This excellent book aims to appeal to many audiences. Wonderfully and refreshingly well written and clearly organized, Meg Rithmire’s presentation of the land politics and development histories of three cities across northeastern China succeeds in offering new data and insights to scholars of Chinese urban political economy. But it also provides fresh perspective for scholars of other aspects of Chinese politics and opens a window onto crucial aspects of China’s recent experience for those working on urbanization or political economy in other parts of the world. In short, members of all its target audiences will find something to like and much to learn in this important and accessible book.
Rithmire begins Land Bargains and Chinese Capitalism by outlining and justifying her comparison of three large cities: Dalian, the region’s only major seaport and by far richest city; Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang Province and longtime center of rail networks, international trade, and commerce; and Changchun, capital of Jilin Province, former capital of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, transportation hub, and home to China’s largest concentration of old-line auto manufacturing. Selecting these cases holds many potential independent variables constant, as they are all large cities in the northeast with somewhat similar political-economic legacies, helping focus on the key factors that Rithmire posits as causes of divergent outcomes in the commodification of land.
The book’s core argument is straightforward: As urban land was commodified in China, beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, access to international capital, on the one hand, and the number and political clout of local claimants, on the other, combined with specific mixes of central-level policy inducements and constraints aimed at particular cities or sectors to produce a new set of political economies, centered around models for the transformation of land into capital. Each city’s story unfolds in several acts, beginning with its industrial and economic structure under the planned economy, continuing though early reform, its transition during the 1990s, and culminating in its present-day political economy. Rithmire tells these stories very nicely across Chapters 3, 4, and 5.
In Dalian, where central policies gave the city preferential treatment and also helped facilitate its early and extensive access to global capital, the local state was able to coordinate land’s commodification in a centralized and efficient manner. Losers from reform, including state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and their workers, were placated or marginalized. A new development zone outside the city proper played host to foreign firms that helped drive early reform efforts. By the time of Rithmire’s field research, Dalian’s transformation into a postindustrial center of commerce and international capital flows was nearly complete. The local government’s domination of land’s transformation helped ensure the smooth completion of this process, while also building a pleasant and impressive urban environment.
Harbin’s experience could not be more different. There, vast numbers of SOE workers, worried about losing their jobs (which many already had), and the firms responsible for them lobbied the local government for pieces of the land commodification pie to use as lifelines in order to sustain operations, forestall homelessness, or provide for workers’ other benefits. These diffuse, yet empowered, claimants on the resources and rents of land commodification hampered the state’s ability to coordinate the process or harness it for remaking the urban economy. Instead, by the early 2010s, Harbin had settled into a relatively stagnant pattern of land relations, in which particular interests were compensated but the overall political economy of the city languished. Launching painful reforms in the absence of international capital or preferential central policies proved too destabilizing for any more cogent agenda.
Changchun’s auto sector helped press for more coordination of its reforms, and the central government also bestowed important subsidies and special policies to assist it during the 1980s and 1990s. Thus, like Dalian, land commodification was relatively more centralized and coordinated, and revenues were directed successfully to a more coherent set of civic purposes than in many other locales. But, like Harbin, the absence of international capital and the prevalence of financially troubled heavy industrial (often central government–owned and controlled) SOEs helped ensure that a primary purpose was modernizing and propping up the auto sector. Pressing for reforms to SOEs before opening to global capital, even when dominant firms and sectors got special central government breaks and assistance, mired Changchun in the same kind of accommodative negotiations as Harbin and prevented the development of a truly healthy or sustainable land market.
In her discussion of each of these cases, Rithmire makes exemplary use of published English and Chinese secondary sources; impressive and extensive use of not always easily available local government documents, statistics, speeches, and circulars; and relatively much more sparing use of interviews or direct observation in the field. The case studies are also somewhat uneven. Fieldwork is richest in Harbin. Documents and local data seem to be most comprehensive in Changchun (though interviews and observations there are also impressive). But the Dalian case is covered much more superficially, with much space in Chapter 3 devoted to recounting the well-known story of Bo Xilai’s rise and fall. Such asymmetry is a necessary artifact of careful field research, especially in difficult contexts like urban China, and I do not think another researcher could necessarily have a done a better job, but it does detract at least a bit from Rithmire’s ability to advance her key claims (especially as Dalian is the most divergent case).
Rithmire’s case selection, while in some ways a highlight of the book’s design, could also be criticized. Her research was concentrated in three highly atypical cities—two provincial capitals and a booming seaport. Had she focused on Mudanjiang, Jilin City, and Fushun, for example, perhaps she would have found something different. Dalian is also so distinct that the pattern Rithmire uncovered there may actually be unique to that city’s individual experience. Indeed, by working inductively, looking for patterns from her cases rather than selecting cities to represent broader patterns, regions, or categories of localities, Rithmire prevents us from assessing just how generalizable her findings might be or discerning what portion of the true scope of variation across Chinese cities she may or may not have captured. Would cities in other parts of the county be similar? How well exactly might her categories and explanations travel beyond China’s borders? Are there many other political processes of land commodification in contemporary China besides the three we see here? Such questions must be left mostly unaddressed.
Such quibbles aside, however, Land Bargains and Chinese Capitalism is a major contribution to the study of Chinese political economy—clearly one of the leading books on the topic to appear in the last 10 years. Every serious student of urbanization, Chinese politics, or the political economy of development ought to pay careful attention to the insights Rithmire provides. I also hope that the field of Chinese politics might be sparked by this book to reengage with the study of political economy more generally, in a way it has not since roughly the turn of the millennium.
