ They were still playing mahjong, so I overturned the table.”

Although the city adopted the Mao-era rhetoric of being “sent down” (xia xiang), the current iteration in fact represents a significant departure from a time when “expertise” consisted in understanding both the Marxist-Leninist social critique as well as the needs of the masses.41 Wen and Duan blamed rural underdevelopment on peasants’ “conservatism”. Their own role, as they saw it, was to provide a form of market expertise that would help reshape villagers’ market consciousness and launch local development. These efforts to introduce “market consciousness” to rural areas had already been initiated under Chengdu’s urban-rural integration project when the earthquake struck. The earthquake provided new impetus for rolling out similar agricultural

41 According to the “mass line” approach developed in Yan’an during the 1930s and 1940s, the ideal cadre is one who moves among the masses to serve them, learn from them, and distil their insights into sound policy (Jacka & Wu, 2016, p. 90).

122 modernization projects across the metropolitan area as part of the recovery process, including the kiwi orchards discussed in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5.

6.5.2 Establishing villagers’ councils

At the end of 2008, the Chengdu government rolled out a program of “villagers’ councils” (cunmin yishihui). Touted as grassroots democracy, the councils were directly elected by villagers to make day-to-day decisions about village government. Village-level democracy was not new, however. The “councils” were added to the “villagers’ committees” (cunweihui) that had been formed during decollectivization in the early 1980s to replace production brigades and teams (Benewick, Tong, & Howell, 2004). In 1987, the Organic Law on Village Committees was passed formalizing the establishment of committees throughout China’s villages. A subsequent revision in 1998 detailed election procedures and guaranteed village autonomy from township interference (Benewick et al., 2004; Jacka & Wu, 2016). This then begs the question: if there were already villagers’ grassroots democratic organizations in place, why did the Chengdu government establish new ones?

One answer may lie in the fact that a number of widely-acknowledged problems have emerged with the villagers’ committees. Some of the initial aims of establishing the committees were to stave off rural unrest and to oversee village cadres in light of widespread corruption (Lianjiang Li & O’Brien, 1999). Election of village committees seems to have boosted the legitimacy of local leadership (Schubert & Chen, 2007), but there are still major challenges to village democracy. First, although village self-government groups are nominally distinct from the Party, Party organizations often remain the locus of power in the village (the Party secretary is often also head of the villagers’ committee). Second, there is frequently tension between township governments and village committees, with township leaders often using the committees as a means of implementing higher- level policies.42 Finally, informal social organizations, including lineage groups, local religious groups, and “black society” (criminal) groups may control elections or challenge the authority of village leaders (O’Brien & Han, 2009).

42 This tension between townships and villages decreased with the abolition of the agricultural tax in 2006 and the adoption of a number of pro-rural policies: townships are less dependent on village cadres and are now the source of various subsidies for villages (X. Sun, Warner, Yang, & Liu, 2013).

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Chengdu’s new villagers’ councils can thus be seen as an effort to increase substantive participation in decision-making and decrease the possibility for the concentration of power in the hands of a few local leaders (C. Wang, 2011). Villagers’ committees are usually small, consisting of three to five members, some or all of whom are usually also Party members. The new councils, by contrast, are required to have at least 21 members, with each village small group electing two to four representatives. Members of villagers’ committees may not be elected to villagers’ councils, and vice versa (Cabannes & Ming, 2014). Moreover, no more than 50 per cent of council members could be Party cadres (Legates & Ye, 2013, p. 114). Villagers’ committees were not eradicated in Chengdu, but their functions were (in theory) drastically reduced. Committees are now tasked explicitly with implementing upper-level policies (under the supervision of the councils), while councils are in charge of decision-making about village affairs (C. Wang, 2011).

The driving factor for establishing the councils, however, was Chengdu’s project to undertake rural property rights reforms (discussed in Chapter 4). One of the primary problems facing the Chengdu government in the process of reforming rural property rights was how to reduce the possibility for local corruption and make sure farmers accepted decisions about the allocation of rights (C. Wang, 2011). In this context, particularly after the Wenchuan earthquake, the primary function of the councils was overseeing land-use rights allocation during the land rights verification process. The councils thus served the joint functions of reducing the possibility of corruption or capture by locally powerful interests, and of lending the land reform process a sense of political legitimacy.

In addition to overseeing land titling, the councils were also given new budgetary responsibilities. In early 2009 the municipal government started a pilot project of giving some villages RMB 200,000 for public service provision (later extended to cover all villages in Chengdu, with the amount gradually increasing). In addition, councils can apply for a loan from the Chengdu Small Town Investment Company to fund larger projects, borrowing against future allocations (Cabannes & Ming, 2014). The list of acceptable projects covered four major categories: culture, literacy and fitness; basic services and infrastructure for local economic development; agricultural training; and village management (including security, sanitation, and solid waste collection) (Cabannes & Ming,

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2014).43 The councils are charged with soliciting input about potential projects from all villagers, organizing a vote on priority projects, and implementing villagers’ decisions.

In a speech in 2011, Sun Ping, Vice-mayor of Chengdu, described the new village democratic mechanisms as a key to social management in Chengdu’s URI project (Ping Sun, 2011). But rather than antagonistic calls for democracy beyond the established administrative system, democracy here is de-politicized by its inclusion in the larger project of technocratic administrative reform (Pieke, 2012, p. 153). Aside from the practical roles of oversight, the councils also have the function of cultivating a spirit of self-management among villagers analogous to urban community- building projects. A group of researchers at Qinghua University note that the democratic consultation process on the use of the special funds not only improves transparency, it also helps develop villagers’ democratic quality (minzhu suzhi) and and trains them to properly understand the concept of common interests (Qinghua University Social Science Department Research Group, 2011).

In 2009 Mayan Village (in Youzha Township, Qionglai City, a satellite city within the Chengdu metropolitan area) became a poster child for grassroots governance. One particular image—a photo of the circular village seal, broken into five pieces—was widely circulated in local media. The five elected heads of the villagers’ council were all required to sign off on any expenses. In order to ensure that all five members had inspected expense reports, the village seal was broken into five pieces, and each head council member was entrusted with a piece of the seal. Mayan’s village council, one journalist reported, had galvanized villagers’ enthusiasm for financial management and had led the village “down the path to prosperity” (Hong, 2010). Democratic participation, combined with property reforms, had prompted villagers to consolidate their land and establish a bamboo growing cooperative (Ibid).

But as with projects to develop villagers’ market consciousness, these efforts to cultivate participatory enthusiasm meet with uneven success. In an assessment of Chengdu’s experiment with villagers’ councils in the liberal, theoretically-oriented publication, Love Thought (Ai Sixiang), Xu Yong and Chen Ganfei (2016) note some of the problems that the councils face:

43 This list was eventually found to be too restrictive, and was replaced with a list of prohibited projects (G. Liu, 2014).

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Furthermore, council members’ democratic participation habits need to be cultivated and improved. Villagers’ participation in democracy and public affairs requires recognizing the basic rules of democratic participation and taking the sacred right of participation seriously. But in practice, some council members talk about issues unrelated to the important matters at hand. Some people bring their children to play, and some people talk during the discussion. This has affected the quality of democratic participation.

The councils, while apparently effective in managing village-level conflicts around land use rights, were thus imperfect tools for fashioning appropriately participatory subjects. For this, the municipal government took the much more hands-on, “illiberal” approach described below.

6.5.3 The “new lives, new homes, new habits” campaign

In 2010 the Municipal Civilization Bureau initiated the “new homes, new lives, new habits” (xin jiayuan, xin shenghuo, xin fengshang), or “three news” project in Chengdu’s post-quake rural areas. The concrete goal was to achieve “clean and orderly homes, a tidy and beautiful environment, and civilized individual language and behavior” (jushi qingjie weisheng, huanjing zhengjie youmei, ge ren yan xing wenming) (Municipal Civilization Office, 2011). As with the programs to send planners and municipal bureaucrats to the countryside, the “three news” project also involved mobilizing urban residents to provide guidance and training for rural residents. This included pairing new rural settlements with a municipal government department (81 such counterpart relationships were established) that would be responsible for oversight and assessment of the project, sending university students to new settlements under the “one village, two university students” (yicun liangda) project, and sending volunteers from various municipal departments (including the Municipal Youth Office, the Municipal Women’s Office, the Municipal Federation of Trade Unions Office, the Education Bureau, and the Sanitation Bureau) to provide training courses for rural residents (Municipal Civilization Office, 2011). The Chengdu Technical University was charged with setting up “New Citizens’ Training Schools” and the Workers’ Cultural Palace was tasked with creating theatrical pieces in order to inculcate rural residents with new urban values (Propaganda and Education Office of the Municipal Federation of Trade Unions, 2010).

Tianma Township, which was considered a model for the land certification process, was also described in the media as a model for the “three news” project (Yu & Zhang, 2011). There, the implementation of the “three news” was characterized by a heavy focus on the physical environment, including providing garbage bins, standardized service centers, and “two buildings”

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(tool sheds and livestock barns). The township mayor, Zhu Ke, explained that at first, residents were not used to the new settlements: they left trash everywhere, tossed the water from washing clothing and rice into public spaces, and accumulated piles of junk in the fronts and backs of the houses. The key to improvement, he claimed, lay in “mobilizing the masses’ self management and mutual supervision.” The villagers’ council passed regulations that there should be no building, no drying clothes, and no unauthorized signs in public spaces. Moreover, raising livestock should only occur in designated locations. This re-ordering of rural space and formal separation of land uses is common to planned villages being built as part of the New Socialist Countryside project across China (Bray, 2013). But the fact that these regulations were passed by the supposedly self- governing villagers’ council throws into question the autonomy of the councils and their function as grassroots decision-making bodies (rather than implementers of upper-level policy).

