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102
Abstract
As urbanization and industrialization continue
to spread through China’s countryside, the central
government has ocially declared the construction of
master planned eco-industrial zones and eco-cities as
primary strategies for accelerating the transformation
of industrial structure and the prevailing model of
economic development, as well as for “constructing
a socialist economic, politically, culturally… and
ecologically civilized… harmonious society” (NPC
2011: chapter 1, np).
Based on recent eldwork, this paper demonstrates
how these strategies extend beyond the “green
washing” of rural land enclosure and transformation,
arguing that processes of rural dispossession are
linked to the commodication and circulation of
natural capital. is paper analyzes processes of
environmentalization and enclosure as linked state-
led strategies for governing economic growth, rural
transformation and interventions into global market-
based solutions to climate change as integral problems
of Chinese national development and modernization.
As a basis for theorizing the relationships between
Chinese models of “green development,” forms
of environmental governance and new circuits of
accumulation, the paper utilizes a case study of Yixing
city, where eco-city, renewable energy and ecological
conservation projects are being planned in tandem,
enclosing over 300 square-kilometers of rural land
and displacing over 50,000 residents since 2006. e
technical and discursive “dividing practices” (Foucault
1972, 1977) of local government planners are
examined in conjunction with the scalar construction
of rural land as a fungible national “resource” under
central government policies for renewable energy
development, food security, “ecological withdrawal of
agriculture” and arable land reclamation quotas (e.g.
State Council 2007).
Following Marxian scholarship on the enclosure
of access to land and the establishment of property
regimes as ongoing moments of “primitive”
accumulation and state-territorial projects (ompson
1975; Harvey 2003; Hsing 2010; Peluso and Lund
2011; Corson and MacDonald 2012), this paper
argues that rural land enclosure in China functions
in dierent circuits of accumulation corresponding
to varied constructed scales of environmentalization.
SuStainable territorieS: rural
DiSpoSSeSSion, lanD encloSureS
anD the conStruction of
environmental reSourceS in
china
Jia-Ching Chen City & Regional Planning
University of California, Berkeley
103
Volume 6, Number 1, 2013
Jia-Ching Chen
e paper analyzes such environmentalized
transformations, including ecological set-asides,
non-fossil fuel energy generation, and high-intensity
non-village agriculture and the requisite conversion
of collectively owned rural land into state controlled
urban land, as a process of territorialization. Drawing
upon the work of Poulantzas and recent scholarship
on environmental enclosures (e.g. the volume by
Peluso and Lund 2011), I argue that the construction
of discrete environmental functions for—and apart
from—rural land is fundamental to the constitution
of “homogenizing enclosure” and territoriality as the
“institutional materiality of the state” (Poulantzas
1978: 93-107). Following Lefebvrian analysis of the
production of space (Lefebvre 1991[1974]; e.g. Roth
2008), I nd that such abstraction regures the local
in a process of territorialization, highlighting the
importance of state power to the establishment of
market-based forms of environmental governance and
the circulation of “natural capital.”
Keywords: Dispossession; land enclosure; agrarian
transition; environmentalization; China
Territorios sustentables: Desposesión Rural,
Cercamiento y la Construcción de Recursos
Ambientales en China
Resumen
A medida que la urbanización y la industrialización
siguen expandiéndose en las áreas rurales de China,
el gobierno central ha anunciado ocialmente la
construcción de mega zonas eco-industriales y
eco-ciudades como estrategias fundamentales para
acelerar la transformación de la estructura industrial
y del modelo económico de desarrollo prevaleciente,
así como también para “construir una sociedad
socialista armónica y económica, política, cultural…
y ecológicamente civilizada (NPC, 2011: chapter 1,
np).
Este artículo se basa en trabajo de campo reciente y
demuestra cómo estas estrategias van más allá del ‘lavado
verde’ del cercamiento y transformación de tierras
rurales, entendiendo que los procesos de desposesión
rural están ligados a la comodicación y circulación
del capital natural. Aquí se analizan los procesos de
mediambientalización y cercamiento como estrategias
del estado para gobernar el crecimiento económico, la
transformación rural y las intervenciones en soluciones
pro-mercado para mitigar el cambio climático como
problemas del desarrollo y la modernización nacional
del país.
Como base para teorizar las relaciones entre los
modelos chinos de ‘desarrollo verde’, las formas de
gobernanza medioambiental y los nuevos circuitos de
acumulación, el artículo utiliza un estudio de caso en la
ciudad de Yixing, adonde proyectos de eco-ciudades,
energías renovables y conservación ecológica están
siendo planeados en tándem, cercando más de 200
kilómetros cuadrados de tierras rurales y desplazando a
más de 50 mil residentes desde 2006. Aquí se estudian
las ‘prácticas divisorias’ técnicas y discursivas (Foucault
1972, 1977) de los planicadores del gobierno local
– en conjunto con la construcción escalar de tierras
rurales – como un ‘recurso’ nacional intercambiable
bajo políticas de desarrollo de energías renovables,
seguridad alimentaria, ‘retiro agrícola ecológico’ y
reclamos de cupos de tierras arables del gobierno
central (por ejemplo, Consejo de Estado 2007).
