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INTRODUCTION
As Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, he proclaimed a vision of urbanizing 100 million rural
people and enhancing conservation through efforts to build an ecological civilization (sheng-
tai wenming jianshe). While China has historically been predominantly a rural society, it is
undergoing a rapid shift through state-led urbanization. The urban–rural divide has been a
foundational component of China’s social contract for, at least, the 70 years since the forma-
tion of the People’s Republic of China and the introduction of a hukou system – a geographical
control system that denes citizenship benets in relation to ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ places and
categories (Chan and Zhang, 1999; Chan, 2009). More recently, coordinating planning and
development between municipalities and rural areas has become yet another way in which
local states intervene in the lives of rural people living in close proximity to cities.
Urban–rural coordinated planning, rst announced in 2003 and repackaged in 2014 through
the National Plan for New-type Urbanization, marks a departure within the party-state’s
approach to governing this binarized system. Alongside this transition in state planning, China
has faced signicant problems of urban pollution and environmental degradation. Multifaceted
environmental crises have catapulted the environment to the forefront of Chinese politics and
governmental concerns. Within this context, there are national-level efforts for scientic con-
servation planning, which correspond to specic policy mandates at the municipal level.
In 2014, Xi announced that, as part of this new-type urbanization program, municipal
regions are to zone 20 percent of land for ecological protection. The prescription stemmed
from a broader national-level policy to zone 20 percent of China’s territory for conserva-
tion – what has been called ‘ecological redlining’ (shengtai hongxian) (Lü etal., 2013). In
2022, China’s central state raised this gure to 30 percent of land in order to align with the
Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Drawing on extensive eldwork in three
Chinese cities – Kunming, Chengdu, and Dali – this chapter details the processes involved in
municipal state efforts to comply with central state mandates for conservation, urban–rural
coordinated planning, and the social effects of municipal conservation planning on people
living in areas zoned for ecological protection. While municipal planners and government
ofcials, at rst, viewed new conservation zoning mandates as something of a headache – as
they were yet another form of land-use planning to incorporate into an already complex plan-
ning process – they found ways to not only comply with the central state policy but to utilize
urban–rural conservation planning processes to extend control over land resources and the
rural population. As such, I draw on a political ecology perspective to situate municipal con-
servation planning within the broader political economy of land in China.
Political ecology is less a singular disciplinary eld as it is an approach to thinking about
issues of ecology and environment alongside political economy broadly dened. As a scholarly
15. Political ecologies of urban–rural conservation
planning and resettlement
Jesse Rodenbiker
Handbook on China's Urban Environmental Governance, edited by Fangzhu Zhang, and Fulong Wu, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2023.
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244 Handbook on China’s urban environmental governance
Urban–rural conservation planning and resettlement
approach, it tends to view ecology as embedded within political economic processes. While
the work of cultural ecologists that preceded political ecology, for instance, focused narrowly
on biophysical processes and natural events as constituting the sum total of ecological pro-
cesses (Vayda and Walters, 1999), political ecologists opened the categories of ecology and
environment to multiform representations and political economic relations (Peet and Watts,
2004, p. 19). Political ecology approaches are not limited solely to biophysical events, there-
fore, but query how knowledge of the environment emerges, circulates and becomes pre-
dominant, and what effects it has on human practices and societal formations. Examining
these themes entails, for many scholars, questions of political economy, power relations and
processes through which environmental imaginaries take shape.
In the context of China, nationwide conservation efforts in cities and beyond are insepa-
rable from imaginaries of building an ecological civilization. Not merely a key sustain-
ability and green development slogan of the Xi Jinping-era, ecological civilization building
emerged from a long history of China’s natural and social scientists grappling with ques-
tions of how to sustainably modernize a socialist country. Interdisciplinary debates on the
nature of ecology in China produced epistemological foundations for socio-environmental
governance and state-led technocratic approaches of social engineering, which contrib-
uted to naturalizing social inequalities between urban and rural people (Rodenbiker, 2021,
2023). Underlying these logics of environmental governance are beliefs that government
intervention based on sound ecological science will bring about social and environmental
improvement. This is fundamentally a belief about the future, namely that ecological civi-
lization is an attainable state of balance between humans and nature, one that is crucial to
sustainable development.
