Making Sense of China’s Urban Construction Land Development: Towards Dual-Track Political Ecology

Abstract

This chapter develops a dual-track political ecology framework for better understanding the dynamics and uneven landscape of China’s UCL development by investigating the local state-peasantry interactions in both the formal and informal processes of UCL development under the hard or soft constraints imposed by the top-down land system within the region-specific land market contexts. In this new framework, the state is viewed from a relational perspective by highlighting its internal cross-scalar relations and interactions with other social and economic entities. By contrast, the peasantry is defined as a collective group composed of individual peasants, village cadres, and rural collectives. Two approaches of UCL development, namely, formal and informal development, are distinguished but understood from the same theoretical angle of the state–peasantry partnership. Two types of state-peasantry partnerships are defined in this chapter. Competitive partnership exists in formal land development where agreement is achieved through a zero-sum game between local states and peasants sharing a certain amount of land appreciation. Collaborative partnership exists in informal land development where agreement is reached on the basis of the “each-takes-what-he-needs” concept. The different interests and unbalanced powers of local states and peasants are shaped essentially by the region-specific market, institutional and geographical milieus. The central state imposes hard and soft constraints on local land development. The increasing market demand for urban space and the emerging market mechanisms in land allocation have provided the opportunity and set the principle for both formal and informal UCL development. The chapter also discusses the application of this framework to the examination of China’s UCL development in the Maoist and Post-Mao era.