Fictitious commodification of land to solve rural crises?: Lessons from an experiment in rural Chengdu, China

Abstract

This article examines the Chinese government’s ongoing controlled experiment to empower rural communities and revitalise rural spaces through the fictitious commodification of rural collective operational construction land (i.e., land used for commercial or operational businesses). We show how local governments in Pidu, one of the selected experiment sites, exploited the political opening to pursue their own landed interests and, in doing so, continued to exploit and marginalise rural communities. The competing interests of local and central governments in rural land commodification—combined with the ambiguous regulatory framework for this type of rural land and the overall conditions of the land market—frustrated the complete and effective commodification of such land. Broadening these lessons to experiments in general, we suggest that effective monitoring mechanisms centring processual and distributional justice are needed to keep experiments in check and realise their potential in bringing about positive changes.