These core facets of the ecological civilization-building imaginary undergird urban envi-
ronmental governance in China. Moreover, a scientic imaginary that holds the nature of the
rural population as decient underlies processes through which municipal states produce gov-
ernable spaces and extend their territorial reach over rural land and resources (Rodenbiker,
2023). Nikolas Rose (1999) uses the term governable spaces to refer to the modalities through
which governments enact control over territories and populations. States, broadly speaking,
deploy myriad spatial tactics and apparatuses to enable territorial control of spaces and the
populations that inhabit them. Here, I point to the role of ecology and urban–rural conserva-
tion planning in China’s municipal regions as key to enabling local state territorial control of
rural spaces and populations.
This chapter synthesizes key ndings from long-term ethnographic research in the three
southwest Chinese cities of Chengdu, Kunming and Dali. In it, I demonstrate urban–rural
conservation planning as an amalgam of spatial practices through which municipal states
extend their territorial reach over the surrounding countryside and the rural population living
in peri-urban areas. Because these governable spaces emerge through municipal state zoning
for ecological protection, I refer to the process as ‘ecological territorialization’. Ecological ter-
ritorialization, in municipal regions, entails urban–rural conservation planning practices and
widespread resettlement, which facilitates the extension of municipal power over rural land
and people (Rodenbiker, 2020, 2023).
Both land and population are key in this formulation. The operation of municipal state
sovereignty over rural land within municipal regions articulates in relation to the rural popu-
lation. Municipal conservation processes are portrayed by urban planners, the party-state and
state media as benevolent forms of socio-natural governance aimed at promoting sustainable
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Urban–rural conservation planning and resettlement 245
land management and socio-environmental improvement. As such, ecological territorializa-
tion processes mirror what Foucault (2000, p. 219) discusses as the operation of government
– a complex triangulation of imaginaries and practices involved in sustaining and extending
forms of power over land and the population. China’s efforts toward producing ‘ecological
security’ and ‘improving’ the rural population through green urbanization are central to these
forms of socio-environmental governance.
An urban political ecology approach, therefore, requires attention to the epistemologies
that inform the nature of the urban and rural population, the ways in which populations,
land and resources become subjects of municipal governmental administration, and the
political economy of land governance. Regarding the political economy of land govern-
ance, Chung etal. (2018) delineate three key interlocking dimensions: municipal land quo-
tas, rural land use and real estate development. In addition to demonstrating how these
political economic dimensions of land intersect with municipal conservation planning pro-
cesses, I point to important shifts in access to rural land, uneven spatiotemporal politics
of land and housing valuation, as well as forms of rural social organization. As I discuss
below, ecological territorialization processes spur uneven socio-economic trajectories for
people displaced from their land and homes. I refer to these displacements as peri-urban
ecological migration because municipal government ofcials and urban planners I inter-
viewed drew parallels with ecological migration processes common in China’s West (Yeh,
2009) and those taking place in peri-urban areas. I conclude by reecting on the unequal
social outcomes of urban–rural conservation practices and possibilities for reconguring
urban and regional planning in ways that center justice. In the context of widespread pre-
carity for peri-urban ecological migrants, I point to opportunities for municipal planners
to consider social inequality and integrate justice-oriented approaches into sustainability
planning.