Siguiendo a académicos marxistas que han
trabajado en temas de cercamiento del acceso a tierras
y establecimiento de regímenes de propiedad como
momentos continuos de acumulación ‘primitiva’
y de proyectos del estado-territorio (ompson
1975; Harvey 2003; Hsing 2010; Peluso and Lund
2011; Corson and MacDonald 2012), en este
artículo se asegura que el cercamiento de tierras
rurales en China funciona en diversos circuitos de
acumulación dependiendo de las diferentes escalas
de medioambientalización construidas. Aquí se
analizan esas transformaciones mediambientalizadas
(incluyendo la generación de energía renovable, la
agricultura intensiva y los requisitos de conversión de
las tierras rurales bajo propiedad colectiva en tierras
urbanas controladas por el estado) como procesos
de territorialización. Basándome en el trabajo de
Poulantzas y en reciente material sobre cercamientos
medioambientales (por ejemplo el volumen de Peluso
104 Human Geography
DIVIDING ENVIRONMENTS
y Lund 2011), argumento que la construcción de
funciones ambientales discretas para – y aparte de – las
tierras rurales es fundamental para la constitución de
un ‘cercamiento homogeneizador’ y una territorialidad
que constituyen la ‘materialidad institucional del
estado’(Poulantzas 1978: 93-107). Basándome en
seguidores de Lefebvre sobre la producción del espacio
(Roth 2008) (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]), considero que
esa abstracción recongura a lo local como un proceso
de territorialización, enfatizando la importancia del
poder del estado para establecer formas de gobernanza
medioambiental y de circulación de ‘capital natural’
pro-mercado.
Palabras clave: Desposesión, cercamiento de
tierras, transición agraria, medioambientalización,
China
Green Planning Principle 1: Begin with
the area’s characteristically dense network of
waterways, fully utilize these natural resources
in order to create the area’s environment, molded
from its distinguishing features, lifting its urban
character.
Green Planning Principle 2: Integrate
planning of infrastructure and key features in
order to create a green space leisure system wealthy
in humanistic delight.
—Yixing New City Regulatory Plan
(YXEDZ Planning 2008: 17)
A cynical observer might be tempted to
conclude that discussion of the environmental
issue is nothing more than a covert way of
introducing particular social and political
projects by raising the specter of an ecological
crisis or of legitimizing solutions by appeal to the
authority of nature-imposed necessity. I would
want, however, to draw a somewhat broader
conclusion: all ecological projects (and arguments)
are simultaneously political-economic projects
(and arguments) and vice versa.
—David Harvey (1996: 182)
As urbanization and industrialization continue
to spread through the countryside, China faces
the problem of simultaneously maintaining urban
economic growth while preserving farmland as a pillar
of social stability and food security. In order to address
this dilemma, the central government has taken a
multi-pronged approach to farmland preservation
and land management that seeks to rationalize land-
use at a national scale and to promote the integration
of modernized agriculture with new city construction
as an explicit eort to simultaneously address the
social, economic and environmental contradictions
of the prevailing model of development. e national
quantication and rationalization of land “supply”
for development and as an explicitly environmental
“resource” has emerged in the conjuncture of the
late-reform period valorization of the private sector
economy and increasing global concern over China’s
population and food demand. e enclosure of rural
land for green development projects necessitates
a reguring of land tenure and property relations
specied under the constitution in order to transform
ownership of rural land by village collectives into
urban land under direct state control. While the
processes of national land resource construction and
accounting are foundational aspects of enclosure in
the classical sense of creating new legal structures to
protect exclusive forms of access and use (ompson
1975), I argue that these practices are also the initial
sociopolitical means of deploying dispossession as an
“extra-economic” form of accumulation alongside
market logics for the valuation and circulation of
environmentalized commodities in the case of green
development explored below (Harvey 2003; Glassman
2006).
ese enclosures simultaneously comprise
an important dynamic of “green grabs” as an
“expropriation of land or resources for environmental
purposes” (Corson and MacDonald 2012: 263),
and a systematic means of shaping environmental
governance as a mode of capital accumulation. Over
the past decade, environmental governance mandates
have set the stage for the present wave of “green grabs”
in China, linking new enclosures to the development
of a national renewable energy portfolio, and
SUSTAINABLE TERRITORIES
105
Volume 6, Number 1, 2013
Jia-Ching Chen
ecological service and preservation zones. Exemplary
of this approach is the ocial declaration of master
planned eco-industrial zones and eco-cities as primary
strategies for attaining the goal of an environmentally,
economically and socially “harmonious society” (e.g.
State Council 2012b; NDRC 2012; NPC 2011). In
the following, I demonstrate how the promotion of
“green development” acts upon rural land in China
to: (1) reconstruct it as a national environmental
resource; (2) link it to novel processes of accumulation;
(3) circulate it through quota systems that enable
its redenition as the basis of urban-industrial and
ecological values; and (4) successfully divorce it from
village livelihoods in a process of dispossession and
enclosure.
I observe and analyze these processes of green
development at the intersection of national farmland
management policies, and local practices of land
management for ecological preservation, eco-city and
eco-industry projects in Yixing, located in the Taihu
basin of Jiangsu province (see Figures 1 and 2). Between
2006 and 2011, these projects enclosed over 330 square
kilometers of rural land (see Table 1) and displaced
over 50,000 village residents in order to provide
construction land for the municipality’s Sustainable
Development Demonstration Zone, designated under
the Ministry of Science and Technology, with its
ecological corridors and economic development zone
focused on the solar energy industry as the core of a
“low carbon development” model (Chen 2012). Critics
may readily analyze such projects as eorts to “green
wash” processes of enclosure and urbanization, and to
compete for investment in the strategic energy sector.
