Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe urbanization of rural China is increasingly achieved not through physical land grabs but the strategic enrolment of rural communities in the commodification of land via speculative rentiership. This article critically examines this shift in approach from the deployment of extra‐economic force in state‐led land expropriations toward an increasing reliance on market mechanisms in land development. A case study, the construction of a financial district in peri‐urban Guangzhou, shows that the enrolment of village communities is achieved through their cooptation as corporatist market players in regimes of rent‐based accumulation. While the apparent use of voluntaristic market exchange has reduced the need for coercion, however, the commodification process has at the same time created new terrain for dispossessory practices whereby value is illicitly extracted and seized by elites through rent relations. The shift from overt land grabbing to more covert mechanisms of value appropriation has important implications for rural class relations and contentious politics.

As urbanization continues to fuel land and property conflicts in rural China, shareholding has been promoted as a reform in property rights that would enhance bottom-up control in the governance of collective assets. The recent proliferation of community-based shareholding companies has been credited for giving villagers new identities as shareholders, which entitle them to vote, receive their share of collective profits, and elect the managers of their wealth. This paper critically appraises these reforms and offers a contrarian perspective to singular narratives of villager empowerment. While shareholding clarifies villagers' rights of control, income and transfer in collective property, the effective exercise of such powers is often forestalled on the ground by the concentration of power in elite hands. To the extent that formal and informal constraints on cadre power remain tenuous, shareholding could function as a vehicle for the powerful to appropriate collective wealth rather than as a weapon of the weak. (China Q/GIGA)

AbstractAs urbanization continues to fuel land and property conflicts in rural China, shareholding has been promoted as a reform in property rights that would enhance bottom-up control in the governance of collective assets. The recent proliferation of community-based shareholding companies has been credited for giving villagers new identities as shareholders, which entitle them to vote, receive their share of collective profits, and elect the managers of their wealth. This paper critically appraises these reforms and offers a contrarian perspective to singular narratives of villager empowerment. While shareholding clarifies villagers' rights of control, income and transfer in collective property, the effective exercise of such powers is often forestalled on the ground by the concentration of power in elite hands. To the extent that formal and informal constraints on cadre power remain tenuous, shareholding could function as a vehicle for the powerful to appropriate collective wealth rather than as a weapon of the weak.