SOCIO-SPATIAL PROCESSES OF URBAN–RURAL CONSERVATION
PLANNING
In contemporary China, urban–rural conservation planning has become central to extending
the reach of municipal state power and producing governable spaces.1 In China’s 13th ve-year
plan (2016–2020), the central state mandated that 20 percent of land within municipal regions
be zoned for ecological protection. Part of this new-type urban planning sought to integrate
urban planning with rural planning in a comprehensive way, by more fully including rural
areas surrounding the city within municipal and regional planning processes. Comprehensive
urban–rural planning synthesizes plans across multiple jurisdictions within the municipal
region into a coordinated master plan. This includes land-use planning, environmental pro-
tection planning, economic planning, tourist planning and other forms of planning.
During interviews with urban planners, as well as high- and mid-level municipal state of-
cials and environmental scientists, state planners consistently stressed the importance of com-
prehensive urban–rural planning for synthetizing multiple kinds of city and township-level
planning, which were previously conducted independently. Despite its somewhat sprawling
and contested nature, the comprehensive urban–rural coordinated planning process invests
the power to determine nal decisions over land use within municipal regions in municipal
government hierarchies.
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246 Handbook on China’s urban environmental governance
Central state mandates for ecological redlines within municipal regions are one of the types
of land-use planning included in the urban–rural comprehensive planning process. Ecological
relines (shengtai hongxian) or ecological protection areas (shengtai baohuqu), however, are
not legal demarcations. These land-use types are legally underdened. In lieu of legal deni-
tions, there are general guidelines set forth by the Ministry of Land and Resources for ecologi-
cal protection that include itemized lists for developing ecological principles and education,
strengthening national resource surveillance, strengthening land use through functional zon-
ing, building ecological service systems, and land conservation (Central Government, 2015).
This ambiguity lends itself to creative experimentation within comprehensive urban–rural
planning processes.
In these urban–rural planning processes, municipal bureaus make concerted efforts toward
zoning ecological protection areas with overlapping land-use designations, which allow
municipal governments to respond to central state conservation mandates while simultane-
ously producing new avenues for generating land-based revenues. Within the planning pro-
cess, multiple overlapping functions (gongneng) are ascribed to parcels of land demarcated
for ecological protection. This centralized planning process therefore consolidates functional
planning across municipal regions and introduces overlapping functionalities wherein eco-
logical land designations overlap with other designations (Rodenbiker, 2020).
Zoning land with multiple overlapping land-use functions in the urban–rural planning pro-
cess has become a way to develop land without having to designate a parcel as ‘construction’
land (e.g., housing or commercial land uses) – a land-use designation that could be subject
to scrutiny from government bureaus higher within the hierarchical party-state system. In
practice, this entails balancing new conservation zones with key national land-use designation
policies, in particular ‘balancing farmland occupation with farmland reclamation’ (zhanbu
pingheng), which is a no net loss of agricultural land policy, and ‘linking up the increase
in urban construction land with the decrease in rural construction land’ (zengjian guagou),
which is a no net gain of construction land policy (Zhang and Wu, 2017). Municipal planners
take measures not to violate these land policies in their designation of ecological protection
land by zoning land with multiple overlapping land-use functions wherein ‘ecological’ land-
use functions overlap with other land uses.
Ecological land designations allow for what municipal planners commonly referred to as
‘ecological construction’ (shengtai jianshe). That is to say, environmental protection land des-
ignations pave the way for economically viable developments related to conservation, which
are predicated on demarcating overlapping land-use functions in which one functional use is
ecological. This conjoining of, for instance, ecological functions with agricultural or tourism
functions, reclassies land and thereby operationalizes a political economy of ecological con-
struction. In my interviews, overlapping functional zoning was frequently discussed as a way
to optimize (youhua) the spatial layout of the city (Multiple interviews, 2014–2017). In the
process of making the comprehensive plan, government bureaus reclassify previously exist-
ing green spaces as new ecological protection designations, thus transforming existing des-
ignations to meet new conservation policies. These overlapping spatial designations facilitate
development within the prescriptive bounds of the comprehensive urban–rural plan.
