Rule through Difference on China's Urban–Rural Boundary

Abstract

In both the academic debate as well as in Chinese politics urban–rural difference is a frequently used categorisation. Policies addressing previous neglect of rural China have been the official top-priority of China's current leadership since it came to power in 2003–2004. This article argues that we need to nuance the distinct dichotomy between urban and rural, and look into the specifics of how differences are actively mobilised when claims are made. The article builds on extensive fieldwork on the claims made by land-losing peasants and local political leaders on the urban–rural boundary in one of the front posts of the current regime's refocus on rural development, Chengdu, appointed as an experimental zone of Urban–Rural Integration (cheng-xiang yitihua) along with Chongqing in 2007 and, as a result of this, subject to massive restructuring of land use. Instead of a clear-cut urban–rural boundary that would have the potential to split the country in two, I find a much more finely masked form of differentiation based on where people are from. Both local leaders and citizens in each locality may bend and interpret rules and regulations considerably as long as their claims do not go beyond their locality.

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Rule through Difference on China's Urban–Rural
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Jesper Zeuthen
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Copenhagen, Snorresgade 17-19, 2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark
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Rule through Difference on China’s
Urban–Rural Boundary
JESPER ZEUTHEN
ABSTRACT In both the academic debate as well as in Chinese politics urban–
rural difference is a frequently used categorisation. Policies addressing previous
neglect of rural China have been the official top-priority of China’s current
leadership since it came to power in 2003–2004. This article argues that we need
to nuance the distinct dichotomy between urban and rural, and look into the
specifics of how differences are actively mobilised when claims are made. The
article builds on extensive fieldwork on the claims made by land-losing peasants
and local political leaders on the urban–rural boundary in one of the front posts
of the current regime’s refocus on rural development, Chengdu, appointed as an
experimental zone of Urban–Rural Integration (cheng-xiang yitihua) along
with Chongqing in 2007 and, as a result of this, subject to massive restructuring
of land use. Instead of a clear-cut urban–rural boundary that would have the
potential to split the country in two, I find a much more finely masked form of
differentiation based on where people are from. Both local leaders and citizens
in each locality may bend and interpret rules and regulations considerably as
long as their claims do not go beyond their locality.
‘My daughter can marry whoever she wants, as long as he is not a peasant’, the
taxi driver told me when we arrived in what used to be a village but was now a
densely populated entity, described by another taxi driver as the ‘wild west’, the
home of thousands of rural–urban migrants living in what used to be
farmhouses, and of a few former local peasants.
1
The urban taxi driver thus
reproduced the urban–rural boundary as a boundary between different types of
human beings, a way of understanding the urban–rural boundary widely
discussed within the China literature, presenting Chinese peasants as massively
despised (through, among other things, discourses on personal quality (suzhi)
presenting rural subjects as uncultivated) and discriminated against (through,
among other things, the hukou-system), ‘non-citizens’ with ‘nothing but their
labour to sell’.
2
The way rural subjects continue to see discrimination as an
inescapable faith is regarded as an essential part of China’s growth-engine and
continued stability.
3
The political refocus on rural development, with an
Jesper Zeuthen is in the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen,
Snorresgade 17-19, 2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark. Email: jesper.zeuthen@gmail.com.
Third World Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 4, 2012, pp 685–700
ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/12/040685–16
Ó 2012 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2012.657425
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ongoing, surprisingly open debate on the problems of rural China, however,
appears to suggest that the disciplining function of China’s urban–rural
boundary might be endangered. The boundary might even become a reference
point for political mobilisation from below.
4
This article argues that analytically dividing China into a rural and an
urban China, be it for the sake of studying exploitation by the urban strata or
for examining political mass mobilisation, neglects 1) how much more finely
masked differentiation is; and 2) the fact that boundaries applied in
differentiation are not always only in the interest of rulers or elites, but
may be just as important in claims making by non-elites. It does so by
examining how local leaders and citizens engaged in some of the many
different urban, industrial and agricultural development projects making up
most of the diffusely defined Urban–Rural Integration Policy mobilise
differences to work the system in the politically tense context of resettlement.
Boundaries and claims making
In a village on the outskirts of Chengdu city proper, a few hundred metres
from the border with a suburban county, I met a middle-aged woman living
in a house planned for expropriation.
5
Both sides of the border were under-
going massive resettlement. In her village almost everybody was to be
resettled. She told me how, in the neighbouring village in the suburban
county a few hundred metres away, ‘everybody took stuff out to the highway
and sat on it’ because all the land of two sub-villages (each of a few hundred
households) had been occupied. ‘Those places are all creating trouble these
days’, she continued: ‘There has been beating. Those leading on were arrested
by the police and the unrest was suppressed . . . They take away your house
and give you 150 yuan per month to go rent a house.’
A village party secretary had informed me that the monthly pay in the district
the woman lived in was 500 yuan. When confronted with this, she replied:
The 500 yuan is only for the five city districts. There it is Xindu District. The
state says that it compensates so much money, but when it comes down to
members of the collective, you don’t get this amount of money ...If
compensation were made according to Property Law, they would be properly
compensated . . . Those who don’t have any connections, except a few of them,
can’t make any noise ...When those with connections make some noise, and
you find someone well connected, then they are not alone and it becomes a
matter of several thousand yuan. As an ordinary citizen [laobaixing], many
don’t want to do like this, but what can you do? In the end you’ll have a lot of
money in your hand. Those at the top have no chance of knowing of it.