Moreover, the regulations extended beyond public space into privates homes: the council also passed a resolution requiring each house to be clean inside. Specifically, each household should keep the living room floor clean, ensure the windows are clean and bright, have no rubbish strewn about, fold the bedroom quilt neatly, store clothes in an orderly fashion, and wash the bedding once a month (Yu & Zhang, 2011). Existing village leaders, including members of the Women’s Group and the “three olds” (old Party members, old cadres, and old teachers) were trained in the “three news”, and went door to door to distribute civilized behavior cards. The owners’ committees (yezhu weiyuanhui) in the new settlements were also mobilized to establish property management regulations. In the Jinling Garden resettlement site (formerly Jinling Village), committees assessed the five most civilized households and five most backward households. The evaluation results for the entire community formed the basis for special subsidies from the town and city level governments. Elizabeth Perry (2011) argues that, contrary to claims that post-Mao governance has moved away from campaign-style mobilization to a more modern, technocratic approach, political mobilization campaigns remain a key tool in the state’s repertoire. The “new homes, new lives, new habits” campaign supports her observations, and highlights that the social mobilization functions of “grassroots” village organizations are still important to implementing policy in metropolitan Chengdu.

What, then, do these three projects (sending urban cadres to the countryside, establishing villagers’ councils, and the “three news” campaign) reveal about the Chengdu government’s aspirations for its rural residents and its technologies for achieving those goals? First, the government seeks to

127 establish the type of “rural bourgeoisie” described by Henri Mendras—a class of entrepreneurial, economically rational professional farmers. These farmers will be self-managing, in the sense that village-level conflicts will be resolved within the village, and the government’s roles (at the township levels and above) will be reduced to those of macro-level guidance and service provision. Finally, Chengdu’s new citizens will also be good environmental stewards, with high standards of personal and public hygiene. The technologies used to shape these new citizens are an odd combination of Mao-era mass campaigns and neoliberally-inflected practices of “governing through community”, and reflect, most likely, urban officials’ efforts to govern the New Countryside using techniques already developed in urban areas. But to a large degree, government actors seemed to rely on the assumption that space itself—in the form of the new concentrated villages—would be enough to transform subjectivities. The assessment of many NGO and social workers in Chengdu’s quake-affected areas was that while the government was effective in rebuilding “hardware” (physical infrastructure), it fumbled when it came to “software” (social reconstruction). This was why, they reasoned, the government had welcomed the participation of NGO groups after the quake.

6.6 NGOs and social work in the post-quake landscape

The Wenchuan Earthquake in 2008 attracted an historically unprecedented number social organizations, volunteers, and donors from across China and was heralded as a sign of “the emergence of civil society in China” (Teets, 2009). Three days after the quake, a coalition of Chinese non-governmental organizations (NGOs) formed under the name “512 Voluntary Relief Services Center” to coordinate the thousands of volunteers arriving in Chengdu. Estimates of the number of NGO groups working in the quake zone ranged from 50 to over 200 (Shieh & Deng, 2011). Most of these groups entered the quake zone by leveraging personal ties with government officials, GONGOs (government-organized NGOs), or mass organizations like the Women’s Federation and Communist Youth League. A Beijing Normal University survey of NGOs operating in the quake zone found that nearly 58.6 per cent were operating in Sichuan in groups of three or more NGOs (Shieh & Deng, 2011). The quake thus provided a unique opportunity for networking and collaboration between NGOs from across China, and dramatically increased NGO presence in Sichuan: by 2013, the province had the third-largest number of registered NGOs in China, after Beijing and Shanghai (Y. Hu, 2013).

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The importance of the quake for China’s NGOs needs to be understood in the context of their tightly monitored emergence in the early 1990s. Until 2012, NGOs not only had to register with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, they also had to find a sponsoring agency within the government that would be willing to oversee their activities (and accept any associated political risks) (Hsu, 2014). Moreover, most NGOs are strictly local in scope; nation-wide organizing is prohibited. (“Chinese civil society: beneath the glacier,” 2014). But in the early 2000s there was a growing recognition of the potential role of “social organizations” in “social management”, and they came to be seen less as a threat to the Party and more as tool for bolstering social stability (Pieke, 2012, p. 151). The Wenchuan Earthquake was thus initially perceived as bringing about a dramatic shift in the landscape of China’s social organizations, in terms of both building organizational capacities and boosting public visibility and government acceptance (Shieh & Deng, 2011; Teets, 2009). In a widely cited turn of phrase, Xu Yongguang (founder of some of China’s most well-known state- affiliated social organizations, including the China Youth Development Foundation/ Project Hope and the Nandu (Narada) Foundation), heralded 2008 as “Year Zero of China’s Civil Society”(Zhongguo Gongmin Shehui Yuan Nian) (Yongguang Xu, 2008).

There are a few problems with this characterization of the quake as the moment of emergence for “civil society”. First, the line between state and society has long been blurred in China (Brook, 1997), making a liberal-oppositional notion of civil society as “a safeguard against an inherently oppressive state” (Ku, 2002, p. 535) inaccurate at best. The term “social organizations”, for instance, includes Mao-era state-run “mass organizations” like the Women’s Federation and Communist Youth League, social work groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and government-operated non-governmental organizations (GONGOs) (Shieh & Deng, 2011).44 Second, much of the literature celebrating the flourishing of civil society after the quake tends to conflate civil society with NGOs. But if we abandon a liberal-oppositional notion of civil society, self-organizing social groups in China have a much longer trajectory than the late 2000s (Brook, 1997). Finally there is the problem that many of the groups that appeared in Sichuan in the relief

44 Here I focus on the non-state NGOs and social work organizations that participated in longer-term social reconstruction. I single out these groups because they were the major non-state actors in the quake zone, aside from the private architectural firms and construction companies involved in physical reconstruction. Their openness relative to state-sponsored groups and local government offices also made it easier for researchers (including myself) to gain access.

129 phase immediately after the quake were shut down or expelled from the quake zone during the lengthier reconstruction period (Sorace, 2014, p. 405). The state was clearly the primary actor in the reconstruction process (Sorace, 2016). But regardless of whether or not the Wenchuan Earthquake should be characterized “Year Zero” for civil society in China, it did represent a unique opportunity for a variety of non-state actors to participate in rural reconstruction.

Although NGOs often worked closely with social work faculties and organizations (and often hired social workers), there were some differences in how the two groups operated and were perceived. Some social work groups entered the quake zone as part of the “counterpart reconstruction” (duikou yuanjian) approach. Social workers from the city of Guangzhou, for instance, arrived in the context of the Guangzhou government’s reconstruction aid, and thus had a (somewhat vague) state affiliation to draw on (Y. Pei, Zhang, & Ku, 2009). Social workers focused on providing social services and “rebuilding social relations” between family and community members. This mandate was developed and promoted alongside the widespread perception that social relations had been “damaged” by the quake (Fei & K.P. Ip, 2009; J. Lin, 2012), echoing the discourses of rural social “atomization” discussed earlier in the chapter. NGOs, by contrast, tended to have a much broader set of goals and projects, including physical reconstruction and livelihood development. One NGO researcher also noted that NGOs and social work organizations were treated differently in the quake areas: while local officials appeared suspicious of the goals of NGOs, social work organizations were often perceived as more neutral professional associations (M. Hu & Zhu, n/d).45 There was correspondingly a strong push to “professionalize” NGO work and thereby improve its standing among local officials.

Both NGOs and social work organizations explicitly positioned themselves as tools for “social management” in the aftermath of the quake: the role of NGO and social workers in the state’s social management project was, for instance, a key theme in a May 2011 seminar that I attended in Chengdu (S. Lu, 2011). At the same time, NGO and social workers were aware that the move towards professionalization also poses certain dangers; namely, the problem that NGO and social

45 Social work has only reemerged as a profession in China since the late 1990s (Sigley, 2016). With “red and expert” cadres (ideally) deeply embedded in society, social work was deemed unnecessary in post-1949 China. But official support of social work has changed with the emphasis on “social harmony” and new efforts to govern through community. By 2012, China was producing the second largest number of social work graduates in the world, after the United States (Leung, Yip, Huang, & Wu, 2012, p. 1042).

130 work will move towards a neutered social service delivery model that prevents NGO and social workers from acting in an advocacy role. Already, recent trends towards contracting out service delivery to NGOs and social workers have been flagged as potentially problematic; while service provision lends these groups new legitimacy, Hsu points out that in process of competing for state contracts, they reshape themselves into models that are more acceptable to the state (Hsu, 2014, p. 105).

6.7 The hazards of civil society?

Teets (2009) claims that, in spite of the obvious need to obtain the permission of local leaders, NGOs in the post-quake setting were able to avoid being “co-opted” by the state. But I think this may miss a broader resonance in how both NGOs and local leaders conceived of state-society relations. Both, in fact, shared a quasi-liberal notion of a separation between state and society. For government officials in Chengdu, this helped move towards a more modern approach to service provision and “government at a distance”. For NGO workers, this provided space to develop a form of civil society that would be autonomous from the state. Both seek to improve a population that is imagined to be too dependent, and was frequently described as “waiting, depending, and demanding” (deng, kao, yao) (Ye et al., 2013, p. 128). This in turn reflects a post-reform liberal narrative of transforming China’s peasantry into citizen-farmers, a shift with political ramifications. Alexander Day writes that “citizens” are imagined to be autonomous from (and sometimes in tension with) the state. But this undermines demands from “the people” for state protection from the market or guaranteed livelihoods (A. Day, 2013, pp. 68–69). In this context, it is easy to understand why the Chengdu government has been so enthusiastic about creating the new villagers’ councils and bolstering individual property rights. Local leaders are not concerned so much with land claims as they are with an inert and dependent peasantry.

At the same time, we should be cautious about seeing a straightforward neoliberal governmentality at work in the city’s efforts to govern rural areas. While the city’s social management programs encouraged “self-management” through the villagers’ councils, the rather invasive “three news” campaign can hardly be classified as governing “at a distance”. Echoing Tim Oakes’ (2017) observations about the municipal government’s “happiness campaign” in Tongren (a city in Guizhou Province), Chengdu’s approach to social management in its rural areas reflects a combination of governmental and sovereign power. Governmental power, in the Chengdu case,

131 entails not only subject formation in terms of cultivating self-managing, entrepreneurial rural citizens, but also reforming perceptions of the role of the state as a service provider (fuwuxing zhengfu) (H. Yang, 2009). I highlight the latter, because it is this disembedding of the state from society that seemed to provoke the most consternation among residents that I spoke with. It is more common to focus on the violence associated with the Polanyian disembedding of the market from society; but in an area still shaped by the legacy of state socialism, the distancing of the state can be equally violent. NGO work, to the extent that it supports the concept of a citizenry that is as independent from the state as it is from the market, can run the risk of missing or undermining claims on the state. The following chapter takes a closer look at how residents attempted to make claims on the state during the post-quake housing reconstruction process in Longmenshan Town, the site of the New Hometown NGO project.