Ecological protection sites are developed in a variety of ways, each of which entails the
enrollment of organizations for nancial and managerial support. In order to facilitate con-
servation-oriented developments, municipal governments enroll organizations for nancial
and managerial assistance. Under nancial constraints, municipal governments are unable
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Urban–rural conservation planning and resettlement 247
to cover the costs of constructing conservation-oriented infrastructure without nancial and
managerial partnerships. The municipal government assigns a series of different organiza-
tions responsibility for nancing, building and managing ecological construction areas.
These include state-owned enterprises, municipal-level government bureaus, private mana-
gerial companies, real estate companies and semi-private state-owned enterprises. Specic
responsibilities vary at each site but can include infrastructural nancing, construction of
resettlement complexes and conservation sites, as well as environmental land management.
Municipal government partnerships with organizations are integral to the regime of land-
based accumulation and crucial to enclosing peri-urban village land. Municipal governments,
additionally, can generate revenues by leasing land-use rights to various organizations.
While municipal governments are able to prot from land transfer fees and save funds
through obtaining nancial support from organizations involved, organizations assigned
responsibility also aim to make their involvement in ecological construction protable.
Institutions provide infrastructure and services with the market impetus to capitalize on land
governance. In practice, daily management and infrastructural provisioning for urban ecologi-
cal protection areas are dispersed across organizations. And with this dispersal comes de facto
governance of the land parcel, albeit under the restrictions stipulated in the comprehensive
urban–rural plan.
Institutions prot from their control of ecological protection zones in at least four ways: land
sales and rents, housing sales, state subsidies and leisure capital. Institutions can prot from
the value markup from land adjacent to an environmental protection area. Multi-functional
zoning allows organizations to sublease land or plots within the ecological protection zone for
economic enterprises that align with the comprehensive plan. Some institutions, additionally,
build commodity housing as well as resettlement housing. These are some of the ways that
organizations seek prots through their involvement in conservation. The alliances between
municipal government hierarchies and organizations they deploy to support them in these
ecological construction processes are tense, indeed. In several cases, organizations undertook
developments that superseded the bounds of the urban–rural comprehensive plan, such as
building commercial housing in ecological protection areas where such developments were
forbidden. For instance, in Kunming, an organization assigned responsibility for conservation
land built commercial housing in an ecological protection area near Lake Dian – a high-
plateau lake renowned for the beautiful vistas that surround it. Due to the location of the site,
near the water with expansive views, the housing was highly priced and the organization stood
to prot handsomely. In this case, however, government ofcials issued nes to the partner
organization, requisitioned the housing infrastructure and took punitive actions to prevent
further violations. Despite such altercations, these mutualistic alliances are key to processes
of ecological territorialization.
Ecological territorialization is but the latest form of municipal land territorialization in a
long series of post-socialist urban territorializing processes. Land development has been the
primary mode of accumulation for municipal governments operating under structural condi-
tions that drive accumulation from land rents. Municipal governments began operating like
prot-oriented interest groups in the wake of early 1990s nancial decentralization and the
1994 tax assignments that gave city governments soft budgetary constraints. Since then, land
became the primary means through which municipal governments generated revenues for
service provisioning. From the early 2000s, the bulk of cities’ extra-budgetary revenues were
generated through urban development (Hsing, 2010). Territorial annexations of land came to
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248 Handbook on China’s urban environmental governance
include vast swaths of village land and even smaller cities (Ma, 2005; Cartier, 2015). Although
land and resources were incorporated into urban governance in many different ways during
the reform era, within the last decade conservation zoning has become a means for municipal
states to accumulate land. Ecological territorialization emerged under conditions of stronger
central state scal control that limited development zones (kaifaqu) – the predominant form of
urban-based accumulation during the rst decade of the 2000s – and municipal experimenta-
tion with urban–rural comprehensive planning. Central state mandates for urban conservation
translate into opportunities for municipal governments to continue generating revenues from
land-based transactions. They entail socio-spatial processes within and through which scien-
tic imaginaries of rural deciency and state-led optimization are operationalized.