However, following Harvey’s (1996) well-known
prompt above and Buttel’s (1992) conceptualization
of environmentalization as a structural transition,
I argue here that as the Yixing case links global
markets for “sustainable” energy, national policies
for climate change mitigation and environmental
governance, and economic development projects to
rural transformation, it illuminates the quintessential
strategy, ideology and broader social–environmental
contradictions of what might be called China’s ‘Green
Leap Forward.’ Moreover, I argue that it is this overall
integrated conception of green development—and not
its individual constituent functions such as ecological
preservation or the production of solar panels—that
constructs rural land as an environmental resource.
Recent scholarship shows that such land
enclosures are increasingly integrated with processes of
environmentalization in the production of new forms
of resource valuation and circulation (e.g.: Heynen
and Robbins 2005; Peluso and Lund 2011). In line
with the recent literature on “green grabs,” this paper
examines rural land enclosure for environmentalized
development goals as a “new appropriation of nature”
(Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012). Drawing from
conceptual and theoretical approaches to the political
economy of dispossession as an ongoing dynamic
of primitive accumulation (Glassman 2007), the
paper outlines linked processes of the enclosure,
commodication and market valuation of “ecological
land resources” (e.g. MLR 2008). I argue that this
appropriation is enabled by central government
policies in which rural transformation is regarded
as a necessary function of overall socioeconomic
development and environmental protection (MLR
2012b, 2012c; State Council 2012a; MLR 2004). is
linkage casts rural village livelihoods as backward on
numerous fronts, the most contentious being the so-
called ecient and ecological use of land. Examining
policy and practice at the intersection of economic
growth and environmental governance agendas
reveals what McAfee calls “green developmentalism…
[a] mutually constituted complex of institutions,
discourses and practices” that manage systems for
circulating “natural capital” and enable the long-term
means of accumulation in the face of environmental
degradation and resource depletion (McAfee 1999:
134). Insofar as these political economies are integral to
global environmental discourses, governance practices
and markets, I argue that they are constitutive of a
broader pattern of ‘sustainability by dispossession.’
e paper will proceed from a critical examination
of the political ecology of the Yixing region within
the context of China’s ideologies of environmental
resource governance. Following, I will analyze recent
archival and eldwork data on the planning, enclosure
and dispossession for green development in Yixing to
106 Human Geography
DIVIDING ENVIRONMENTS
outline the scalar construction of rural land as a fungible
national “resource” through the central government
policies for renewable energy development, rural
development, and land management policies,
including ecological preservation schemes, farmland
conversion and arable land reclamation quotas.
From Agrarian To Environmental Questions
e close of the twentieth century has brought
a renewed salience to agrarian questions through
transformations to global agricultural commodities
production and trade (Watts 1996; McMichael 2005;
Bernstein 2010). Within this context, the objective
of this section is to examine how green development
ideology removes the problem of agrarian livelihoods
(as one of politics in Bernstein’s 1996 formulation)
from the historic articulation of the agrarian question
in Chinese socialism and rearticulates the question of
agricultural production as an “environmental question”
centered on the enclosure and conveyance of rural land
resources. e simultaneously political–economic and
ecological argument of green development in Yixing
thus regures state–society relations around an axis
of environmental resource management, dismantling
collective land tenure as the basis of rural livelihood.
As in the industrial capitalist “revolutionizing of
agriculture” analyzed by Kautsky (1988 [1899]: 297),
this transformation is driven largely by phenomena and
forces outside of agricultural production. Principally
speaking, these include energy, climate and carbon
governance mandates and markets whose dialectical
interaction with agriculture contribute to a deepening
of the environmental “second contradiction” of
capitalist production in the neoliberal era (O’Connor
1994; McMichael 2012).
Central government policies promoting
green development enter ocial discourses and
longstanding ideologies that root problems of
environmental resources and national development in
a series of agrarian questions linking the construction
of socialist modernity to the transformation of rural
space and society. From the Maoist revolution and
the Great Leap Forward through the present, ocial
ideology has underscored the ability to overcome
limits in natural resources through social mobilization
and technological advancement. is aspect of
state ideology is especially prominent in relation to
questions of agricultural production and population
growth (e.g. Shapiro 2001; Greenhalgh 2008).
In its earlier articulation, the agrarian question in
China was directed at producing massive surpluses
as the basis for capital accumulation for national
industrial modernization. Shapiro (2001: 9) argues
that this ideology was epitomized by Mao’s use of the
Confucian proverb “people are masters of their fates”
(rén dìng shèng tīan) as a slogan meaning “people must
conquer nature.” e disastrous results of the Great
Leap campaigns to remake the countryside through
massive land reclamation projects are a prominent
historical referent (Smil 1984). Under the banner of
“learning from Dazhai,” mountains were terraced and
wetlands and lakes were lled to construct arable land.
Millions of hectares were transformed, but little usable
farmland resulted as projects ignored local topography
and climate, causing massive erosion, soil degradation,
and desertication (Smil 1984).
Despite these failures, reclamation of slopes,
grasslands and wetlands continued as the primary
response to cultivated land loss under various
policy and physical pressures resulting from rural
industrialization, urbanization, disasters and
agricultural restructuring (e.g. MLR 1999, 2008).
Development pressures mounted under the 1988
amendments to the Constitution, which established
a land leasehold system along with ocial recognition
of the private sector economy.1 is led to a dual
system including planned land allocation and a
leasehold market. is bifurcation became a major
cause of unregulated land development, real estate
speculation and arbitrage (Huang and Yang 1996; Lin
and Ho 2005).
1 Before the changes, Article 10 of the Constitution
previously stated: “No organization or individual may
appropriate, buy, sell or lease land, or unlawfully transfer land
in other ways.” It was amended to include the clause: “e right
to the use of the land may be transferred in accordance with the
law.”