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Chapter 7

7 Habitation versus Improvement in Longmenshan Town

7.1 Overview

The reconstruction forum described at the outset of the previous chapter was attended not only by social “experts”, but also by a handful of local residents. Although the main topic of the meeting was social reconstruction, this did not seem to be as much of a concern for residents as it was for experts. At one point during the lengthy line-up of PowerPoint presentations, an elderly resident interrupted to ask, “What I want to know is, what does reconstruction have to do with Chengdu’s urban-rural integration? And where is the money coming from?” The presenters didn’t have any answers for him, and treated the questions as a sort of non sequitur. But for me, the effect was electrifying. Indeed, the two questions, which ended up anchoring this project, are fundamental to understanding the dynamics of post-quake reconstruction in rural Chengdu. Earlier chapters have described how funds for reconstruction were generated through urban-rural integration (URI), or, more specifically, through the concentration of residents and the creation of property markets for rural land rights. The incident suggested that many residents were well aware of the land-based financing strategies propelling reconstruction in rural Chengdu, and were also aware that this was linked to municipal policies like URI. The exchange also reflected how residents’ substantive concerns about property, finances, and future livelihoods were often misread or sidelined by those in charge of reconstruction. Finally, although I did not know him at the time, the speaker’s identity as a team leader in one of the community’s former state-owned mines hinted at the role that local institutional histories were playing in the reconstruction process. Far from being a “blank slate” or an “atomized” group in need of assistance, rural residents in Chengdu tried actively (though not always successfully) to shape reconstruction outcomes by mobilizing pre-quake social institutions.

I want to shift registers in this chapter to focus on the everyday experiences of residents during the housing reconstruction process. Many of the questions about this process are framed in Polanyian terms. What were the concrete ways in which reconstruction served to extend “market logics” to rural areas after the quake? What role did state actors and NGO workers play in this process? With what alternate logics did residents try to challenge market-based logics, and to what extent did

133 socialist legacies provide them with a repertoire of tactics or logics? Finally, is it possible to speak of a “double movement” at the local level? Polanyi himself depicted the double movement as a broad-based social reaction against the market. He didn’t provide a broad theoretical explanation for how these movements occur, but his analysis suggests that actually existing social institutions provide the concrete, historic bedrock upon which such movements are established. I want to suggest here that an understanding of everyday life might enrich the Polanyian account. More specifically I draw on and extend Polanyi’s pairing of “habitation versus improvement”.

In the opening chapter of the dissertation I described how Polanyi used habitation to refer not only to housing, but also to the protective movement against the market. But habitation, as I read it, is not merely a synonym for the social counter-movement. It is a word too rich in associations—both grounded in the everyday business of survival and pregnant with a sense of Heideggerian dwelling—to be interchangeable with a vagely defined movement. Rather, I want to employ it to highlight the role of everyday life in sparking such an anti-market movement, in a way bringing Polanyi more directly into conversation with Lefebvre, who recognized everyday life as the substrate for struggles over space. In the case of post-quake Longmenshan Town, where the social reconstruction conference was held, habitation in all of its meanings—as housing, as resistance to the market, as everyday life—became a crucial point of contention between residents and local governments.

Longmenshan Town is a group of six settlements located 72 km northwest of urban Chengdu, where the flat, fertile Sichuan Basin gives way to the Longmenshan Mountain Range. The township sprawls over a scenic, mountainous area of about 368 km2, with almost 88 per cent of that land classified as forested area. In 2005 Longmenshan was home to over 12, 700 people, of whom about three quarters were engaged in agriculture (Longmenshan People’s Government, 2006). Mining was the economic mainstay of the community from the 1960s until 2002, when the two large state-owned mines were shut down. Since that time the Longmenshan government has focused on promoting the area as a tourist destination.46 By 2005, local residents had opened about 800 official “rural homestays” (nongjiale) to receive tourists who arrived to visit two well-known

46 In fact, Longmenshan Town was originally called Dabao Town: the town government decided to rename the place for the Longmenshan mountain range in order to promote tourism.

134 gorges in the area (Longmenshan People’s Government, 2006). The 2008 earthquake killed 455 Longmenshan residents, and destroyed over 95 per cent of the houses (Dai, 2010). During the quake, several tourists were also killed and the gorges themselves sustained heavy damage. In accordance with the central reconstruction plan, which promoted tourism as a “pioneer industry” in the quake zone (State Council of the P.R.C., 2008), the Longmenshan town government pitched the entire town as a center for rural tourism (xiangcun lüyou).

Longmenshan `

721km Pengzhou

Chengdu `

Figure 13: Position of Longmenshan Town within Chengdu (PowerPoint presentation, Shanshui Longmen Wucai Xiangcun: Longmenshan Shengtai Lüyou Guihua, 20/11/2009)

I focus particularly on Baishuihe Community, where I spent most of my time as a volunteer in the community centre. Baishuihe has a somewhat unique mix of residents consisting largely of laid-off workers from two former state mines, many of whom moved to Sichuan from northeast China during the 1960s under Mao’s “Third Front” industrial development strategy (described in Chapter 2). This means that Baishuihe is formally registered as a “community” (shequ) rather than a “village” (cun). The chapter is based on participant observation fieldwork carried out at the community centre and at community meetings, as well as semi-structured interviews conducted with residents, grassroots community leaders, government officials, and planners and consultants

135 involved in reconstruction. Because the community centre was also a research base for Sun Yat-sen University students, I also benefitted from insights and resources that other researchers shared with me. Specifically, I draw on transcripts of meetings between town officials and residents during the reconstruction process prior to my arrival, as well as an unpublished masters thesis that outlines the history of one of the communities in Longmenshan Town, Baoshan Village47. Finally, I draw on policy and promotional materials published by the township and village governments, media reports, and the local gazeteer (difangzhi) published in 2005. Aside from Baishuihe, I also conducted interviews and collected materials in two other adjacent settlements: Baoshan Village and Guoping Village. Because housing reconstruction approaches varied widely across the different communities in Longmenshan, this comparison is a helpful way to understand the significant role that institutional histories play in shaping reconstruction outcomes.

7.2 Social reconstruction in Longmenshan

The NGO group that I worked with in Longmenshan, New Hometown, was composed of several different domestic and international NGO and university-affiliated organizations. The NGO operated with the permission of the local government, but its day-to-day operations were not shaped by any direct government mandate. Instead, the New Hometown operated under a broad mandate to “build civil society”. NGO workers speculated that the government gave them permission because, while they recognized that social reconstruction was important, they weren’t quite sure how to “do” it. New Hometown made a point of staying out of the reconstruction process or intervening in any conflict between government and residents.48 Instead, the group focused on making small improvements in residents’ daily lives while they were living in the temporary shelters. These rather low-key interventions echo He Xuefeng’s emphasis on the importance of building “social capital” in rural communities at a very quotidian level. One NGO worker explained that they adopted this approach because they recognized the unsustainable nature

47 Baoshan Village is formally registered as a corporation (under the name, “Sichuan Province Pengzhou City Baoshan Enterprise Group Company Ltd.”), but for the sake of reader comprehension I refer to it as a village. 48 At an early stage the NGO tried to take on an advocacy and facilitation role when a group of residents wanted to address periodic water stoppages in the temporary shelters by tapping into a nearby spring. When the township government rejected the proposal, the NGO decided to step away from any similar projects. This arose both from a concern about incurring ill-will among township government officials, as well as a concern about disappointing residents, who expressed frustration with the project’s failure.

136 of project-based interventions, and chose to concentrate instead on integrating into the daily lives of local residents.

New Hometown opened an office in the temporary shelters where the young NGO staff worked and lived alongside residents. The regular staff included one social worker, one employee with NGO experience elsewhere in rural China, one university graduate from the community, and usually one or more university students conducting research on the community’s historical development. The largest project was the construction of a temporary community center consisting of two long barracks (like all the other temporary shelters) separated by a covered concrete courtyard (Figure 15). It included a library, a computer room, a television room (popular among retirees), a classroom, a hostel (two rooms of bunk beds for hosting visitors), and two showers available for public use at a nominal fee. During a tour of the village, one of the NGO leaders stressed the importance of public space on creating public-minded citizens, echoing sentiments I heard expressed by government officials. Public space was considered something that rural areas were lacking. There was a strong sense that public space itself would create communities from atomized rural residents, and plans for most new settlements in the quake zone included community centres. In Longmenshan, the new permanent community centre was one of the first buildings completed after the quake, though when I left at the end of 2011 the permanent centre was still not in use (Figure 15). Further echoing state discourse, another long-term aim of the NGO project was to foster a sense of “self-sufficiency” among residents, New Hometown hired a local resident to run the library and collect fees from the shower and the hostel, so that the center was partly self- sustaining.

The activities of the regular staff fell into three categories: communication, education, and social activities. In the early days after the quake, the staff ran a daily radio show, broadcasting news and announcements from loudspeakers posted throughout the village. They also met frequently with members of the Baishuihe residents’ committee in order to keep abreast of new government initiatives. NGO workers also targeted their work to reflect the demographic make-up of Baishuihe’s permanent residents, mostly middle-aged women, school-aged children, and the elderly. NGO workers visited older residents in their temporary quarters to check up on them and circulate news. They also helped organize summer activities for local children, including English

137 classes and environmental education workshops. Finally, they provided space and sound equipment for local women to practice their nightly “square dance” (guangchang wu) routine.49 And to some extent these activities may have served to promote “civil society”. One residents’ committee leader remarked to me that he felt people’s thinking was becoming “more complicated”, and they understood government policy better, because they were concentrated and could read notices, hear broadcasts, and watch television together.

Figure 14: The NGO-established community centre in Baishuihe’s temporary housing (left) and the new community centre built by the Fujian government (right) (photos by author). The sign outside the permanent centre announced it as part of “Chengdu’s public culture” (Chengdu gonggong wenhua).