The woman showed an interest in what happened on the other side of the
border, and she had clear sympathies towards the protests. Yet the protests
were none of her business. She was likely to become part of a similar protest,
but her protest would be directed towards her local authorities and based on
the well-connected noise-makers she would be able to find once her sub-
village was to be developed.
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The form of claims making the woman refers to resembles very much what
O’Brien and Li call ‘rightful resistance’. Here, protesters attempt to find allies
higher up in the system, or in other departments of the fragmented authori-
tarian system, who can help them work their very specific and localised claim
through the bureaucracy. This form of claims making requires a popular
belief that, if only the top leadership knew, things would be just, and it
requires clear boundaries defining the scope of claims. The zoned nature of
‘rightful resistance’, along with the fact that it requires allies close to the
political top, means that it does not pose a threat to regime resilience. If
claims were made along the urban–rural boundary, this would seem to be a
break with ‘rightful resistance’, and to open up for protests that could
potentially split the nation in two.
6
In his life-long work on boundaries Tilly argued that they either work to
define categories of bounded individuals more or less silently accepting each
other’s very different sets of opportunities (opportunity hoarding), or they
may be used as reference points in mobilisation.
7
Opportunity hoarding is a
non-elite strategy to protect privileges. Here a prerequisite for all privileges of
each category is a perception of the boundaries defining this category as
‘natural’. In mobilisation boundaries work quite differently. Here, the ideal is
that opportunities should be equal. Boundaries justifying unequal opportu-
nities are perceived as unjust and exaggerated in order to increase
mobilisation in very open networks, including different strata of society.
Clearly the borders between small localities with different sets of oppor-
tunities for negotiation and networking seem like arenas for opportunity
hoarding. The urban–rural boundary, on the other hand, seems like a
boundary against which people might mobilise across the nation; and
indeed were mobilised during both the 1949 revolution and the Cultural
Revolution.
8
In the following sections this article seeks to identify how the urban–rural
boundary and borders between localities are controlled and exploited at
different administrative levels as well as among ordinary citizens outside the
state system. I find a very strong zoning created from the top but, equally,
maintained from below.
State control and zoning
A view traced throughout Chinese history is that zoning enables authorities
to blame lower levels, intervene whenever needed, and accept high degrees of
autonomy for local elites in prosperous zones not posing any treat to the
overall stability, while simultaneously contributing to national prosperity
(what Ong refers to in its present form as variegated sovereignty).
9
There
seems to be agreement on this basic structure. Disagreement starts when it
comes down to explaining how well the centre is able to intervene and how
intended the zoned structure is. Views range from Cai Yongshun and Wang
Fei-ling agreeing that intervention is really only a matter of whether the
centre wants to intervene or not to O’Brien and Li’s concept of rightful
resistance that would seem to be a view of a political centre in which at least
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some elements want to do good.
10
A third view is that there is no master plan.
Local cadres implement the policies they select, and only occasionally may a
higher-level cadre attempt to mobilise lower-level cadres in social engineering
projects, with little or no base in the demands of the people or consideration
of social stability.
11
The zoning between different localities, I argue, means
that it is of less importance to regime resilience whether claim makers believe
in the virtues of the top leadership. As long as claims by local cadres and
citizens are kept within a single locality, they do not pose a real danger to
overall stability. The zoned structure, I further argue, is enforced through
claims made from below. In such claims maintenance and expansion of the
opportunities hoarded in a locality require that the zoned structure is
maintained.
The infrastructure for the zoned structure is the hukou-system with roots in
imperial times. In its present form (or something more amenable to its
present form), it was properly in place from 1958.
12
A hukou was assigned to
everybody. The hukou system regulated access to land, occupations, housing,
food, education and medical care. A major characteristic was the hukou’s
distinction between agricultural and non-agricultural occupations. These
were the formal occupations that persons were supposed to have, and
possibly did have when the system was initiated. An agricultural hukou
guaranteed usage-rights to land and the provision of resources from the rural
self-supplying collective. A non-agricultural hukou guaranteed access to non-
agricultural occupations, without land, but with the provision of food rations
directly from the state; thus hoarding opportunities were different between
these two categories. When the system was initiated during the Great Leap
Forward (1958–59), the ration system ensured food supplies to non-
agricultural hukou-holders, while millions of agricultural hukou-holders
starved to death.
Since the 1980s the hukou system has been altered. Especially in Western
media, but also in parts of the more serious China literature as well as
Chinese media, the hukou system has in recent years been portrayed as having
been almost abandoned.
13
Chan and Buckingham argue that such reports are
based on a misunderstanding of the introduction of uniform hukou in several
metropolitan areas. The uniform hukou refers to abolishing the distinction
between agricultural and non-agricultural occupations, and only note the
place of registration in the hukou. Services provided for individuals not
holding a local hukou are as limited as always, while peasants from already
fairly well-to-do villages under the jurisdiction of the city prefectures get
access to more extensive urban welfare. Abolition of the agricultural/non-
agricultural element of the hukou, according to Chan and Buckingham, does
not mean that the urban–rural boundary becomes less significant, at least
when it comes to entitlement to urban welfare. The big picture of the rural as
poor and the city as rich remains the same; the cities merely absorb some of
their frontiers. The introduction of a uniform hukou is part of the many
disputes over land issues near large cities. Peasants do not want to replace
their usage-right to valuable land with the declining services attached to
an urban hukou.
