Abstract
Land is growing scarce in China. Increasing shortage of space is sorely felt as cities and towns grow, as infrastructure is expanding, and as land is lost to environmental degradation. With intensified competition, smallholders’ positions are often weakened by the cumulated institutional disenfranchisement of China’s modern agrarian history.
Land tenure is about more than simple property rights. Zhao therefore investigates the broader dynamics of governance and politics in which struggles over land control are embedded. Zhao’s basic argument is that the recent land reform policies, with collective (ultimately state) ownership and individual use rights, have caused social fragmentation and a weakening collective power of the poor, and have led to unsustainable natural resource use and farming practices. The current policies have paradoxical results. On the one hand, the, so-called ‘Household Responsibility System’ has put increasing emphasis on individual (and virtually private) property rights to land, limiting people’s ability and desire to cooperate on issues that require coordinated collective action. On the other hand, cooperatives of producers are stimulated exactly to overcome inefficiencies in smallholder production, to deal with issues that require such coordinated behaviour, and to promote scaled production. However, these cooperatives, while ostensibly member-based organizations, are run more as party companies than as effective producer-controlled structures for efficiency, coordination, growth and wealth. They are basically instruments for the party cadres’ dispossession of ordinary people.
Obviously the confluence of policies, of market integration and of political representation and exclusion vary tremendously between regions in a country as vast and diverse as China, and politics, illegal land takeovers, protests and land use configure quite differently from one place to another. The cases are very instructive. In a case from southern China, Zhao demonstrates how cooperative organizations, which were supposed to guard the interests of its members, have effectively become vehicles of dispossession. As land is the property of the state, others cannot definitively transfer land rights, except in some rural areas where this control has been given to village collectives. However, rather than looking out for, or representing, the collective interests, these organs basically launder uncompensated dispossession as transfers for the common good. In cases from northern China, Zhao shows how ‘responsible households’ are incapable of organizing to meet ‘collective action’ problems – or, as the author puts it, ‘it becomes difficult for the state to organize the peasantry’. One might wonder whether this is a slip, or whether the author is viewing the world and its challenges with a governor’s perspective.
Land is inherently political, and it is only natural that Zhao should be tempted to be prescriptive in his text. In principle, there is nothing wrong in that, but the frequent subtle switches between an analytical and a prescriptive modus weaken his argument. For example, when the author talks about ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ effects, they are never clearly defined, and the reader is supposed to subscribe to similar standards as his. I suppose that most readers will be in favour of ‘pro-poor’ reforms, but when what that actually would entail is left vague policy recommendations become rather gratuitous statements with which it is impossible to disagree.
One of the interesting features of the book is its attempt to engage a long-term perspective. In the chapter coyly entitled ‘A Brief Account of 600 Years of China’s Land Struggles’, we realize that land was practically always scarce in China. The tensions between smallholders, ‘largeholders’ and central political power have characterized Chinese development for centuries, and the degree of ‘free-hold’, the terms of tenancy, the level of tax and the opportunities for market access have been perennial political issues. Yet the trajectory of land tenure and land governance systems has by no means been simple. Consolidation (and exclusion) and fragmentation (with inefficiencies) of land holdings have succeeded each other in different periods, and the policy measures of Communist China could be seen to have followed this pattern somewhat: ‘Land to the tiller’ (breaking up large estates and tenancy systems), was replaced by ‘Communalization’ (to combat rural inequalities resulting from emerging new inequalities), which was finally replaced by the ‘Household Responsibility System’, providing more individual management rights over land.
The book brings out a number of serious dilemmas that segments of the rural populations in China currently face and that the Chinese authorities are called upon to tackle. Zhao demonstrates that these concerns of land governance are integral to governance as such in rural China and have been for centuries. The tensions between individual and collective interests, between rule and representation, and between the powerful and the many, come out vividly in the book’s empirical parts. It adds interesting and illuminating examples to the growing body of analysis of land conflicts forming part of the broader fabric of politics in contemporary China.