SUSTAINABLE TERRITORIES
107
Volume 6, Number 1, 2013
Jia-Ching Chen
In the context of scal decentralization and the
approval for the Shenzhen special economic zone
model of foreign investment and rapid export-oriented
growth following Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern
Tour, local governments initiated massive rural land
enclosure projects to fuel rentier accumulation (Hsing
2010; Ren 2003; Fan 1997; Smith 2000). Even as this
“development zone fever” of the 1990s left 85 percent
of enclosed land undeveloped (Ren 2003), cascading
spatial restructuring fed an urban revolution with real
estate development and local government-controlled
land rents forming a major engine of economic
growth (Hsing 2010; see Lefebvre 2003 [1970]).
Jiangsu recorded a net loss of approximately 1,800
square kilometers of cultivated land for construction
land from 1988 to 1995, the third largest provincial
loss in the country (State Land Administration 1996).
is loss occurred despite reclamation eorts totaling
more than 700 square kilometers. Furthermore, this
total was more than 100 square kilometers short of the
legally required “replacement” for farmland that had
been converted for construction projects.
e problem of China’s continual loss of cultivated
lands to development was widely publicized in Lester
Brown’s controversial book Who Will Feed China?
(Brown 1995). Brown argued that as China’s food
production declined, its increasing imports would
create a global environmental and economic crisis.
Although Brown’s calculations of land loss and arable
land stocks were contested and his approach critiqued
as neo-Malthusian (Smil 1995; Lin and Ho 2003;
Shapiro 2001), the central government took notice
of the question of food security as a major problem
of social stability (Lin and Ho 2005). Increased
government attention to the a question of land
resources, including a national land survey completed
in 1996, led to new policies aimed at stemming the
ongoing loss of approximately 6400 square kilometers
of cultivated land annually (1996-2008 average; NBS
2011; see also Figure 3). A national moratorium on
land conversion was put in place from May 1997
through 1998 during which new reclamation policies
were developed and the rst National Land Use
Master Plan was put in place. Covering 1997-2010,
the plan set a minimum cultivated land area at 129.33
million hectares for the year 2000, and 128.01 million
hectares, including 108.56 million hectares designated
as protected “basic farmland” (jiben nongtian), for
2010.
After nearly two decades of policy action, China
has continued to lose scarce farmland to urban and
industrial uses at an annual rate of thousands of square-
kilometers.2 In ocial numbers, continued losses
over the past decade are heavily obscured by “land
consolidation, reclamation and replacement farmland
construction” under policies requiring one-to-one
replacement for farmland converted for construction
(e.g. MLR 1999, 2007, 2008) (see Figure 3).
Dividing Environments: Scaling Land, Resources
and Services
e preceding discussion illustrates how state
environmentalization functions as a mode of “xing,
dividing, and recording” practices (Foucault 1977:
305) that simultaneously work to classify rural
land and people as objects “in a eld of exteriority”
(Foucault 1972: 50). Foucault (1972: 49-50) describes
such discursive practices as establishing relations
between “institutions, economic and social processes,
behavioral patterns, systems of norms, techniques,
types of classication, modes of characterization…”
that enable a xed and divided object to be dened
in its “dierence” and “irreducibility…” In this sense,
land is conceptualized as a fungible “resource” that can
be instilled with dierent, necessary functions (grain
basket, construction land) and attributes (inhabited,
marginal, urban) that are equally divisible and
locatable as objects. us, environmental resources
and services (such as those associated with a wetland)
are themselves not taken as intrinsic to a particular
quantum of land.
Here, Robertson’s (2011: 388) analysis of the
construction of ecosystem services as fungible
commodities is useful in highlighting the practices
of scientic and governmental assessment and
2 China’s arable land is considered scarce in comparison
to regional and world averages, with about .1 hectare per capita,
approximately 40% of the world average (World Bank 2012).
SUSTAINABLE TERRITORIES
108 Human Geography
DIVIDING ENVIRONMENTS
measurement that enable the negotiation of
commodied values and the “construction of abstract
spaces, the denition of boundaries between types
of things that allow nature to be segregated out in a
typology.” In Yixing, local ocials and planners utilize
an expansive notion of “ecological services” rendered
through an aestheticized approach to producing
environments in which such “services” and “ecologies”
are sited, designed, represented and constructed as
the mastery of nature. is discursive classication
further works to “separate natural history from social
history” (Williams 1980: 76), to render rural land as
a form of capital in various circuits of accumulation
corresponding to constructed scales of environmental
resources and services that explicitly maintain “land”
as the origin of an intrinsic, non-economic use-
value upon which environmentalized values can be
established and commodied.
Complementing Foucault’s approach to discourse
analysis, the concept of sociospatial scale enables
analysis of the relationships between environmental
processes and politics. at each of these “divided
environments” are constructed at nested and
imbricated scales can be understood through what
Sayre identies as a dialectic between epistemological
and ontological “moments” of scale (Sayre 2005). e
dominant epistemological scale of the land resource
is composed of the techniques through which it
is accounted for and conveyed for development.