14
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Wang Fei-ling argues that the agricultural/non-agricultural divide
primarily enabled opportunity hoarding along the urban–rural boundary,
with a growing domestic market in the cities, and agricultural hukou-holders
accepting underpaid jobs. I argue that it is now mainly the rank of localities
of registration that enables this mechanism, while the agricultural/non-
agricultural divide appears to be anything but silently accepted in the way
that it would be in opportunity hoarding. Chan and Buckingham’s view of
the system as instituting a metropolitan/non-metropolitan divide, I argue,
does not fully appreciate the fact that zones are much more finely ranked
than merely as metropolitan or non-metropolitan.
Chengdu’s urban–rural integration policy
The keyword for the reordering of land under the integration policy was
‘three concentrations’ (san ge jizhong), ie the concentration of residential
land, agricultural land and industrial land. As one of the architects behind
the policy, originally started as a city prefecture policy in 2004, has argued,
through concentration specialised zones would become more competitive and
more easily manageable.
15
In China peasants usually have usage-right of around one mu (666 m
2
) per
family member. Normally this land is placed close to the family’s home.
Concentrating land in areas that used to be rural for large-scale projects is
thus by implication a massive change in the physical space. Concentration of
land also implies a major change of who controls land. In principle, all land
in China formally classified as agricultural belongs to collectives. These
‘collectives’ are the lowest administrative units in the Chinese state system
(referred to here as villages and sub-villages). Chinese legislation in principle
ensures that sub-letting agricultural land to larger projects can only take
place if a clear majority of such a village collective agrees. Such collectives
can become strong organised enterprises when sub-letting land, or the sub-
letting agreement may be manipulated by a few local leaders or private elites.
By changing the formal status of land from rural to urban, higher-level
governments and elites connected to these may take over control of the land.
Urban and rural hence become important categories deciding who can
possibly claim control over land use.
16
An important element of the Urban–Rural Integration Policy was hukou-
reforms. The city prefecture government divided the city (12 000 km
2
,
14 million inhabitants in 2010) into three different zones forming rings
around the city (see Figure 1). Targets for land use in each zone differed. The
most central zone consisted of the already almost built out city districts. Here
urbanisation would reach 100 per cent. The counties furthest away were
supposed to reach a much lower degree of urbanisation, and considerable
agricultural production would be maintained. Rights to social welfare and
books used in schools differed between these zones. The monthly social
welfare for the handicapped was around 70 yuan in the outer counties and
around 500 yuan close to the city, so differences were very real to individual
citizens. It was the intention that all citizens within each of the ring-zones
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should have the same rights to social welfare, etc, irrespective of their status
as holders of agricultural or non-agricultural hukou. In the most rural zone
county towns had a special status as local urban centres. Transfer of hukou to
a more attractive ring was heavily regulated, leaving residents from the
external rings in essentially the same situation as rural–urban migrants from
outside the city prefecture when entering the central city districts. The city
prefecture was to abolish the agricultural/non-agricultural divide for locals
within each zone and maintain rural–urban migrants (be they from far away
or from a neighbouring district) as non-locals. In this way the hukou-policy
had many similarities with those studied by Chan and Buckingham; the
major difference was the ranking of counties and districts of registration on
an urban–rural continuum, where getting a hukou was less attractive the
further one moved from the city, but without a distinct metropolitan/non-
metropolitan divide.
17
Claims by local leaders
With the city’s policy of appointing specialised zones, the competition to
become a special zone and thereby attract political goodwill as well as
funding and career opportunities was tense. As a head of a county-level
department put it, ‘each township had its own speciality, so I needed to visit
all of them in order to really know what the Urban–Rural Integration Policy
was about’.
18
In this section, I study how local leaders used the urban–rural
boundary to justify policies by adding content to special zones in localities
with different distances from the urban centre.
You-tien Hsing divides her analysis of urbanisation in contemporary
China into different types of zones, very similar to the rings defined by
Chengdu’s government. Far from the city centre, in what she calls the rural
fringe, land has a limited value, and local authorities often have quite a free
hand to override legislation on land use. Closer to the urban centre, land is
more valuable and the many actors interested in the land there make the
FIGURE 1. Chengdu’s ranked districts and counties.
Ó Mette Willaing Zeuthen.
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citizens’ influence larger, often with sub-village or village organisations as
their representatives. Below, I apply Hsing’s terminology and look for
similarities.
The rural fringe
Huaqiu village was one of the most distant villages still under the jurisdiction
of the city prefecture. The now legendary village party secretary, Liu, had a
few years before I met him in 2007 single-handedly encouraged his fellow
villagers to build the steep, paved mountain road we had arrived on. After
the road had been built, a tea company was established, financed by loans
channelled through a company run by the county government to the party
secretary who owned it. Pictures of the building of the road were now
exhibited in a newly built exhibition hall next to the company headquarters.
