In her comprehensive study of the political, social, cultural and economic relations that shape land ownership in rural China, Yi Wu demonstrates the need to understand property relations in contemporary China as the outcome of interactions among diverse social groups, and not simply as the product of top-down state actions. As she states, “current rural collective land ownership in China is a hybrid resulting from the power interplay among the socialist state, with its changing social, economic, and political agendas; village communities with enduring social and cultural identities; and resilient rural families, with resilient economic organizations and a persistent egalitarian attitude toward the land” (p. 237). This “fluid process” is one in which local governments and villagers have negotiated and contested property rights, even as national policies set an overall framework.
Working as an anthropologist in rural Yunnan Province, Wu provides a “ground up” view of property relations. She also makes impressive use of both secondary and primary sources. Several factors have shaped rural property regimes during the collective and reform eras. For instance, the Household Responsibility System (HRS), which devolved land use rights to families in the early 1980s, was initially part of an unofficial lease system in poor villages. Later, the national government adopted it as policy. Further, the state itself is hardly a monolith. The national government and different layers of local governments, from county to township and village, have different and sometimes conflicting agendas with regard to rural property.
The notion of “bounded collectivism” is key to Wu's analysis. Maoist collectivization and post-Mao de-collectivization left village boundaries and criteria of village membership intact. Longstanding kinship systems and ritual practices, such as ancestral worship and worship of local deities, define social membership in villages. During the earlier collective era, these pre-existing structures shaped the arena within which collectivization occurred. Collectives did not reallocate land across village borders, even if it would have further equalized ratios of population to land. Subsequently, during the implementation of the HRS, membership in such “natural villages” determined who was eligible to receive use rights in shares of land.
In reform-era China, land is broadly categorized as agricultural land, non-agricultural land and forest, and these categories shape how land can be used and accessed by villagers. While the HHS broadly gave peasant families use rights in the agricultural land allocated to them, villagers lack total freedom to use the land as they see fit. In Wu's research area, villagers are forced to grow a certain amount of tobacco each year because the revenues are profitable for the local government (tobacco is a government monopoly). Villagers sell tobacco to government purchasers for low prices, but the government can realise huge profits through tobacco's retail value and through taxing it. Local governments have also encouraged or forced villagers to experiment with other cash crops, some of which villagers embrace more eagerly than tobacco.
Families remain as central institutions in the rural economy. Even during the collective era, the rural family was the social unit through which individuals received their work points and foodstuff apportionments. As Wu points out, while the HRS allocated use rights in land to individuals, households pool these shares. In 2008, land use contracts were extended for 70 years. As such, land has now become “quasi-family property” to be reallocated within the family as older members die or new members are born. Nonetheless, recent economic and social changes have created spaces for contestation over land use rights within families. Tension over land exists between family members who remain in villages and those who have migrated to urban areas. Divorce and marriage change family composition as well and can lead to contestation over land. For instance, divorced women and/or daughters who do not have rights in land according to traditional kinship practices, may now claim rightful access to their allocated shares.
Economic stress continues to bedevil rural families in southwest China, and government polices often exacerbate it. The price scissors – the unequal exchange between agricultural and industrial products – dampened rural incomes in the collective era. Agricultural taxes in the reform era continued to impose a heavy burden until the national government abolished them in 2006. Land fragmentation and labour surplus in rural China also work against farmers’ attempts to better themselves. Rural families attempt to combat these problems through seeking off farm employment (often in urban areas), or by starting small businesses, some in specialized agricultural products. Small farm enterprises, however, still have difficulties accessing broader markets.
The concluding chapters of the book examine tensions between farmers and local governments. The key to understanding these conflicts is the basic fact that land rights in rural China are use rights. Villager groups own agricultural land collectively, and land is not the property of individuals. However, the state (whether national, county or township) has the right to requisition villagers’ land and to subsequently sell use rights to the land. Compensation rarely makes up for the loss of basic subsistence and the safety net which agricultural land provides villagers. Thus, while local governments profit immensely from resale of the use rights to the land, villagers are undercompensated.
Such dispossession has sparked tens of thousands of rural revolts each year. Leaders of protests may be village group cadres or individuals with a relatively higher degree of education. Villagers may try to block construction projects, provoke media attention, or file legal suits claiming that local governments are violating national law in requisitioning land and unjustly compensating them. Villagers use a “survival discourse” and emphasize the necessity of retaining access to land in order to subsist. Rights in land are so important to villagers that even rural migrants to cities are unwilling to give up their claims.
While village protest leaders are sometimes imprisoned and protests may lead to violent clashes between protesters and law enforcement, protests continue to flare. Their frequency and intensity has also caused the national government to reform some of its practices over time. For instance, the national government has revised regulations about compensation for requisitioned land. In theory compensation schemes are more advantageous to rural farmers than in the past (however, the implementation of such improved compensatory schemes is far from universal).
As such, changes in the management of rural land by the national government has been a continuous and complicated process. Further, while the national government is increasingly concerned with the preservation of farmland and environmental conservation, these goals are often at odds with local government goals, which focus on garnering revenue from rural land acquisition and the subsequent sale of use rights. This leads to the aforementioned tensions between local governments and villagers.
Wu therefore concludes that property regimes in contemporary China cannot be understood through the posing of simplistic dichotomies such as “capitalist vs. socialist, socialist vs. post-socialist, public vs. private, or modern vs. traditional” (p. 237). This study certainly sets a new standard for understanding the complex template on which property relations play out in rural China. By examining not only formal law and regulations, but also social interactions at all levels of rural society, Wu provides us with a multi-layered analysis. This monograph will be of great use to scholars and graduate students of contemporary China, as well as to advanced undergraduates.