Sociospatial processes such as cultivation, land
reclamation, pollution, environmental illness and
ecological service construction that produce objective
eects and relationships are ontological moments
of scale. e state politics of this scalar dialectic
enable the use of land management quota systems
for environmental governance while simultaneously
constructing rural livelihoods and their displacement
as insignicant within the large spatiotemporal scale
of a national ecological modernity. ese scalar
politics make “sense” of ecological destruction at
a given locale for the epistemological assumption
of ecological coherence at the national system wide
level. is epistemological coherence, mobilizing the
dividing practices of assessment and measurement,
is dialectically entwined with the construction of
fungible rural land resources as the ontological basis
of ecological value.
e great majority of rural land enclosures
during the “development zone fever” of the 1990s
failed to successfully generate investment and
rentier accumulation. Leaving land undeveloped
and “baking under the sun” (Hsing 2010: 99), the
socioenvironmental contradictions of the enclosures
prompted re-regulation and governance of rural
land under an emergent bundle of environmental
questions. New environmental values for land linked
to macro level planning of its basis for climate, energy
and agricultural resources have provided multiscalar
and translocal accumulation strategies for continued
enclosure. us, the “strident” (MLR 1999) regulation
of rural land resources has paradoxically created a
system under which there are more diverse economic
and policy incentives for enclosure and displacement.
Environmentalizing Development Goals In
Yixing
Although the massive conversion of wetlands
during the 1970s slowed, the Taihu basin and the
greater Yangzi delta region have consistently reclaimed
wetlands in order to oset farmland loss in conicting
eorts to expand rural industrialization, construct
urban modernity and maintain agricultural outputs
(Smil 1993; Cartier 2001; MLR 2012a) (see Figure
4). During the 1980s, major social and environmental
contradictions emerged in the region as the result of
rural industrialization through township and village
enterprises (TVEs; see Rozelle 1994; Zhang 2003).
Bramall (2007) demonstrates that assumptions about
the successful economic growth, eciency and equity
outcomes do not hold in some of the most prominent
cases of the ‘Sunan model’ (including Yixing) that
emphasized mobilizing rural collectives for local state-
controlled enterprises. Because of the massive state
subsidies and capital extraction from agriculture, rural
industry in Sunan became an “encumbrance” that
“absorbed scarce capital and labor” in a path-dependent
model of uneven growth (Bramall 2007: 39).
SUSTAINABLE TERRITORIES
109
Volume 6, Number 1, 2013
Jia-Ching Chen
Although Yixing and its neighbors were
counted among the top economies at the county
level,3 unregulated TVE industrial and agribusiness
development had direct and indirect environmental
impacts leading to large and cyclical economic losses
(Ge 1992). Between 1978 and 1990, output in the
region’s TVE sector topped 28 percent (Bramall
2007: 29). is growth continued through the
1990s, accompanied by the annual discharge of
one billion tons of un- and improperly-treated
wastewater into Taihu’s wetlands and rivers (Zhang
2002). As chemicals including arsenic and mercury
contaminated groundwater and soils, negative health
impacts became evident as several villages in Yixing’s
jurisdiction developed high incidence of cancer. ese
and other acute clusters in several coastal provinces were
subsequently documented as “cancer villages” (aizheng
cun) with ocial data in 2007 (Yu 2007). With rural
industrialization absorbing land and labor resources,
higher-intensity agriculture demanded the increased
application of chemical fertilizers and pesticides
which further degraded local wetlands, rivers and lake
systems, resulting in hypertrophication and toxic algal
blooms that contributed to higher cancer rates (Wu et
al. 1999; Chen et al. 2002) and caused drinking water
crises and production shutdowns with hundreds of
millions of yuan in annual direct economic losses (Ge
1992; Zhang 2002). Subsequently dubbed the “Taihu
paradox” (Taihu beilun), the region was held up as
illustrative of the costs of GDP-centric development
policies (Mu 2007).
As the environmental health consequences of
pollution became acute, foreign-educated engineers
in Yixing seized upon manufacturing water treatment
equipment as an economic opportunity. Local ocials
supported the eorts with joint venture incubation
arrangements and land allocations that underwrote
3 See the 100 Strong Counties Rankings (bai qiang
xian) issued by the National Bureau of Statistics. In 1994,
Wen Jiabao (then a central leader of agricultural, nance, and
environmental policy) produced a commemorative work of
calligraphy for the county economic rankings that emphasized
what he saw as the model spirit of the TVEs in the region.
e main inscription, taken from a classical poem, reads, “a
thousand sails unexpectedly unfurl, one hundred boats vie in
the current.”
the establishment of independent private enterprises.
As a base industry, pollution control had a strong
industrial clustering eect, requiring the adaptation of
machine, pipe, lter, pump and other manufacturing
industries (Chen 2007). By the time China signed the
Kyoto Protocol in 1998, Yixing generated 18 percent
of the national total value added in the environmental
industry (Zhang 2002). In 1992, Yixing established
the country’s rst nationally designated environmental
industries research and manufacturing park, the
Yixing Industrial Park for Environmental Science
and Technology (YIPEST). e designation came as
a part of broader eorts by the central government
to expand environmental industries following the
United Nations (UN) Conference on Environment
and Development (the Rio Earth Summit). With its
adoption of the Rio Declaration, the Park became
a pillar of China’s Agenda 21 Program in 1993 (cf.
Zhang and Wen 2008).
Central government policies for a wide range of
environmentalized development goals have provided
Yixing with multiple opportunities to construct its
model of an “ecological and harmonious society”
(YXEDZ Planning 2008: 41). e 2005 passage of the
Renewable Energy Law, with specic targets for the
implementation of non-fossil energy sources, spurred
the expansion of investment into environmental
industries and served as a major impetus for the
establishment of the Yixing Economic Development
Zone (YXEDZ, or “the Zone”) in 2006. In 2010
through 2012, as China’s solar industry went through
a massive value collapse and major restructuring in
the face of overproduction crises and trade disputes
with the U.S. and E.U. over illegal subsidies,
national quotas for renewable energy production and
implementation have increased. In 2012, the central
government announced investment in solar power
during the Twelfth Five-Year Plan (2011-2015) would
total 250 billion yuan to produce 21 gigawatts of
generation capacity (MOST 2012).