19
By manifesting a good story of hardship endured, Secretary Liu had de facto
monopolised the usage-right to land in the village, and he was an important
figure for more highly placed authorities to display. When national inspections
arrived, county officials staffed a nearby closed down factory, supposedly
ensuring that peasants without usage-rights to land had a source of income for
the duration of the inspection. Everybody within the local state had an interest
in preserving this story of the poor but hard-working mountain village and its
success. Secretary Liu, now also one of the county’s only two members of the
provincial party committee, as the hero of the story had more or less a free hand
to do as he pleased. The county government would find almost anything
justified, and displayed the success of Huaqiu village to cadres at the city-
prefecture, province and national level in order to illustrate how it more than
met the demands of the central leadership. The hard-working and entrepre-
neurial party secretary had made Huaqiu a model village. Other villages on the
rural fringe had their specialities. In some villages the speciality, as in Liu’s
mobilisation of villagers to build a road, had its origin in something that had
been truly successful, such as the establishment of a successful collectively-
owned agricultural company in one case; and in another the attraction of urban
industries (the party secretary’s own factory on remarkably cheap land). In
other cases, models developed by one village were copied, often with less
promising results. In all rural fringe cases the low status of the localities made it
possible for local leaders with an entrepreneurial spirit to justify bending and
bypassing the regulations by exemplifying a technique to fight for rural
development. Although there was a resemblance to what Scott might call social
engineering, the zoning of experiments made consequences less disastrous, and
many projects were only a thin veneer justifying land seizure for local elites,
which, while often putting some at a vast disadvantage, might also contribute to
local development.
The urban fringe
In a county town with a formally higher rank than the surrounding rural
fringe townships, the entrepreneur Li Yongkang almost succeeded in
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becoming the de facto single ruler of a new town district through his visions
for urban planning.
20
In 2002, when rural tax reforms had taken away a substantial part of the
county funding, Li Yongkang’s private enterprise Ruiyun Group was
allowed to more than double the area of the town with around 150 000
inhabitants. Scholars, who quickly became aware of this process, called it the
C-BOT-model. Also written C- BOT in Chinese, the C was short for ‘city’ and B,
O and T were abbreviations for ‘build, operate and transfer’. The system
meant that services were to be operated by the company and fees were to be
paid to it. The new city area would de facto be run by Ruiyun for 50 years.
This quite unorthodox way of leading a town was only politically possible
because it was presented as new, innovative and necessary in order to
develope the backward town and make it meet the new requirements of a
modern city. Director Li continuously pointed at how backward the town
was, and made sure to ally himself with university intellectuals who had come
up with the
C-BOT term. He had made a study trip to England in order to
ensure that the new town district would look extraordinarily appealing. In
this way he had convinced local authorities of the benefits of developing the
town according to his ideas. He needed to convince these authorities, because
his ideas were on a scale where going through a village would not be feasible,
unlike many of his other projects. However, after an inspection by the State
Council in 2004, the experiment was halted and the county party secretary
fired. This was probably because the state council could not accept letting a
private enterprise run a county town. Yet by arguing for the special need of
his home town, Li Yongkang almost made Beijing waive some of its cardinal
legislation.
When I visited the county town, some years after Director Li’s project, the
mapping of land use was extremely detailed, and interviews seemed to
confirm that continued resettlement was being carried out according to
regulations. The room for manoeuvre of local elites and political leaders to
mobilise each other through difference had been considerable, and the
mobilisation had had very few links to ordinary people. Development after Li
Yongkang’s project suggests more focus from above on control, and less
room for bypassing regulations by being creative.
Closer to Chengdu, in a more central zone with much higher levels of
compensation for lost land, the tendency seemed to be similar, yet with
somewhat quicker shifts between the selected development models. Here, a
large 13-storey compound built on rural land that had made the collective
economy grow from 100 000 yuan to 23 million per year in just three years,
was no longer presented as a model project, probably because of concerns
following a central government focus on the illegal selling of agricultural
land. During my fieldwork the ownership structure of the compound did not
change. The strategy seemed to be to hush it up while the neighbouring street
committee, where land had been converted to urban land, became the model
and was praised for resettling according to the regulations. Until recently
both places had been dominated by oversized farmhouses partly illegally
occupying all available land and mainly inhabited by rural–urban migrants
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renting rooms from local landlords, as in the taxi-driver’s description of ‘the
wild west’. So strategy shifts were very fast.
21
In these examples we see a tendency towards more freedom for local cadres
and well connected local elites to engage in projects that manifest
development technologies (or what Scott might refer to as ‘high-modernist
ideology’) the farther the distance from the city. This is quite similar to
Hsing’s observations. On the urban fringe merely mobilising difference did
not work. It seemed that citizens’ influence in urbanisation had been
considerable when locals expanded their farmhouses to host rural–urban
migrants, yet authority was in the process of being transferred to higher-level
government. This was partly justified by a belief that they could protect the
interests of resettled residents better. Citizens may have become protected by
this manoeuvre, but village organisations clearly had not. The zoning enabled
variegated sovereignty, where regulations could be more easily overridden in
some localities (rural fringe) while heavily enforced in others (urban fringe).