Without discounting the real improvements that NGO workers made to residents’ everyday lives in the temporary shelters, I want to reiterate my concern in the previous chapter that efforts to build civil society through self-management (ziguan) and public consciousness (gonggong yishi) are built on slippery foundations of liberal individualism. They promote restructured notions of the social that discount older socialist organizational forms and mobilizing tactics. In other words, projects that exhort residents to be “self-sufficient” encourage, even if in small ways, a shift from “the people” to “the citizen”, erasing a sense of the state’s responsibility. The consequences of this shift to citizenship can be dire. Chuang (2014), for instance, documents how the push for “citizenship”

49 Square dancing here refers to dancing in a public square, not the square dancing style of the western United States. It is a popular form of exercise for middle-aged women in both urban and rural China, though recently it has come to be seen as a public nuisance in urban areas, and the government has tried to regulate dance styles and music volume.

138 under Chongqing’s New Socialist Countryside project removed the conditions for rightful resistance to land expropriation.

But it is one thing to point out the liberal logics of state and non-state social reconstruction projects, and quite another thing to assert that these projects were successful. For instance, on 20 April 2009, a resident’s council (the yishihui described in the previous chapter) was convened for the first time in Baishuihe Community in Longmenshan Town. The 30 elected members agreed to meet once monthly on the 20th, and a special committee was established to gather the opinions of the community and set the agenda for the meeting. But according to one member, the yishihui was “meaningless” (mei you yisi) because the proposals the council put forward were never adopted by the government. “The council should have been a way to involve residents in democracy, but it didn’t have that effect,” the member claimed, “Now every month on the 20th, only a few people show up for the meeting” (Interview, 17 March 2010).

One of the most contentious issues for the council was the allocation of the dibao, a basic minimum income guarantee extended to Longmenshan in 2000. Initially dibao recipients were nominated by the small group heads who were familiar with the financial situation of households. The results were reviewed by the residents committee and then submitted to the Civil Affairs Bureau in Pengzhou. The Civil Affairs Bureau issued public notices of the result, and if there were no objections, the recipients would receive funding. Now the recipients are supposed to be determined through a broader public vote in the council meetings. The council member cited earlier said that they spent half a day discussing the dibao in council, and in the end the government decided how they wanted to do it. But not all residents were critical of the government’s role. One former residents’ committee (the precursor to the council) said that under the council allocation system, people who didn’t need the dibao would get allocated a subsidy because their friends had shown up to vote (Interview, 19 March 2010). For her, the government had an important role to play in these questions of reallocation and social justice. This role was hotly debated during the process of physical reconstruction, the topic that I want to turn to next.

7.3 Baishuihe Community

Baishuihe Community acts as the social and spatial hub of Longmenshan Town. It consists largely of a collection of commercial and residential buildings clustered along the main highway from Pengzhou City. The settlement formally became a “community” (shequ) in 2002, after the nearby

139 state-owned copper and serpentine mines were shut down. This represented a change in population registration rather than a spatial change: while workers and their families had been housed on or near the street while the mines were operating, after 2002 they lost their registered status as state workers (gongmin) and became official residents (jumin) of the newly amalgamated Baishuihe Community. These classifications have important repercussions: since residents are not farmers (nongmin), they are not organized as a rural collective and do not have collective rights of land ownership. For most Baishuihe residents, their property claims are limited to their individual homes and yards. When the mine was still operating workers rented these houses from the mine, and after the mine closed, the houses were sold to workers at a nominal cost. Initially, the community consisted of only about 400 people living along the main commercial street. After the mines closed, the number of permanent residents swelled: in 2010, there were about 3200 people living in the community (Longmenshan People’s Government, 2006).50 Many of the permanent residents of Baishuihe are middle-aged women, young children, and retired mine workers. Most of the working age men and young adults work outside of Baishuihe, returning only between jobs or for important celebrations. Since the mines closed the primary local sources of nonagricultural income are limited to the rural homestays and the small businesses lining the street.

Geography, according to Longmenshan officials, is the main factor constraining Baishuihe’s future development. The community occupies a narrow strip of valley land between the Jianjiang River and a steep slope that rises about twenty meters before it turns into a broad plateau known as Sanfuping. Much of the land in the plateau belongs to neighbouring Baoshan Village, except for a small area where, prior to the quake, the copper mine workers and their families lived in closely built single-story cottages. When residents speak of the geography of the community, they refer to two distinct areas: the street (gaidao, in the local dialect) and the plateau (referred to as either Sanfuping broadly, or “the old copper mine” if they are talking specifically about the residential area where the former mine workers live). The neighbourhood divisions within Baishuihe reflect the community’s mining and industrial history. Until the quake, residents lived with members of their old work unit, and many of the neighbourhood groups are named for the former mines. Old

50 There are in fact 2658 officially registered residents, but about 3200 people live in the community if non-locally registered residents are included. Many of the former mine workers were originally registered with the Public Security Bureau in nearby Xinxing town, and didn’t change their registration when Baishuihe established its own police station in the 1980s.

140 mine affiliations and former team leaders retain unofficial authority within the community, although since 2005 the community’s daily affairs have been overseen by a new residents’ committee. But compared to villagers’ committees in some neighbouring villages, the Baishhuihe residents’ committee was toothless when it came to decision-making during post-quake reconstruction, which was largely managed by the Longmenshan Town government.

As mentioned previously, three months after the quake, the National Development and Reform Commission issued an overall plan for post-quake reconstruction. The document laid out broad principles and priorities for physical and economic reconstruction, as well as guidelines for financing, land use, and management (State Council of the P.R.C., 2008). Key features of the plan were the three-year deadline established for all reconstruction projects to be finished; the principle of scientific planning; and the counterpart reconstruction system (duikou yuanjian). Each quake- affected city or county was paired with a wealthier eastern city or province, which dedicated one per cent of annual GDP over the three years of the reconstruction timeline to infrastructure projects in their paired region. The counterpart province or city not only provided funds, but also sent work teams to oversee the reconstruction process. Longmenshan lies in the jurisdiction of Chengdu’s satellite city, Pengzhou, which was paired with Fujian Province. This meant that the Fujian government funded and managed the area’s infrastructure projects largely independently of local governments. With infrastructure being handled by Fujian planners and construction teams, housing was thus the major responsibility placed on the shoulders of local governments.

In Baishuihe, the Longmenshan Town government adopted a “joint planning, joint reconstruction” approach, under which residents gave up their former property to join a concentrated settlement with planning and construction conducted by outside contractors retained by the town.51 Under Baishuihe’s post-quake “Scenic Ecological Community” (shanshui shengtai anzhiqu) project,52 most residents will be moved to multi-story apartment buildings along the street (Figure 16). The new houses are five to seven story walk-up apartment buildings with the lower story devoted to

51 As described earlier, three different resettlement approaches were adopted across the quake zone: rebuilding on the original site (yuanzi chongjian); joint planning, self-construction (tonggui zijian); and joint planning, joint construction (tonggui tongjian) (Sichuan Statistics Bureau, 2010). 52 “Ecological” here is more about branding the town as an eco-tourism site than environmental sustainability. The apartments were designed and built conventionally, with no particular attention to their “ecological” impact.

141 commercial space. Each apartment has an average area of 65 m2, which is close to the area of residents’ former houses. There are also some two- and three-bedroom apartments with slightly larger areas (80 m2) but households have to pay more for this space. The majority of the new buildings are being built between the river and the street on a previously unoccupied piece of state- owned land. Until 2006, a narrow-gauge railway line ran through this land, servicing the mines. After the quake, the town government claimed the land for reconstruction. Using the state-owned land reduced the cost of providing housing, and thus the costs borne by residents. It also freed up land in the original commercial and residential strip to attract investment to the community. The town government labeled this approach “putting out the cage to attract birds” (teng long huan niao): in this case, land is the cage, and capital is the capricious bird that local officials hope to attract (M. Zhou & Guang, 2009).

Figure 15: A poster of the Baishuihe "Scenic Ecological Community" plan (left), and a billboard showing Baoshan's post-quake tourism plan (right) (photos by author)

Part of the justification for the “joint planning, joint construction” approach was financial. While the Sichuan provincial government guaranteed an average subsidy of RMB 25,000 per household (“Sichuan post Wenchuan city and town housing reconstruction work report,” 2008), this fell short of the funds needed for rebuilding. The shortfall had to be made up by residents and local governments. The Longmenshan Town government used the “joint planning, joint reconstruction” approach to open up new land for development and negotiate a loan with the contractor, the

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Chengdu Ninth Air Force Engineering Corps (Chengdu Kongjun di Jiu Gongcheng Zongdui), one of the largest construction groups in Sichuan (S. Xu, 2008). The Ninth Air Force Engineering Corps spent RMB 5 million building the Longmenshan Town“Nine Years” school (“The Longmenshan Town Nine Year School Built by Chengdu’s Air Force Officially Opens Its Doors,” 2009). Completed on August 1, 2009, it was one of the first schools in the province to reopen after the quake. Through the school project, the company established a close working relationship with the town government, including a creative financing strategy for their reconstruction projects. According to local cadres, reconstruction will cost the town government about RMB 180 million (Interview, 15 March 2010). The government has collected over RMB 60 million from subsidies and from the residents themselves, so the Air Force Engineering Corps is effectively providing a loan of over RMB 100 million to the town government. But local cadres described the loan as a risk-free internal government transaction between two branches of the state (Interview, 23 April 2010). Once the residents have been resettled, the logic goes, the old residential area will be opened up for investment and the town government will repay the loan from the Air Force.

Using the vacant land by the river seemed like an ideal solution—in fact, Longmenshan town officials described this strategy of building on unoccupied land as a “lifesaving straw” (M. Zhou & Guang, 2009). But in order to realize this plan residents had to agree to the new project, and this was far from straightforward. To apply for the joint planning and building project, residents had to go through the following process: (1) Apply, with necessary proof, for the state subsidy for damaged houses (2) Fill out the voluntary form for housing reconstruction (3) Fill out the voluntary form for land replacement (4) Fill out the voluntary form to apply your housing subsidy towards the housing reconstruction fund (5) Fill out the voluntary application for demolishing dangerous houses (6) Apply for extra reconstruction subsidies on your own initiative

What this meant was that residents who wanted to join the resettlement project had to hand over their state housing subsidy to the town government, give up their property title, and consent to their old house being demolished. All of this was “voluntary,” but in the end only about one-quarter of households decided not to join the unified plan: of the community’s 1547 households, 1123 registered for the new housing project after the earthquake (G2, 2010a).