After a successful 234 million Chinese yuan
(CNY; about 35 million US dollars) joint venture in
2007 with Guodian, one of the ve primary state-
owned utilities, the Zone administration won a major
110 Human Geography
DIVIDING ENVIRONMENTS
contract to site the utility’s national solar photovoltaic
(PV) manufacturing and research base. rough
2012, the successive phases of the Guodian projects
have brought over 12 billion CNY (1.8 billion USD)
to the Zone. e combined manufacturing capacity
of the Guodian projects will reach 800 megawatts of
PV cells and modules in 2012, up 60 percent from
2011 and bringing the Zone’s total capacity to over
3 gigawatts—about 10 percent of China’s 2012
national total (see Figure 5). is massive output of
solar generation equipment has helped to maximize
the implementation European country subsidies for
renewable energy sources, and has brought Yixing’s
transformation into the direct political economy of
China’s national renewable energy portfolio. Guodian
has numerous solar farm projects including two
that have been certied as Kyoto Protocol Clean
Development Mechanism projects worth an estimated
10 million USD in certied emissions reductions
(UNFCCC 2012).4
e initial Zone enclosures entailed the
displacement and relocation of thousands of villagers
that were further justied by wetlands restoration and
construction and a greenbelt on the western shore of
Taihu (Rong 2011; Zhang et al. 2010). ese eorts
extend beyond “city branding” or “green washing” and
link development planning to larger state projects of
environmentalization. rough its status as a National
Sustainable Development Experimental Zone, Yixing
receives expanded regional planning authority from
the provincial administration and is able to receive
priority status for its land resource quota management.
is regional vision was prominently articulated
by a national Party Central Committee member, Li
Yuanhu, who proposed to construct a model ecological
“water city” extending from the western shore of Taihu
across Yixing’s chain of lakes (Xu and Ling 2010) (see
Figure 2).
e 2009 Taihu greenbelt project utilized the
framework of the “ecological grain for green” policies
best known for the construction of the “Great Green
Wall” anti-desertication project. Over 800 hectares
4 2011 EU price of USD 16.4 per ton of CO2
equivalent
of village agricultural land, the holdings of over 2,500
households, were converted as part of a 2,667 hectare
buer and “ecological lifestyle” park between the
Zone and Taihu Lake (Liu 2010; Min 2008b).5 Under
the slogan of “returning elds, pens and ponds to
forests, lakes and wetlands,” the “Protecting Mother
Lake” project includes a 1,333 hectare aorestation
project to build a “green screen” along the lake (Min
2008b). According to central government statistics,
such “ecological withdrawal of agriculture” and “grain
for green” aorestation projects—including some for
certied carbon credits—account for the majority of
agricultural land losses nationally (Tian 2007; NBS
2011; UNFCCC 2012).
In the Yixing project, the reallocation of land
resources and populations links with local policies to
restructure agriculture with “pollution free, organic…
modern ecological agriculture” with goals to increase
eciency, and generate climate mitigation outcomes
(Min 2008a: np). Although praised as a new
agricultural “green economy to enrich the people”
(Min 2008a: np), the projects consist primarily of
specialty horticultural agribusiness. us, despite
ongoing concerns and policies promoting grain
production and food security, model “ecological
cultivation” (Min 2008b) is a fundamental aspect of
China’s environmentalized agrarian transition.
Assessment, Marking and Banking: e
Construction Of Land Resources In Yixing
In 2008, the National Land Use Master Plan was
revised to set a 120.33 million hectare “redline” as the
minimum threshold for cultivated land protection
through 2020. Although the plans include explicit
language that protects basic farmland from conversion
(104 million hectares under the 2008 revision), rural
residents often do not know that a given area of
farmland is designated as protected. Notwithstanding
the increase in disputes over land enclosure nationally,
villagers in Yixing frequently do not believe that
5 e lake ecological zone project, supported by Premier
Wen Jiabao, will ring the lake with 200 to 1000 meters of
“recovered” forests, grasslands, wetlands, and lake with a stated
policy goal of constructing a model eco-tourism industry (Wuxi
People’s Government 2009).
SUSTAINABLE TERRITORIES
111
Volume 6, Number 1, 2013
Jia-Ching Chen
they have the political right, privilege or ability to
oppose enclosures and dispossession. Furthermore, a
good deal of churning is enabled by collusion from
local bureaus of the Ministry of Land and Resources
(MLR), who frequently adapt implementation rules to
the specic needs and conditions of local government
development projects. As the redline is maintained
through quota systems for conversion, preservation
and reclamation through piecemeal accounting at
project, district, municipal, provincial and national
levels, errors and structural opportunities for arbitrage
abound (Chen 2010a).
Conversion of rural land must conform to a
series of requirements including local land use master
plans and the local administration of the national
land management policies. In order to maintain a
putative net-zero loss of cultivated land in the face of
rapid urban and industrial development, the Jiangsu
provincial Bureau of Land and Resources (BLR)
coordinates provincial level quotas of land conversion
and massive “land reclamation” projects to add arable
land to the national balance sheets. For the purposes of
regulating land supply, the 1998 Land Administration
Law classies all land as agricultural land, construction
land, or unused land. In order to convert rural land to
other non-agricultural uses, local governments must
rst transfer collectively owned village land to direct
government control as state-owned urban land. Local
authorities must also clear land use changes through
the MLR.