Claims from below
As in local governance, particularities and special conditions of a small locality
were also frequently applied in the claims of those targeted by resettlement. I
found that claims made might in some cases go directly against central politics,
but since they usually do not involve large categories such as ‘all peasants’ in
China, the sometimes high degree of social mobilisation locally against such
projects involving resettlement remains possible to control.
I divide my analysis of public claims between three different categories that
were treated considerably differently by the local state: 1) locals with an
agricultural hukou; 2) locals with a non-agricultural hukou;and3)non-locals.
On the outskirts of the city proper the per capita compensation offered for
resettlement depended almost exclusively on this formal status: 51–60 m
2
of new
housing for locals with an agricultural hukou,30m
2
for local urban residents
(non-agricultural hukou-holders), and nothing for non-locals, because in
principle they could not have rights to local agricultural land. In each of these
three categories a number of citizens had good jobs, and had already bought
housing at market prices. These individuals might also make claims, and
probably had a better chance of succeeding with them. Here, however, I choose
to focus on citizens for whom the claim was vital to their life chances. I do so
because I am concerned with how boundaries can justify politically created or
maintained inequality (opportunity hoarding) and how they may be applied to
target allegedly unfair inequality (mobilisation). I keep this a major concern by
focusing on citizens for whom rural land, a politically assigned good, is essential,
rather than citizens whose opportunities are largely decided by market forces
less directly under political control.
Close to the city the three categories of citizens lived next to each other. All
the local urban residents I interviewed were laid-off workers, who were either
registered in a township seat (zhen) and had worked in local industry instead
of having access to land before economic reforms, or had been compensated
with a state sector job in an earlier urbanisation process. Many of them were
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not resettled, because they already lived quite densely and occupied little
space. These urban residents might feel bypassed by the, in their eyes, over-
compensated peasants. Local peasants had often built quite large houses,
parts of which they sublet to the many rural–urban migrants. In most villages
farther away from the centre the vast majority consisted of local peasants.
Since access to interviews without local cadres present was much easier when
persons were not yet resettled in a gated community, most of my data cover
peasants in the process of negotiating their deal or anticipating how
negotiation will go. During my fieldwork, the resettled-to-be was a much
larger group than those already resettled. The three categories represent
different types of divides. Each of the three categories has boundaries with
the two other groups. All these boundaries have the potential to be
understood as urban–rural boundaries, while only the boundary between
locals and non-locals is also a boundary between citizens administratively
assigned to different localities. I argue that this boundary between different
localities and citizens from different localities plays a great role not only for
individuals’ real opportunities, but also for the way individual citizens believe
their opportunities should rightfully be; this boundary is not seriously
contested. The boundary between locals registered as peasants and urban
residents, on the other hand, is seriously contested, and not accepted by
increasingly marginalised laid-off workers. In my view this is because the
boundary is not based on where citizens are from.
Local peasants
I first analyse the restructuring of land from the viewpoint of local peasants,
both close to the city and farther away.
As illustrated by the woman in the farmhouse about to be expropriated
discussed earlier, peasants’ distrust of the local administrations was
widespread. This was not least the case for a young widow in a village on
the rural fringe. She was much more socially challenged than most others,
since she had a small child and only one income. She now earned a very small
income by working for watermelon growers invited from Zhejiang province,
more than 1000 kilometres away, by the local authorities to till land leased
from the village collective. She was one of very few informants who hinted at
a possible conflict with outsiders:
The government doesn’t want us locals to rent the land, so people from outside
come and rent the land, because there’s a pr ofit involved. Here it is not like
other places. If the government lets locals rent the land, the market price is
transparent, and they [officials] will get no profit. With people from outside,
they get a profit. The logic is that easy . . . People say that development is for
ordinary citizens, to de velop agriculture . . . But the government doesn’t do it
like that; like here it just reports to the upper level government the planned
production quantity, but never cares about the life or death of ordinary citizens.
Although she saw the watermelon growers as outsiders, her real dissatisfac-
tion was directed towards the village leadership, not at the melon growers,
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nor at the central leadership, which was seen as at least partially well-
intended. When I interviewed other peasants far away from the city, they all
knew about the much higher level of compensation for land in places closer
to the city, but in claims, references were to neighbouring villages. They
believed that they should have the same opportunities as villagers living in
places similar to their own, but saw no chance of reaching the same level as
those closer to the centre.
Almost all peasants interviewed believed that they as peasants had to work
hard. A peasant in his 40s who had lost land and a house very close to the
centre and was waiting for resettlement explained how hardship was part of
being a Chinese peasant, as opposed to being a former state employee:
Often unemployed workers don’t want to do jobs that make them lose face.
Peasants, on the other hand, can do all kinds of jobs. They do it thoroughly,
because they need food . . . Laid-off workers always believe they are workers
and a level higher than peasants ...;itused to be like this, but now peasants are
a bit higher, so now many urban residents want to become peasants, and don’t
want to be workers. Peasants have land which they can let out and earn
money by.