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These numbers conceal a colossal task. Many residents were hesitant to forego their property titles and post-quake housing subsidies. Even after they signed the subsidy over to the town government, residents had to pay additional construction fees out of their own pocket (350 yuan/m2) and many felt the cost of the new houses was too high. With so many forced retirees as a result of the mine closures, the idea of supplementing the state subsidy with their own limited funds in order to obtain a government-built apartment was unpalatable. In Baishuihe, households received an average of about RMB 25,000 in subsidies, an amount that covered about half of the price of the new houses. Most households made up the remainder through savings, and, in the case of older respondents, support from their children. Only about 10 per cent of households surveyed were taking out loans, but this was often in conjunction with other forms of financing.53 There were initially a number of concerns about the design and location of the new apartments. Older residents did not want to move into a multi-story building that would mean navigating stairways (Figure 17). The lower levels of the new buildings are designated as commercial space, and many residents expressed worry that this would result in a dirty, noisy living environment. Residents also perceived the building site itself as unsafe. In fact, the area by the river where the construction is occurring was previously classified as a flood zone. Residents were cautious about moving to the old rail yard, and recalled stories of a train that was washed away by flooding. Finally there was apprehension about the future allocation process. Not all of the new buildings were finished at the same time, meaning that some residents were able to move in earlier than others. Moreover, since the buildings have no elevators, lower stories were seen as more desirable than upper stories, particularly given the age profile of residents.

53 These estimates are based on a nonrandom survey of 50 households that I conducted with my research assistant.

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Figure 16: Pre-quake (left) and post-quake (right) homes in Baishuihe (photos by author)

The town government has relied on the lower level village committee leaders to disseminate piecemeal information about the project and secure residents’ acceptance. As described earlier, town level government officials are the lowest official state representatives in China. Below this level, groups known as residents’ committees (juweihui) (in “urbanized” settlements) or villagers’ committees (cunweihui) (in rural villages) are charged with managing conflicts and representing residents’ interests to upper levels of government. Not part of the formal state apparatus, these groups are classified as “self-governing organizations,” and are made up of representatives elected by residents. In practice, however, “grassroots” committee members and group leaders tend to act as instruments of the town government. In Baishuihe the residents’ committee was only established in 2005, as a means of dealing with social unrest after the mine workers had been laid off (M. Hu & Zhu, n/d). The committee members felt immense pressure from the town government to win residents’ over, and were also on the receiving end of residents’ hostility. “Life would be so good,” sighed one committee member when I went to visit their busy office, “if only it hadn’t been for this quake.” He was referring not to the catastrophe itself, but laborious work of reconstruction afterwards. The grassroots leaders had to pay personal visits to households who did not sign up. In some cases, they approached the children of older residents to ask them to convince their parents to sign up for the new project.

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In addition to the committees, there were also government-established residents’ “leading groups” for reconstruction. 54 Each neighbourhood group selected two representatives to attend meetings. These representatives couldn’t be selected by the current cadres, but were elected by residents. According to committee members, the people elected as representatives were “good talkers,” and “very enthusiastic”. One committee member explained the representatives’ activities in the following way: “After understanding the situation, [the representatives] led the way to resolving problems, so that not everyone with a question had to go running to the government…The countryside is like this, so the leaders thought of this method, but it seems not to have really taken off [because] people are used to going to the government [with their problems].” (G2, 2010a) It is interesting here that committee members (who are themselves residents) attribute to residents some of the characteristics often associated with peasants—irrationality and excessive dependence on the state—although residents were not peasants (nongmin), but former workers (gongmin) and their families. Leading groups appear to have been intended to be means of pacifying residents and avoiding direct confrontations with the town government rather than including residents in the planning process.

A lack of clear communication from the town government about the new housing project, combined with the lack of avenues for affecting the reconstruction process, meant that stories about the project spread quickly. One rumour suggested that the reason the price for the new houses was higher than residents had expected was that the government had previously auctioned off the state- owned railway land to developers, and then was forced to buy it back at a higher cost when they decided to build the resettlement project there (though this was not corroborated by town government officials). In early 2010 residents noticed a new, unannounced project was being built at a site far away from the central street. No one wanted to live at such a distance from the centre of the community, so residents organized their own group of representatives to approach the town government. These delegates were strategically chosen: many were former mine leaders, who not only had positions of authority within the community, but were affiliated with the state and seen as less threatening to town officials. The delegates were told that the new project was a private residential development, and would not act as a resettlement site for residents. But this new

54 These were different than the residents’ councils (cunmin yishihui) described earlier in the chapter.

146 development was also a source of concern for residents, who were well aware that local officials were funding the reconstruction project through (future) land leasing under the deal with the Ninth Air Force Engineering Corps. They also believed that the government would be earning rent from the commercial properties on the lower levels of the new buildings. The question “Where is the money coming from?” expresses not only anxiety about how residents will pay for their own houses, but also misgivings about how the town government is funding the reconstruction project.

Two and a half years after the quake, many of the buildings on the main street were nearing completion. Once the buildings were there, residents’ earlier concerns about design problems seemed to fade. Most were eager to be settled, and found the new apartment blocks modern and attractive. Moreover, they were not opposed to the government’s tourism plan per se, but were more concerned about what they were being required to pay. Many residents felt that they should not have to pay any money for the new houses. There were two primary justifications for this. The first stems from an earlier socialist ethic: mine workers felt that they had performed a service to the country, and that it is the state’s responsibility to house them. There was also a sense of just redistribution: they were laid off by the mines, and were left with few resources to draw on. Not only their prior service, but their subsequent condition of economic disadvantage should entitle them to support from the state. But they also appealed to market logics in their claim to free housing. Residents were aware that the town government needed them to move into the new houses in order to open up space for future development, and felt they were entitled to a share in the future largess. But the contradictions between the socialist and market ethics became clear in interactions with town leaders.

In a fascinating meeting between residents of the former serpentine mine houses (which were located on the street) and Longmenshan Town Secretary Xie, a spokesperson for the residents introduces himself as a former mine worker who has been selected to speak on behalf of the residents.55 He first expresses gratitude for the work that the government has done after the quake, and then argues that the serpentine mine workers should not have to pay for the new housing. The spokesperson points out that the land the former serpentine workers lived on, along the main road,

55 The meeting occurred prior to my arrival in Longmenshan, but another researcher from Sun Yat-sen University was present to record the meeting. She kindly shared the meeting transcript with me, and I use it with her permission.

147 is the most valuable land in Longmenshan. The government can make a lot of money by moving the serpentine mine residents to the less valuable land along the river, and the residents should be compensated for exchanging their “gold and silver bowl” for a “clay bowl” (exchanging more valuable land for less valuable land). Secretary Xie replies that giving the serpentine workers free housing is “impossible.” He says that the residents can undertake self-reconstruction if they want— the government is not forcing anyone to join the plan. But Xie reminds them that everyone had agreed to the joint plan in a previous meeting, and now he has put a lot of effort into trying to amass the funds needed for the planned settlement. Xie explains that by moving to the Scenic Homes area, residents were providing Baishuihe with an opportunity to develop:

Resident 1: We residents are willing to make Longmenshan better, but it’s not clear that sending us packing is going to improve anything.

Secretary Xie: Because of planning, afterward the government can adopt a number of different measures [to improve Longmenshan]. To be frank, after building the houses and moving you in, then the land will appreciate and offset the over 1 billion yuan in funds that the government has already poured into the project.

[heated discussion among residents]

Resident 2 (a former mine leader): Let me help explain. I’m not just expressing my personal opinion here, but everyone’s opinion. That 350 yuan make-up cost [the amount that households have to pay per square meter for the new houses on top of the subsidy], all the 65 square meter houses shouldn’t have to give this 350 yuan, but for every one square meter larger than that, those households should give 1000 yuan.

Secretary Xie: If that’s your opinion, you need to look at the land prices and the housing prices. You’d pay however much you have to, not necessarily 350 yuan. It might be 200 yuan, it might be 600 yuan, depending on where your land is. We’d have to carry out an assessment.

The residents and the town secretary seem to be talking at cross-purposes here. The second resident is appealing to the widespread sense that residents shouldn’t have to pay for their new homes. He suggests that those with the economic means can pay extra to obtain more space, and the extra cost can help subsidize the other residents. But Secretary Xie interprets the residents’ suggestion as

148 asking for market-based compensation for the property that they are “freeing up” by moving into the new houses. He pushes that logic one step further, to the point where it undermines the sense of social ethics in the residents’ initial suggestion.

The residents’ spokesperson subsequently goes on to make a more explicit appeal to a non-market logic, describing how, once the mines had gone bankrupt, they had reduced their payments for workers’ pensions and health insurance. Secretary Xie claimed that he was moved by this history, and responded that the reconstruction project was a way to address the problems of the “Third Front” projects once and for all. But if the residents wanted to use their subsidy and their land to pursue their own development project, Secretary Xie continued, he would not stop them. He added, making his own emotional appeal, that if residents felt that there was any error in his methods of policy implementation, he would leave his position.

This exchange reflects a number of fascinating dynamics during the reconstruction process. It highlights the role that older institutions and leaders (like the former mine leaders) played in trying to influence reconstruction. It also highlights the contradictions between market and socialist logics in housing reconstruction. Finally, the discussion also complicates narratives that local governments “coerced” residents into signing up for the concentrated settlements. Secretary Xie seems to use the option of “self-reconstruction” as a threat. This suggests that residents lacked the social and financial resources to rebuild on their own; that they wanted and expected the government to manage housing reconstruction; or both. The coercion at play, if it can be called that, is surprisingly emotional, even passive-aggressive. The residents start out by acknowledging the hard work of the government officials, and the secretary subsequently calls on them to acknowledge his own sacrifices. He even goes so far as to offer to leave if they are dissatisfied. In the end, Secretary Xie was replaced, but residents remained stuck with the original 350 yuan cost for each square meter of their new apartments.