Since its founding in 2006, the Yixing Economic
Development Zone has enclosed over 100 square
kilometers of rural land. e enclosure process
proceeded in several parallel tracks. Conversion to
non-agricultural uses proceeded piecemeal in order to
coordinate village demolition, resident relocation, with
infrastructure construction, investment and enterprise
development. Reclamation and consolidation land can
be “banked” (MLR 1999) and quota can be exchanged
with other government units (Chen 2010a). Such
practices by provincial level bureaus under the MLR
have been documented (Wang et al. 2010). However,
the overlapping environmental transformations
to agrarian and the local state itself have not been
adequately examined. Wang et al. (2010) do not
account for the politics and collusion interfering with
stated centralized government policy goals. Rather,
they interpret the functioning of Zhejiang’s farmland
conversion policies as a type of entrepreneurial action
by the provincial government exploiting “an opening
in central government’s policy” (2010: 459). is
interpretation of “implementation” or negotiation
of the central policy by provincial level governments
ignores the complex bureaucratic matrix of territorial
governance and central policy vectors. I argue that the
environmentalized policy goals reorient, rather than
are gamed by, local ocials exercising (and producing)
state-territorial authority (see Hsing 2010: 7-14).
Yixing municipal level authorities (including the
local Bureau of Land and Resources) did not clearly
map prime farmland as delineated in township level
rural areas under its jurisdiction. Rather, large swaths
of rural land were designated as within the “planning
area” (guihua qu) of the urban core (Yixing People’s
Government 2003). e Yixing Bureau of Land and
Resources does not merely act as a quota bank, but
produces the accounting that enables an abstracted
transaction of the environmentalized land resource.
is includes the technical practices of “xing” and
“dividing” basic farmland during the enclosure
process, and the internally reconciling the amounts
that are marked as cultivated land versus other village
uses.
In 2005, Yixing took six months to map its cultivated
land and to delineate basic farmland protection zones.
e Yixing BLR mapped approximately 60,500
hectares of basic farmland in 1,385 zones (Wuxi
People’s Government 2011). is eort was widely
publicized as a model village responsibility system for
enforcing basic farmland protection according to land
use master plans. However, according to villagers,
not all of the protection zones were publicly marked.
Ironically, one of the villages undergoing demolition
at the time was named Shengtian, after Mao’s famous
slogan. In 2010, nearly four years after administrative
enclosure of the village under the YXEDZ planning
authority, I interviewed Jiang, one of the last residents
to be relocated from the village. When I asked him
11 2 Human Geography
DIVIDING ENVIRONMENTS
about the origin of the village name and its relation
to the Great Leap mantra, he replied “eviction isn’t a
mobilization campaign,” and wryly repeated “rén dìng
shēng tían,” altering the tones and writing his pun out
for me: “from people’s asses, elds are born” (Chen
2010b).
e Yixing BLR expanded implementation of land
exchange policies to promote village land consolidation
and arable land reclamation under central policy (see
MLR 1999). ese policies and the vision of a “new
socialist countryside” under the past two ve-year
plans promote the relocation of village households into
more concentrated settlements to enable the ecient
allocation of land and higher-intensity agricultural
practices. Such practices of “rationalization” and
land-use consolidation can be used to produce land
conversion quota as freely available “land resources”
(Chen 2010a). Local authorities rst enclose a rural
area under administrative planning authority. Next,
they begin to rationalize land resources by relocating
villagers, consolidating village construction land
and moving residents to peri-urban resettlement
colonies. Because such consolidation does not require
actual land use conversion to proceed, authorities
can construct rural land resources for future use and
circulation to other projects through quota banking
(Chen 2010a). Finally, on a project-by-project basis,
the development authorities coordinate with the BLR
to process banked conversion quota for new non-rural
construction uses (see Figures 6 and 7).
Exporting Sustainability: Dispossession as a
Means of Production
Since 2006, Yixing’s various green development
projects discussed here have required the enclosure of
over 330 square kilometers of rural land—over ve
times the land area of Manhattan—and the forceful
eviction of approximately 100,000 villagers. ese
enclosures, wrought partly in the name of rural
development, have resulted in greater social inequality.
e failures of such eorts at rural development are
stark. One National Statistics Bureau survey found that
nearly half of dispossessed villagers are impoverished
by eviction and relocation processes (Hsing 2010: 209,
n.18). As villagers are dispossessed of their land and
livelihoods, transformations to social–environmental
relations, cultural values, and the places people live
present new terrains of politics and social division.
In Yixing’s eco-urbanization, relocation
communities are spatially and socially segregated
from the rapidly expanding urban core and new city
developments for which residents were displaced.
As villages are divided for phased demolition,
village committees are dissolved and their authority
is subsumed under larger administrative village
structures and the privately owned demolition
company. Social cohesion is lost as residents are
scattered to nd rental housing and transitional
livelihoods. During this transitional period, villagers
are not technically classied as urban residents and
must maintain their rural household status until local
authorities implement the separate compensation
process for agricultural land. Depending on the rate of
investment, nancing, and construction, or the use of
quota banking schemes, this process may take years.
With the loss of access to land and livelihood, villagers
are forced into a new more proximate, but more
explicitly marginalized relationship with the city. In
extreme cases, dispossessed villagers are referred to as
a new “underclass” with “three withouts” — without
land, work, and social benets (Solinger 2006).