Although hardship was perceived as an integral part of being a peasant, it was
also clear that peasants were believed to have to work harder the further away
from the city they were. Rural–urban migrants were believed to have to work
very hard. This perception of geographically differentiated opportunities was
most clearly expressed by an elderly married couple close to the city. When
talking about the many rural–urban migrants in their village, they explained:
A district party secret ary from a mountainous area couldn’t even be like a sub-
village leader [three administrative levels lower] here. Our sub-village leader
here gets several hundred yuan per month. A party secretary of a mountain
district only gets a bit more than one thousand per year.
Both cadres and subjects were perceived as having fewer opportunities the
further they were from the centre. These differences were perceived as, if not
just, then more or less ‘natural’, as in opportunity hoarding, while differences
within localities of the same rank were understood as the result of more and
less successful local leadership and hence subject to public claims. Rural–
urban migrants in this respect were understood as belonging to their places of
registration.
Most of the informants above were neither particularly well-to-do nor
particularly poor, but they all seemed to identify themselves very much as
ordinary citizens (peasants) who were having a hard time. However, they
were also aware that some, like laid-off workers or peasants from further
away were having a harder time, but this fact in no way made them incapable
of making claims against their local authorities. Though there was to some
degree a notion of China’s ordinary citizens (peasants) against the elite
around the state, when making a claim it was important to present a case as
particular and draw a line distinguishing it from other cases.
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It seemed that the continued mobilisation for campaigns for proper
resettlement schemes in connection with the very long lasting and massive
resettlement had given local peasants some sense of resistance that went
beyond a single case and went beyond their narrow locality. In some
situations, this was leading to a situation where it was almost as if the major
authority trusted was not the local administration, but potential protesters
with proper allies. By having somebody well connected approach higher
political levels, there was a chance of getting a more just treatment. Whether
this belief implied a belief that higher-level politicians were truly just or
simply wanted to avoid ‘noise’, however, was not clear. What was clear was
that claims and the network of people backing the claims were extremely
place- and case-specific. Claims were made in extremely small units with
reference only to nearby localities with similar rank on the urban–rural
continuum. While much was disputed within localities of the same rank, the
ranking was surprisingly little questioned. The ranking was a prerequisite for
making claims of a scope limited enough to succeed with them.
Local urban residents
Attitudes found among holders of non-agricultural local hukou were quite
different, and references were considerably less place-specific. One old urban
resident, living in a single leftover house between several large development
projects, explained how the state (guojia) had betrayed her several times through
changes of her hukou status. First, she had been sent down to the country during
the Cultural Revolution and had got a rural hukou when it was more attractive
to be urban. Then, during early economic reforms, she had become an urban
resident. Thus she could only get half the compensation given to everybody else.
She thought that China’s overall progress was all very fine, but she had been
unfortunate and had not enjoyed any of it.
22
The old woman’s point of view was quite similar to that of two laid-off
female workers approaching fifty years of age. They lived in small, badly kept
rented rooms at the compound of the former state-owned enterprise at which
they had worked. When asked to compare peasants and urban residents, they
explained:
A: Now, really, laid-off workers are the most miserable. Peasants aren’t a bit
miserable any more.
B: Peasants have land. Their land is money. The working class neither has a tile
over their heads nor a speck of land. It all belongs to the state, right?
A: [The state] ha sn’t mentioned those laid off, they all talk about peasants.
[...]
B: We have fought for the state, all [our] youth and hot blood was given to the
Communist Party, and the result is that it is very miserable now.
In both cases the state was identified as the reason for the misfortune rather
than merely its local arms. The old woman in the last house standing was not
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able to blame the local government for misinterpretation of regulations; her
ill fate had its root in central politics both during the Cultural Revolution
and under the reforms. The two women interviewed above understood
economic reforms as continually taking away privileges from them, especially
with the latest focus on rural development. They all saw their opportunities
as considerably worse than those of local peasants, but they blamed the state,
not the more privileged local peasants themselves. Many former state-
employed workers might, when explicitly asked, claim that they were more
cultivated (had a higher suzhi) than local peasants and that they were also
harder-working than local peasants; many saw themselves as being in the
same boat as the migrant workers. They did not see themselves as having a
higher suzhi than rural–urban migrants. Informant B noted: ‘When they
leave their homes, it is also to work, we also work, it’s all for making a living.
It’s the same there’s no difference.’ Local peasants, on the other hand did not
need to work hard since they had land and houses.
The urban residents had quite strong perceptions of themselves as having
been mistreated, and frequently returned to almost archaic political paroles, like
‘I represent the laid-off workers of China’. In Tilly’s terms, there was clearly no
silent acceptance of their faith. These laid-off workers blamed the political centre
rather than local authorities for their misfortune. The group of laid-off workers
clearly illustrated the fact that maintaining an urban/rural divide between
citizens registered at the same place severely challenged local state authority.
Once compensated, urban and rural residents would, however, have the same
rights to public service, so the divide was probably a transitional phenomenon
and, although they questioned the authority of the entire political system, the
fact that their rights were subject to locally defined regulations, and their limited
number, ensured that they were no true danger to the regime.