7.4 Baoshan Village

The Baoshan villagers’ committee, in contrast to the Baishuihe residents’ committee, was very active in defining the village’s future development path. Indeed Baoshan seemed to operate more or less independently of the Longmenshan town government. Baoshan Village is run as a corporation, with residents holding shares in the company. It is known as “the top village in Western China” (Zhongguo xibu di yi cun), and the “Baoshan story” is displayed in the village’s

149 shiny promotional brochures, a prominent frieze outside the committee offices, and a small museum dedicated to the man considered responsible for the village’s rise in fortune, Party Secretary Jia Zhengfang. Until 1966, Jia had worked as part of a state geological team. But after an accident caused him to lose most of his vision, Secretary Jia returned to his home village of Baoshan. Determined to improve the village’s low living standards, he led villagers on a project of wasteland reclamation. Jia used the painstakingly accumulated surplus from increased agricultural yields to develop the village’s mining resources. Following reform and opening, the village became the Baoshan Enterprise Group Company (Baoshan Qiye Jituan Gongsi). In 1979, Baoshan designed and built a hydropower dam in the village. Throughout the 1980s, the village-company built several more hydropower dams in the surrounding area.

Figure 17: Image from the Baoshan Museum that shows armed Baoshan residents reading a newspaper headline urging support for Chairman Mao's call to establish a people's militia (left). The museum is located in the Baoshan Corporation offices (right). (photos by author)

By the 1990s, as with the state-owned mines where Baishuihe residents worked, the Baoshan mines were less profitable. In 1997, Jia Yanjing, the son and successor of Secretary Jia, attended the 15th Party Congress, and cited this as a watershed moment for his understanding of development. He claimed that prior to the meeting, he had only thought of using the village’s own funds for development, and had never thought to borrow funds from the bank. After the Congress, he realized how conservative and narrow this thinking was, and that it was limiting Baoshan to a very slow pace of development (Xian, 2010, p. 34). In 2003, the Baoshan Enterprise Group Company

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(Baoshan Qiye Jituan Gongsi) became the Sichuan Province Pengzhou City Baoshan Enterprise Group Company Ltd. (Sichuan Sheng Pengzhou Shi Baoshan Qiye Jituan Gongsi Youxian Gongsi), and established a stricter, more modern governance system with professional managers working under a board of directors. With the help of loans, the company drew on its mining expertise to invest in a mining project in Vietnam, and sent a group of villagers to work at the Vietnamese site. The company also started to develop Baoshan’s tourism resources, building a hotel, marketing nearby gorges as “scenic areas”, and entering into a joint project with a Japanese company to develop a “Japanese-style golf course”. Company profits started to take off during this period. At the end of 2007 the net income for the corporation was RMB 210 million, and the average income for each villager reached RMB 12,322 (Xian, 2010, p. 38).56

In 2005, Baoshan had 611 households (2168 people) divided into 15 villager small groups (Xian, 2010, p. 22). About 28.9% of villagers work outside the village; the rest work in the collective enterprises (32.1%), in agriculture (20.1%), or were self-employed with small businesses (18.9%) (Xian, 2010, p. 25). Spatially, Baoshan’s residents are scattered in about 26 clustered settlement areas (juzhudian), with the largest consisting of 40 households. Some of Baoshan’s residential areas are interspersed with Baishuihe’s residential areas, particularly in the Sanfuping plateau, where Baishuihe’s former copper mine workers lived. Prior to the quake, some Baoshan residents lived in “European-style” villas on the Sanfuping Plateau, near the older work unit housing of the Baishuihe copper mine. Unlike the homes of the Baishuihe workers, these survived the quake with minimal damage. This made for a surreal environment after the quake: Baishuihe residents were living in temporary shelters beside their decimated houses, literally steps away from a scene of bucolic, bourgeois comfort in the Baoshan residential area (Figure 19).

56 To provide a sense of the relative wealth of Baoshan villagers, annual incomes in neighbouring Guoping Village (discussed in the following section) were about RMB 2000.

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Figure 18: Baoshan's "European-style" villas (left) and temporary earthquake shelters for Baishuihe residents (right), both on the Sanfuping Plateau (photos by author)

After the quake, the Baoshan Corporation undertook reconstruction independently, “without relying on the government”. In terms of housing, Baoshan residents were able to adopt the “joint planning, independent construction” approach (tonggui zijian). The corporation provided an extra subsidy of RMB 5000 (Meeting August 12 2010), and established basic planning guidelines for reconstruction that consisted largely of demarcating areas where residents could rebuild, and hiring an architecture firm to come up with a unified design for the houses in each settlement area. One area near the main road—the Sun and Rain (Taiyang Yu) Community—was rebuilt as a specialized “rural homestay” (nongjiale) quarter (Figure 20). This was one of the first areas to be completed, and it was where the village leaders brought visiting officials and journalists. In other areas, the design codes were somewhat less strict. I once got a ride up to the village with a young woman who was working as a landscape architect with the Chengdu-based planning firm that Baoshan Corporation had retained to draw up the reconstruction plans. She was immensely frustrated with the chaos (luan) when she toured the site, because residents had built the houses about ten meters away from the plan she carried in her hands, cutting into the space designated for lawns and pathways. Outside the “showcase” areas, then, residents seemed to have a certain amount of de facto flexibility in reconstruction under Baoshan’s “joint planning, independent construction” approach.

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Figure 19: Baoshan's "Sun and Rain" rural tourism area (photo by author)

In fact, the village leaders didn’t seem too concerned about enforcing design standards for residents’ houses. Their attention was focused on other post-quake development projects related to tourism and real estate under the slogan of “one heart, four areas”, which included the “four areas” of the Baoshan Hot Spring Resort, the Baoshan New Countryside Tourist Area, the Huilongguo Grand Canyon Scenic Area, and the Sun Bay Scenic Area. These projects were headed up by Dai Jun, an outside consultant with vague qualifications as an entrepreneur. Dai spent most of his time in Chengdu, but drove frequently from the city to meet with Baoshan leaders. Baoshan residents who worked in the Baoshan Corporation offices referred to him as Dai Zongli (Manager Dai), although he didn’t have a formal position within the Baoshan Corporation. Dai’s primary task seemed to be to “sell” Baoshan to outside investors. He excelled at the banter needed to entertain prospective partners during the long dinners that often accompany business transactions in China (at least prior to Xi Jinping’s later anti-corruption campaign).57 The aim of Baoshan’s tourism projects, as explained by Dai, was not only to improve peasant incomes, but also elevate their culture (wenhua) (August 12 2010).

57 Dai was aware that Chengdu’s townships and villages were seeking new investors for the land that was freed up through residential concentration. He subsequently used his experience in Baoshan to formally establish a business as a “rural tourism consultant” in Chengdu with some former school friends.

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Dai Jun claimed he wanted to carry out a survey of the rural homestays (nongjiale), and planned to invite experts to train them in hygiene, service, and management techniques. But we should be careful about interpreting this as a comprehensive or effective program. This training plan was described during a meeting with NGO workers and village officials at the Baoshan village offices (where he pointed to my own presence in the village as having a beneficial impact on residents’ level of culture). He knew that his audience was interested in social reconstruction, and pitched the project accordingly. But in private conversations, Dai did not seem primarily interested in raising culture levels or even reforming the rural homestays. The main platform for Baoshan was “tourism real estate” (luyou fangdichan), or vacation homes for urbanites. I asked him if these would be like the apartment buildings currently lining the street. “Sort of,” replied Dai, “but the projects we are planning will be at a much higher level. Some residents can afford the apartments on the street, but they won’t be able to afford the new buildings, which will have their own hot spring access.” What Dai was planning, with the support of Baoshan village leaders, was an elite tourism economy that would be physically and socially separate from the day-to-day lives of the villagers.

7.5 Guoping Village

Reconstruction in Guoping Village, just across the river from Baoshan and Baishuihe, presented a stark contrast to Baoshan. In 2010 there were 435 households and 1376 residents in Guoping Village, divided into 10 villager small groups (Guoping Village Committee, 2010). Like Baoshan, most of the land in Guoping is hilly and forested: the village covers an area of 8010 mu, with arable land making up just 970 mu and forest land making up 6356 mu, or 86 per cent, of village land (Ibid.). The primary sources of agricultural income came from gathering medicinal herbs and wild vegetables, and cultivating corn and sweet potatoes. Guoping Village is a “traditional” village, with direct agricultural production still playing a large role in household income. Average annual income for the villagers in 2009 was just RMB 2000, less than a tenth of the average income for Baoshan residents (T. Chen & Wang, 2010). Without a dedicated (and well-connected) leader like Secretary Jia, the Guoping collective had never embarked on a Baoshan-style improvement project. Residents had been unhappy with previous village secretaries, so there had been difficulty in filling the position with someone from the village. In the end, an outside cadre was appointed to the position (Interview, 17 March 2010).

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During the earthquake, about 95 per cent of houses were seriously damaged, and six residents were killed (Guoping Village Committee, 2010). Because Guoping had been classified as a low-income settlement before the quake, the entire cost of housing reconstruction was covered by the state, provided that residents moved into the concentrated settlement under the “joint planning and joint construction” (tonggui tongjian) plan. A single concentrated settlement area was built consisting of a walled compound of four and five story buildings (Figure 21). There was no attempt here to adhere to any “pastoral” aesthetic: this was a clear transfer of “urban” plans to a “rural” setting. When we encountered one of the project managers for the new development at the site, he was full of complaints about the “backwards” people and the damp climate, and seemed eager to finish as soon as possible. Unlike Luping Village (described in Chatper 3), there were no efforts in this case to engage Guoping residents in the planning of the new settlement.