A class of ‘four withouts’ is also emerging as
some villagers lose permanent housing. Because the
compensation system requires dispossessed families
to pay for the dierence between the government-
determined “market prices” of their demolished
homes and their relocation housing, many families
are frequently impoverished in the process. Poor
families are frequently unable to pay the fees and lose
the “compensation” for their demolished homes as
the money is tied to a compulsory mortgage system
to underwrite the construction of the relocation
housing. Some families are left with no option other
than to attempt to sell the property through a broker.
However, as no market exists for the resettlement
housing apart from renting to recently displaced
families, this is generally unsuccessful. Many families
are forced to purchase or rent a home further outside of
SUSTAINABLE TERRITORIES
11 3
Volume 6, Number 1, 2013
Jia-Ching Chen
the city. However, because they are unable to relocate
household registration, they cannot receive new rural
land rights. e degree to which socioeconomic
outcomes are dierentiated and uneven is startling.
Byres’s (1977) analytic of rural class formation, in
the relations of agricultural production is useful here
in conceptualizing the dierentiated state–society
relationships in Yixing’s green development model
of agrarian transition. Intra-village class formation
is very often aligned to proximities to state power
through the structures of the party and village
leadership committee. Allegations of corruption and
disputes over uneven compensation are frequent (see
also Hsing 2010: chapter7).
Here, it is not my sole intent to highlight the
social injustice of uneven development per se. Rather,
following diverse analyses of agrarian transition (e.g.
Muldavin 1997; Byres 2004; Levien 2012), these
processes of dispossession, class formation, expansion
of unabsorbed labor and informal sectors of the
economy should be understood as both resulting
from and enabling structural changes; in this case,
of state territorialization for green development. In
Yixing’s political economy of displacement and land
conversion for urbanization, enclosure enables a
transfer of previously non-commodied rural assets
into processes of development. ough the net
amounts of these assets may appear to be very small,
they are signicant in important ways. e cash
amount of post-eviction livelihood shortfalls is equal,
on average, to over CNY 1,800 (192 USD) annually.
is is a signicant amount for a rural household. For
retirees who depend mainly on subsistence farming,
cash income may be as little as CNY 60-100 (6-11
USD) per month. However, simply multiplying this
amount across displaced households does not give an
appropriate picture of its net economic signicance.
In addition to discounting (the future value of money,
interest and ination as well as opportunity costs),
this shortfall also produces a “multiplier eect” in the
local economy by increasing the supply of cheap and
exible labor. at said, this process is not centered
on proletarianization as in classic analyses of primitive
accumulation (see Glassman 2006), nor of “primitive
socialist accumulation” (Byres 1986: 15).
It is important to understand that this labor is
both fully incorporated into the local economy at the
same time that it is irregular in character. Employers
hire workers from job to job, and do not pay payroll
taxes and other fees. Wage rates are reective of the
rural rather than the urban economy. e ability of the
green development process to utilize such labor ows
underwrites the cost of the overall transformation
and externalizes these costs by placing socioeconomic
burdens on individual households. ese dynamics
outline a circuit of accumulation through the extra-
economic means of state violence (Glassman 2006; cf.
Harvey 2003) as a process of exporting sustainability.
e extent to which the state relies upon enclosure
as a “spatial x” to construct new territories for the
production and absorption of environmentalized
forms of capital surpluses reects the primacy of land
resources as a source of revenue and state authority
(Hsing 2010).
However, I argue that patterns of dispossession
for urban-spatial accumulation strategies cannot
fully explain the forms of “circulation” of rural land
examined above. Rather, such forms of accumulation
(and sometimes their failure) demonstrate that the
local political economic transformations of green
development take place as a part of broader processes
of social–environmental transformation mediated at
national and global scales. In the case of Yixing, rural
land enclosure has played a functionally multivalent
and multiscalar role in producing local land rents,
meeting national renewable energy targets, balancing
national land resource quotas, and serving the
sustainable development objectives represented by
Euro-American markets for solar energy and certied
emissions reductions.
e proliferation of green development
demonstrates a dialectical reshaping of state–society
relationships that can be understood in two ways.
First, as Buttel (1992) argues, environmentalization
proceeds in relationship to structural transitions.
In the U.S. case, the move to neoliberal social and
economic policies with the decline of Fordism shaped
the politics and ethical claims of scientized sustainable
development discourse, which was “crucial in leading
11 4 Human Geography
DIVIDING ENVIRONMENTS
to the substitution of environmental for social justice
discourse” (Buttel 1992: 16). Buttel’s analysis is
consonant with China’s current emphasis on scientic
sustainable development in the context of the
gutting of rural collective property rights and social
welfare entitlements. In the context of this neoliberal
environmentalization, the restructuring of property
extends beyond the establishment of leasehold and
other private forms of holding and rent seeking.
Land resources and enclosure itself are also greened in
integrated schema linking carbon credit aorestation
projects to greenbelt tourism parks, and new ecological
industries and spaces to the embodiment of new talents
and urban civilities. ese practices demonstrate
an emphasis on environmental rationalities that
systematically produce and address rural land and
people as objects and subjects of governmental action
under ideologies of “authoritarian high modernism”
(Scott 1998).
e process of constructing new environmentalized
forms of value for rural land lays bare the remaking of
“social relations between things” (Marx 1990 [1867])
inherent to the production of commodities. I argue that
this analysis of ecological values in a multifunctional
process yields an understanding of the Yixing “green
grab” as a scalar politic that constructs displacement
and rural transformation as “environmentally
rational,” even as capital accumulation is not spatially
or temporally immediate and negative impacts are
observable across various social and ecological systems.
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