Non-locals
During an interview of an otherwise quite well informed interior decorator from
around 200 km from Chengdu, who had lived in Chengdu for decades, I asked
whether there were any plans to demolish the farmhouse on the outskirts of
Chengdu in which he rented a room. He was not able to answer the question and
had to turn to his landlord. She could then answer the question. The question of
resettlement did not matter to him. When his present locality was demolished, he
would rent a room slightly further out of town. One of the watermelon growers
from Zhejiang, described by local peasants as really well connected with the
local authorities, seemed to be doing good business. Even so, he lived with his
family in a tent and was not planning to buy any other accommodation in the
village. Like the interior decorator, he did not reveal any signs of a long-term
spatial affiliation to the area to which he had moved.
23
In the 20 interviews with migrants to central Chengdu conducted, I only came
across one case in which expropriation seemed to have been an issue. A group of
sellers of Chinese medicine had rented land from a local sub-village leader (and
now husband to one of the migrants) more than a decade ago, and then built
their own housing on this piece of land. These migrants would get compensation
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for the building materials used to build the houses, but nothing more. Unlike
most of the locals, they were satisfied with their compensation.
Migrants perceived their stay as temporary, and their expectations towards
local authorities were extremely modest. Migrant informants might occasionally
claim that they worked harder than locals, but there was no real disdain directed
towards locals. The only group singled out of by a rural–urban migrant as a
danger were the ‘blind floaters’ (mangliu), ie migrants migrating without a
proper job. Interviews with local authorities and reports written by local
authorities revealed slight problems with registering migrants, family planning,
and ordinary crime among some migrants, but the big issue of social unrest was
clearly that involving local peasants in land appropriation.
The rural–urban migrants stood in vast contrast to a group of immigrants
(yimin) resettled (with hukou transfer) from a very large dam project to
various villages on Chengdu’s rural fringe. The project had caused severe
unrest, reportedly the largest incident since the Tian’anmen incident. The
military had been used, and Premier Wen had had to deal with the problems
personally. The high degree of political attention now placed on their
resettlement gave them a considerable negotiating power against local
authorities. This was a negotiating power that local peasants knew they could
not get and did not even attempt to get. Claims remained isolated between
locals and non-locals.
24
It was clear that rural–urban migrants were regarded as role models of rural
hardship by both local peasants and urban residents. This is quite different from
findings in studies of the middle class, where rural–urban migrants are rather
regarded as the materialisation of anything it does not want to be.
25
Hu and
Wen’s rhetoric on rural China may have contributed to this.
Claims were made in isolation among different groups. Differentiation
between people from different localities was not disputed, while maintaining
differentiation between locals categorised as urban and rural seemed to be
regarded as unjust. The boundaries between localities were an accepted part
of the opportunity hoarding taking place; urban–rural boundaries were not.
Boundaries between localities may have been enforced by the explicit zoning
part of Chengdu’s Urban–Rural Integration Policy.
Conclusion
When I studied in China in the 1990s I frequently heard myself telling my
urban friends how similar Chinese cities were to Denmark and how different
the Chinese countryside was from the cities. I had never set foot in rural
China but still firmly believed in this image of the Chinese countryside and
was frequently reassured by urban Chinese friends that I was right. To me at
least, the urban–rural boundary was extremely manifest. Yet, when I
physically went to places where the urban–rural boundary appeared to be,
the boundary was not manifest to the people there, and the boundary itself
was a belt stretching more than 50 kilometres from the centre of the city, far
beyond the sign at the fourth ring-road not allowing dirty cars to enter the
city proper.
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The physical urban–rural boundary was hard to identify. The ranking of
zones defined by the hukou system reflected this gradual urban–rural
boundary. When the boundary was referred to, it was mainly by leaders at
various levels, either with the intention of making their power penetrate more
deeply (the city government), or in order to please the higher levels and
justify local projects (local leaders). Ranks and borders based on the hukou
system fixed claims to places so they almost never got beyond these
boundaries. This meant that social-engineering-type projects in one locality
could be contained, and it meant that government could control claims from
below even if, as in the dam case, they were to blame high-ranking levels
within the state system.
Although boundaries and ranking were constructed by the state (city
prefecture), the maintenance of the zoned structure was only possible because
this was equally crucial in claims made from below. Heavily compensated
land-losing peasants on the urban fringe would have a weak case if they were
to include peasants from the rural fringe in their claim. A prerequisite for the
claims made was that each category of citizen had certain privileges based on
the status of the locality they belonged to. While the boundaries between
localities worked very well at maintaining a stable system based on
opportunity hoarding, the urban–rural boundary, as suggested by Wang
Fei-ling, did not. Discrimination between urban and rural residents from the
same localities was not accepted, and when cadres mobilised other cadres, the
urban–rural categorisation was also frequently in play.
The many boundaries between localities seemed to provide a stable
infrastructure for claims making of both hard to control local cadres and
citizens who all saw advantages in being in a special situation defined by their
respective localities. When claims resulted in violence or close-to-disastrous
social engineering, these problems were contained within a single locality,
since boundaries between localities were regarded as ‘natural’. Both rule and
claims making were powered by difference.
Notes
1 This article builds on extensive fieldwork on Chengdu’s urban–rural boundary, including more than
200 interviews and archival work. For a full list of interviews, see JW Zeuthen, ‘Ruling through
differentiation in China: Chengdu’s urban–rural integration policy’, unpublished PhD dissertation,
Roskilde University, 2010.