Figure 20: Guoping Villages offices (left) and Guoping's new post-quake housing settlement (right) (photos by author)

Residents seemed largely pleased with the “urban” design of the new apartments, aside from the loss of space for tools. They were given an extra subsidy to build small sheds on the land that they cultivated, but because this land was often far from the concentrated settlement, some of the people I spoke with were not satisfied with this arrangement. Their primary concerns revolved around housing allocation and compensation. The new settlement itself had to be built on land belonging to the Number 2 small group (xiaozu), and group members claimed that they were supposed to be compensated for the land at a rate of RMB 50,000 per mu. But they were worried about what would happen after the money was gone, since they no longer had land to farm. The Number 2 group

155 members also claimed that they had been promised preferential treatment in the allocation of new apartments. But when the time came for residents to move into the new apartments, the village leaders simply started drawing lots to assign apartments. Bulletins posted outside the Guoping villagers’ committee offices indicated that this allocation policy was established by the Chengdu government, presumably as an attempt to avoid corruption and favoritism at the village level. Regardless of the origins of the allocation procedure, it was experienced by the Number 2 group members as a violation of promises made to them. This translated into a feeling that the village leaders had a bad attitude towards them, and didn’t listen to their concerns. One Number 2 group member said, “When we went to ask them about allocation, they cursed at us and beat the desk. They didn’t seem like cadres, and they have even have higher education.” Here, residents appear to acknowledge the “civilizational” benefits that accrue to those with education, but use it to demand certain standards of behavior from village leaders.

Residents also claimed that village leaders weren’t responsible, and were never in the offices when they were needed. 58 Some accused village leaders of embezzling money after the quake, based, it seemed, on close personal observations of cadres’ new clothes and new marriages after the quake. This accusation may or may not be true, but a glimpse at the village budget, posted outside the village offices, hints at reasons why residents might be dissatisfied:

Expenditures: 1. Village planning 300,000 yuan 2. Geological assessment 180,000 yuan 3. Office products 71,699 yuan 4. Cleaning up rubble 8,000 yuan 5. Beer festival 203,589 yuan 6. Village affairs expenses 1680 yuan 7. Temporary shelter sanitation fees 3000 yuan 8. Urban-rural comprehensive improvement 3900 yuan

The main budget line is for village planning, and the second largest item is for a “beer festival” that was held in an effort to attract attention and tourists to the area. In media interviews, the village

58 I tried repeatedly to interview village leaders in Guoping Village, but whenever I visited the village offices, they pleaded busy-ness (and indeed the office was frequently crowded with residents). Even after I received and presented a letter of introduction from the town secretary, Guoping leaders declined to make an appointment with me, suggesting that they were facing substantial difficulties during the allocation process.

156 head, Li Ping, claims that he learned from the entrepreneurial leaders of Baoshan Village to “seize the opportunity of [post-quake] projects to lay out the basic path to development” (T. Chen & Wang, 2010). The development plan itself revolved around creating fields of lavender, cherry orchards, and a four-star hotel to attract tourists. For village-level cadres in Chengdu, their priorities, as evidenced in Guoping’s village budget, lie in complying with Chengdu’s regional urban-rural integration plans and pursuing local economic development, often through spectacular tourism or real estate development projects. Because these projects are generally spearheaded by outside experts and consultants, rural residents have little to no involvement in them.

When residents went to the higher-level Longmenshan Town government with complaints, they were told that this was a village issue, and that the village council (cunmin yishihui) should decide on such matters (July 7 2010). But the village council had no say over the housing reconstruction project. Guoping residents were unhappy about the lack of town-level responsiveness, and complained about the town government offices being built near the entrance to Longmenshan on the other side of the river. They believed that this was a deliberate strategy to allow Longmenshan officials to drive to work from their homes in the city without having to enter the rest of the town. The town officials, they felt, were physically and psychologically distant from the demands of Guoping villagers. Indeed, as the section on Baishuihe suggests, town officials already had their hands full managing housing reconstruction in Baishuihe.

7.6 Discussion

The reconstructions stories in Baishuihe, Baoshan, and Guoping highlight several aspects of post- quake reconstruction. First, in all three places, residents had minimal direct involvement in reconstruction planning. According to the overall quake zone plan issued by the central government, public participation should have been an integral principle of reconstruction projects (State Council of the P.R.C., 2008). But in Baishuihe, although there were mechanisms for soliciting residents’ opinions (including the residents’ groups and meetings with town leaders), there were no efforts to implement any suggestions. Meetings and groups functioned rather as a means of informing residents about decisions that had already been made. Baishuihe residents attempted to gain some foothold in the reconstruction process by mobilizing through former work unit institutions and appealing to a pre-reform “moral economy” that prioritized equity and subsistence rights (habitation) over land values and developmental potentials (improvement).

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Second, the stories of these three communities suggest that post-reform inequalities were not eradicated by the quake, but exacerbated. Baoshan’s developmental “lead” over Baishuihe and Guoping was only furthered by post-quake reconstruction, and this inequality was strongly felt by residents in both Baishuihe and Guoping. When I asked one young Baishuihe resident (who also worked at the community centre) how Baishuihe residents felt about Baoshan villagers, he replied, “They hate their bones!” (Interview July 22, 2010). I thought he was joking, but when I pursued the question, it seemed he wasn’t exaggerating much. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, Baishuihe residents, as state workers, had enjoyed a position that was socially and economically superior to their peasant neighbours in Baoshan. The tables completely turned in the 1990s, when the mines were closed and Baishuihe workers were laid off. Post-quake inequalities were partly a result of the strong role that local histories and institutions played in shaping post-quake reconstruction projects. Financial resources, the ability of residents to influence reconstruction projects, and the division of power between township and village levels, depended largely on the strength of prior collective institutions.

Blame for the worsening inequality and lack of residents’ marginalization during the reconstruction process cannot be laid entirely at the feet of local government leadership. Township leaders were under pressure to rebuild within the central government’s three-year timeline (and the two-year timeline subsequently laid out by the Sichuan provincial government), making substantive consultation tricky, if not impossible. Moreover, the “Chengdu approach” to financing reconstruction through harnessing present and future land values meant that there was pressure to concentrate residents, create “new” land, and attract investors. Leaders at both town and village levels were less concerned with housing projects, and more focused on the development opportunities opened up through residential concentration and post-quake inflows of capital. But the effect of this in Baishuihe and Guoping Village is that residents were given a one-time housing subsidy at the expense of future livelihood possibilities or the ability to benefit from future land value appreciation. In all three settlements, it has resulted in a sort of bifurcated local economic structure consisting of a tourism and real estate economy that operates at a physical and social distance from the lives of residents themselves. Local leaders are using public resources to undertake these mega projects and attract investors, but it seems unlikely that these projects will yield sustainable returns, particularly since nearly every area in the quake zone is pursuing a similar tourism-oriented development strategy.

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Finally, I want to return to the questions posed by the resident at the reconstruction forum I described in the opening chapter: what does reconstruction have to do with urban-rural integration, and where is the money coming from? The interlocutor himself, as a former team leader in the community’s now-defunct mine, was speaking as a representative of the community and of an alternate understanding of the state’s responsibilities. His questions highlight the divide that often existed between the concerns of (often newly minted and self-proclaimed) rural “experts” and rural residents themselves. In the case of Longmenshan, the majority of residents I spoke with were not particularly concerned about the design of their new homes. The issues that provoked most tension with the township government were concerns about how the township was financing the new apartments (through leasing land out to tourism developers) and how the new apartments were being allocated. In other words, they were more preoccupied with distributive justice and the disposal of collective resources. His questions also unsettle the naturalized links made between URI and reconstruction, and suggest alternate possibilities. Could housing reconstruction have been carried out without urbanization, and without the funds generated through the quasi-privatization of collective resources?

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Chapter 8

8 The limits of urbanization qua development in Chengdu

This dissertation was motivated, most broadly, by wanting to understand the principles shaping reconstruction in rural Chengdu in the wake of the Wenchuan earthquake. Was the earthquake being used, as proponents of “disaster capitalism” would suggest, as an opportunity to extend neoliberal market logics to the countryside? When I arrived in Chengdu, it was immediately clear that the Wenchuan earthquake had provided the Chengdu government with an opportunity to accelerate the urbanization of its rural hinterlands under its ongoing urban-rural integration policy. But this was not simply urbanization in the sense of the expansion of a built-up urban core: it was a comprehensive project that involved rationalizing land use throughout the metropolitan region, building concentrated villages, assigning individual titles to rural collective land, developing markets for rural property rights, encouraging large-scale agribusiness, extending social services to rural areas, reforming rural governance institutions, and transforming peasants into self-managing citizens. Grouping these projects under the labels of either “urbanization” or “neoliberalism” seemed to obscure as much as it as it revealed.

I have argued here that Chengdu’s post-quake urban-rural integration project is best understood as a developmental project aimed at improving the rural population. Existing conceptions of urbanization in contemporary China tend to depict urban governments as entrepreneurial growth machines . This leads to an understanding of the politics of urbanization largely as a confrontational battle between municipal governments and rural collectives over land. Hsing (2010), for example, foregrounds battles over land as central to what she describes as the territorial politics of contemporary China. This certainly captures part of what was happening in rural Chengdu after the quake. But I suggest that Chengdu’s URI project was a much more comprehensive, productive effort to build particular types of space and subjectivities. Although rural development goals are shaped and compromised by their imbrication with other urban-based accumulation strategies, we must take seriously municipal governments’ new roles as developmental actors.

The Chengdu municipal government deployed a wide range of governmental technologies and fields of knowledge in a process that I have termed “urbanization qua development”. I have

160 focused here on three interrelated aspects of Chengdu’s URI project: spatial planning, property rights reforms, and social management. What surprised me was how open government and NGO actors were about their projects to transform the countryside on the one hand, and the scarcity of opposition to the new concentrated villages on the other. This might be attributed to the “shock” impact of the quake. But URI was carried out in non-affected areas as well, suggesting that we need to look at alternative reasons for widespread acquiescence. One explanation may lie in how concentration and property rights reforms were tied to real improvements in rural welfare, as highlighted by Wang Qiao, the pioneer in the joint reconstruction (lianjian) model. Another may lie in the hegemonic, taken-for-granted common sense of the urban transition narrative: urbanization is seen as something that is not (only) desirable, but also inevitable.

Conceptions about the meaning of “urbanization” are hotly debated among academics, not least because the process presumes a clear separation between something identified as “urban”, and a non-urban outside identified as “rural”. In China, although there are clear legal and institutional distinctions between urban and rural land and residents, it is similarly important to acknowledge how “rural” areas have long been tied to “urban” circuits, economically, culturally, and politically. At the same time, however, popular conceptions of a distinction between urban and rural landscapes and lifestyles continue to hold sway over residents, officials, and planners. And, as the chapters addressing regional and rural planning have highlighted, the ways in which the rural is imagined are shaping rural futures in a very concrete fashion. Planners are creating “new-style” villages that reflect both an attempt to modernize rural China, as well as preserve some form of traditional village life. Yet for residents themselves, the extension of planned space to the countryside, even if it was space zoned for handicraft production or cultivation, was itself a form of urbanization.