2 Quotes are from two of the most path-breaking contributions to the field: Li Zhang, Strangers in the
City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China’s Floating Population,
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001, p 1; and DJ Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban
China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market, Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1999, p 1. Bregnbæk in this issue discusses suzhi. See also A Anagnost, ‘The corporeal
politics of quality (Suzhi)’, Public Culture, 16(2), 2004, pp 189–208; and C-P Pow, ‘Securing the
‘‘civilised’’ enclaves: gated communities and the moral geographies of exclusion in (post-)socialist
Shanghai’, Urban Studies, 44, 2007, pp 1539–1558 use this concept to argue how the urban middle class
constructs itself as the opposite of rural–urban migrants. R Murphy, ‘Turning peasants into modern
Chinese citizens: discourse, demographic transition and primary education’, China Quarterly, 177(1),
2004, pp 1–20; and Pun Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace, Hong
Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005 shows how similar discourses contribute to the disciplining
of rural subjects. On hukou, see A Chan & P Alexander, ‘Does China have an apartheid pass system?’,
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 30(4), 2004, pp 609–629; KW Chan &W Buckingham, ‘Is
China abolishing the Hukou system?’, China Quarterly, 195, 2008, pp 582–606; and Wang Fei-Ling,
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Organizing through Division and Exclusion: China’s Hukou System, Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2005.
3 See, especially, Wang, Organizing through Division and Exclusion; and Pun, Made in China.
4 See S Thøgersen, ‘Return of the Chinese peasant: farmers and their intellectual advocates’, Issues and
Studies, 39 (4), 2003, pp 230–239 for an overview of the open debate. On mobilisation, see Yu
Jianrong, ‘Maintaining a baseline of social stability’ (translation of a speech to the Beijing Lawyers
Association), China Digital Times, 17 February 2010, at http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/03/yu-
jianrong-maintaining-a-baseline-of-social-stability-part-i/, accessed 10 February 2012.
5 Districts (urban) and counties (rural) are the administrative level just below the city prefecture. They
are divided into street committees or townships that are again divided into communities of villages and
sub-villages.
6 KJ O’Brien & Li Lianjiang, Rightful Resistance in Rural China, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006. On fragmented authoritarianism, see K Lieberthal & M Oksenberg, Policy Making in
China: Leaders, Structures, and Processes, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.
7 C Tilly, Durable Inequality, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998.
8 M Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.
9 Aihwa Ong, ‘The Chinese axis: zoning technologies and variegated sovereignty’, Journal of East Asian
Studies, 4(1), 2004, pp 69–96. Historically, see GW Skinner, ‘Presidential address: the structure of
Chinese history’, Journal of Asian Studies, 44(2), 1985, pp 271–292; and RB Wong, China Transformed:
Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997,
pp 179–206
10 Cai Yongshun, ‘Power structure and regime resilience: contentious politics in China’, British Journal of
Political Science, 38(3), 2008, pp 411–432; Wang, Organizing through Division and Exclusion; and
O’Brien & Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China. For a perspective on a well intended centre, see also
Wang Shaoguang, ‘Changing models of China’s policy agenda setting’, Modern China, 34(56), 2008, pp
56–87
11 G Smith, ‘Political machinations in a rural county’, China Journal, (62), 2009, pp 29–59. On the
concept of social engineering, see JC Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the
Human Condition have Failed, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
12 Wang, Organizing through Division and Exclusion.
13 For a review, see Chan & Buckingham, ‘Is China abolishing the Hukou system?’ . An example from the
academic debate is Zhu Yu, ‘China’s floating population and their settlement intention in the cities:
beyond the Hukou reform’, Habitat International, 31(1), 2007, pp 65–76.
14 You-tien Hsing, The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China, New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010; and Zeuthen, ‘Ruling through differentiation in China’, p 119.
15 For details on documents collected and interviews on the city prefecture’s policy, see Zeuthen, ‘Ruling
through differentiation in China’, pp 106–122.
16 Hsing, The Great Urban Transformation; and P Ho, Institutions in Transition: Land Ownership,
Property Rights, and Social Conflict in China, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
17 JW Zeuthen & MB Griffiths, ‘The end of urban–rural differentiation in China? Hukou and
resettlement in Chengdu’s urban–rural integration’, in B Alpermann (ed), Politics and Markets in Rural
China, London: Routledge, 2011.
18 Interview, November 2007.
19 For details of documents collected and interviews on cases discussed in this sub-section, see Zeuthen,
‘Ruling through differentiation in China’, pp 169–178.
20 Ibid, pp 207–210.
21 Ibid, pp 155–163.
22 The data on urban residents are explored more fully in Zeuthen & Griffiths, ‘The end of urban–rural
differentiation in China?’.
23 Parts of the material on rural–urban migrants are also discussed in ibid.
24 For data on the case before resettlement, see A Mertha, China’s Water Warriors: Citizen Action and
Policy Change, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. For further details on immigration to
Chengdu, see Zeuthen, ‘Ruling through differentiation in China’, pp 147–148, 206–207.
25 Anagnost, ‘The corporeal politics of quality (Suzhi)’.
Notes on contributor
Jesper Zeuthen has recently defended his PhD dissertation on Chengdu’s
urban-rural integration policy at Roskilde University, Denmark and teaches
China Studies at the University of Copenhagen.
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