Lefebvre’s conception of the urban was open-ended, and characterized by a dialectic of both alienation and emancipation (Goonewardena, 2014). As Goonewardena (2014) points out, the “revolutionary” component of Lefebvre’s urban revolution describes not only the “complete urbanization” of society, but also the struggle for a socio-spatial alternative to capitalism. If Chengdu’s urban-rural integration project does not represent this alternative, it is also inaccurate to describe it as the unfolding of capitalism in Chengdu’s rural areas. As critic He Xuefeng pointed out (Chapter 4), urban-rural integration in Chengdu remained primarily a state-led rather than a market-led project. Moreover, this re-envisioning of the state’s role as a cultivator of the market

161 did not go uncontested. The case of Longmenshan Town (Chapter 7) demonstrates that residents often had very different, welfare-based conceptions of the state’s responsibilities.

Although other actors, including planners and officials, envisioned the state’s role as paving the way for the market, this was not necessarily a successful project. In many places throughout the quake zone, it did not seem that developers were lining up to take advantage of the “opportunities” that opened up in rural Chengdu after the quake. Township officials, like Daguan Town’s Mayor Hu (described in Chapter 5), expended a lot of time and effort courting investors in Chengdu. But for local leaders who are not as savvy or well-connected as Mayor Hu, there is a real possibility that the space created for some vaguely defined development will remain open. When I last visited Longmenshan, for instance, there was no evidence that the lavender-based tourism development in Guoping Village had even been started. Moreover, even for places that succeeded in securing concrete projects after the quake, there was no guarantee of the longevity of the investments. When I asked the Chaping Village leader (described in Chapter 4) what would happen if the large-scale kiwi project failed, he seemed unperturbed. “They have already built the infrastructure,” he observed with a shrug, reflecting the odd disconnect between Developmental projects and daily lives in post-quake rural Chengdu.

It is this disconnect between development projects and everyday lives that may provide openings for rural areas to serve as sites of habitation rather than development. The quake brought a number of younger residents back to rural Chengdu, some of them seeking their own way in the landscape of “opportunities” that opened up in the wake of the disaster. One young man in Longmenshan, who had served in the People’s Liberation Army, returned to his rural home to help rebuild after the quake. Restrictions on the use of forested land were loosened temporarily after the quake, and residents were allowed to remove and sell fallen trees from their household forest land. An underground industry of young men removing “fallen” trees quickly sprung up, with trucks carrying wood out of Longmenshan in the middle of the night for sale in the high-end urban construction market. The former soldier worked as a truck driver until he deemed the work too dangerous. But then he opted to stay in the area and open a rural homestay with the help of his wife. He was realistic about the kind of “opportunities” the city offered for someone like him. With his limited education, the best he could hope for would be a position as a security guard. The salary he would earn would barely cover his living expenses in the city, let along allow him to raise a

162 family. He made a conscious decision to accept a less consumption-rich lifestyle in exchange for a higher quality of life and more time with his family in the countryside.

Moreover, the rural socio-spatial restructuring being wrought through urban-rural integration policies is affecting not just the rural periphery, but also the metropolitan core. In some ways, Chengdu’s World Modern Garden City illustrates Lefebvre’s dialectical understanding of urbanization (as a process of both concentration and dispersion): the centralization of power in the city is simultaneously a ruralization of urban form, as the city’s morphology is redrawn in a series of suburban expansions (Shields, 1999, p. 178). The city’s new developmental responsibilities are also forcing the Chengdu government to acquire a new set of capabilities and bureaucratic controls, to reconfigure municipal financing strategies, and to re-orient policy towards a new set of rural social welfare goals. And the Chengdu government appears to be taking its responsibilities for rural development seriously: in 2011, peri-urban areas of Chengdu received more than 70% of the city’s total fiscal expenditures, compared with the nearby suburbs, which received 20%, and the inner city, which received only 10% (Ye et al., 2013, p. 128). Part of this may have been the result of expenditures on post-quake rebuilding (which finished officially in 2011), but it is at least indicative of the importance of rural areas in metropolitan politics.

Lin Chun, whose claim that “a developed economy does not have to be prevailingly urban” I cited in the opening chapter, paints a promising picture of a possible, socialist urban-rural relationship. She writes that a collectively autonomous rural sphere based on grassroots organizations and networks can be built with the support of government investment, subsidies, welfare provision, and conscious price manipulation in favor of rural income (C. Lin, 2013, p. 154). Strong communal or cooperative organization can help peasants overcome the problems of the fragmentation of land and vulnerability of petty farming in a global market economy (Ibid.). But Chengdu’s URI project, although it prioritizes rural welfare goals, attempts to realize these through the privatization of land and the imposition of particular visions about rural citizens and economies. In the end, it is this foreclosure of alternative, autonomous rural futures that is most troubling about urbanization qua development.

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Appendix 1: Interviews

Code Date Location Interviewee

1 S1 2009-11-19 Chengdu NGO/Social worker

2 S2 2009-11-20 Chengdu NGO/Social worker

3 S3 2009-11-22 Chengdu NGO/Social worker

4 S4 2009-11-24 Chengdu NGO/Social worker

5 S5 2009-12-10 Longmenshan NGO/ Social worker

6 S6 2009-12-10 Longmenshan NGO/ Social worker

7 P1 2009-12-13 Chengdu Landscape architect

8 S7 2010-02-02 Chengdu NGO/Social worker

9 G1 2010-02-02 Chengdu Government official

10 R1 2010-02-03 Longmenshan Resident

11 S8 2010-02-25 Chengdu NGO/Social worker

12 S9 2010-03-12 Longmenshan NGO/Social worker

13 R2 2010-03-12 Longmenshan Resident

14 R3 2010-03-13 Longmenshan Resident

15 R4 2010-03-13 Longmenshan Resident

16 L1 2010-03-13 Longmenshan Community leader

17 L2 2010-03-13 Longmenshan Community leader

18 R5 2010-03-17 Longmenshan Resident

19 R6 2010-03-17 Longmenshan Resident

20 R7 2010-03-17 Longmenshan Resident

21 R8 2010-03-18 Longmenshan Resident

22 R9 2010-03-19 Longmenshan Resident

201

23 R10 2010-03-19 Longmenshan Resident

24 L3 2010-03-20 Longmenshan Community leader

25 R11 2010-03-20 Longmenshan Resident

26 R12 2010-03-21 Longmenshan Resident

27 R13 2010-03-21 Longmenshan Resident

28 L4 2010-03-23 Longmenshan Community leader

29 G2 2010-03-27 Chengdu Government official

30 R14 2010-04-15 Longmenshan Resident

31 R15 2010-04-15 Longmenshan Resident

32 R16 2010-04-16 Longmenshan Resident

33 R17 2010-04-16 Longmenshan Resident

34 R18 2010-04-16 Longmenshan Resident

35 R19 2010-04-16 Longmenshan Resident

36 R20 2010-04-16 Longmenshan Resident

37 S10 2010-04-22 Longmenshan NGO/Social worker

38 R21 2010-04-22 Longmenshan Resident

39 P2 2010-04-27 Chengdu Planner

40 P3 2010-04-27 Chengdu Architect

41 S11 2010-05-07 Shuimo NGO/Social worker

42 R22 2010-05-07 Shuimo Resident

43 R23 2010-05-07 Shuimo Resident

44 S12 2010-05-12 Chengdu NGO/Social worker

45 G3 2010-07-22 Longmenshan Government official

46 R24 2010-07-23 Longmenshan Resident

47 R25 2010-07-23 Longmenshan Resident

202

48 P4 2010-07-27 Longmenshan Consultant

49 P5 2010-07-27 Longmenshan Landscape architect

50 R26 2010-07-27 Longmenshan Resident

51 R27 2010-07-27 Longmenshan Resident

52 R28 2010-07-27 Longmenshan Resident

53 L6 2010-07-28 Longmenshan Community leader

54 G4 2010-08-04 Longmenshan Government official

55 G5 2010-08-12 Longmenshan Government official

56 S13 2010-08-20 Longmenshan NGO/Social worker

57 R29 2010-08-21 Longmenshan Resident

58 R30 2010-08-22 Longmenshan Resident

59 R31 2010-08-22 Longmenshan Resident

60 R32 2010-08-22 Longmenshan Resident

61 G6 2010-09-26 Daguan Government official

62 R33 2010-09-26 Daguan Resident

63 R34 2010-09-26 Daguan Resident

64 R35 2011-03-03 Longmenshan Resident

65 R36 2011-03-03 Longmenshan Resident

66 L7 2011-03-03 Longmenshan Community leader

67 A1 2011-04-22 Chengdu Academic

68 S14 2011-04-25 Chengdu NGO/Social worker

69 P6 2011-04-26 Chengdu Consultant

70 L8 2011-04-29 Cifeng Community leader

71 R37 2011-04-29 Cifeng Resident

72 R38 2011-04-29 Cifeng Resident

203

73 S15 2011-05-27 Dujiangyan NGO/Social worker

74 S16 2011-05-27 Dujiangyan NGO/Social worker

75 S17 2011-06-11 Chengdu NGO/Social worker

76 P7 2011-06-17 Tongji Architect

77 R39 2011-07-18 Longmenshan Resident

78 S18 2011-07-18 Longmenshan NGO/Social worker

79 S19 2011-07-22 Chengdu NGO/Social worker

80 R40 2011-10-05 Cifeng Resident

81 R41 2011-10-05 Cifeng Resident

82 R42 2011-10-24 Longmenshan Resident

83 R43 2011-10-24 Longmenshan Resident

84 S20 2011-11-01 Chengdu NGO/Social worker

85 G7 2011-11-12 Cifeng Government official

86 G8 2011-11-13 Chengdu Government official

87 R44 2011-11-25 Shuangliu Resident

88 R45 2011-11-25 Shuangliu Resident

204