This imaginary of urban–rural difference, with a decient rural population and superior
urban population, was articulated by state planners in numerous interviews. A representative
example comes from a high-level government ofcial involved in urban–rural planning who
said:
The village and the city are not the same. The city is concentrated like this, but villages are really
dispersed [fensan]. Their surface area is really wide. So up until now, they have not matured [cheng-
shu]. Regarding this form of governance, it is not only a calculated plan, it is also a structure of the
city and countryside in which we take dispersed areas and concentrate them vertically … We have
tried to move villages to a point [qiancunbingdian] which involves concentrating many villages
together. This is one way we transform villages … We take dispersed built areas and concentrate
them through ecological migration in order to deal with them [lai chuli].
Municipal government ofcials and planners, in comments such as this, express a predomi-
nantly held sense that the planned urbanization of rural people is a form of socio-environmen-
tal improvement. The reality of social displacement for peri-urban villagers, however, differs
substantially from the imaginaries of state planners. Instead, there are myriad and uneven
socio-economic trajectories for peri-urban villagers as their land and housing are incorpo-
rated into municipal conservation plans.
UNEVEN TRAJECTORIES OF PERI-URBAN RESETTLEMENT
Peri-urban ecological migration refers to the involuntary resettlement of people living in close
proximity to cities as part of state conservation efforts (Rodenbiker, 2020). Ecological migra-
tion (shengtai yimin) is an ofcial state term that emerged in the 1990s in relation to large-
scale anti-desertication and grassland management policies in China’s West and North. In
the early use of this term, ecological migration referred to resettling people into spatially
concentrated settlement areas as part of state-directed restoration or conservation (Xun and
Bao, 2007; Yeh, 2009). Urban planners and municipal ofcials use this same terminology,
ecological migration, to refer to the forms of resettlement taking place in municipal regions
in relation to conservation planning and ecological construction. To date, there has been rela-
tively little assessment of ecological migration in peri-urban areas. Yet, peri-urban ecological
migrations are of key importance as the processes involved gure centrally in the lives of
tens of millions whose land and house are unevenly incorporated into municipal conserva-
tion efforts. These people experience transitions in their housing, livelihoods and access to
resources.
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Urban–rural conservation planning and resettlement 249
While resettlement and the loss of access to land for urban development are frequently
characterized as a process of victimization and violence (Sargeson, 2013), my ndings, in
contrast, point to a variety of socio-economic trajectories and uneven outcomes that span
enrichment and upwards social mobility – what some peri-urban ecological migrants call
‘moving into riches’ (ban fuyou) – to land and housing dispossession with meager compensa-
tion capital. Underneath the veneer of a unitary state policy for municipal conservation lies
a great deal of variability. Indeed, there is a wide array of peri-urban ecological migration
outcomes and trajectories, which are contingent on the spatiotemporal politics of land and
housing valuation, as well as forms of rural social organization.
Land in China is a socialized asset. There are constitutional divisions in place for rural and
urban land. Despite constitutionally underdened parameters regarding which branches of the
state can exert control over land, municipal government hierarchies generally control urban
land while rural collectives and township governments tend to control rural land. In order for
municipal governments to control rural land through conservation planning, land-use rights
need to be acquired from rural land users. Inherent in acquiring land-use rights are processes
of land and housing valuation. How will rural land and housing be valued and compensated?
How will compensation be meted out to peri-urban ecological migrants? How will migrants’
utilization of compensation capital reshape their relationships with land, housing and labor?
Addressing these questions entails delving into inherently slippery political processes. Within
the limited space of this chapter, I can only analyze these processes breiy, though I examine
them in more detail elsewhere (Rodenbiker, 2023).
First, municipal states can acquire land through purchasing a land conveyance from rural
collectives. For instance, I encountered cases of municipal states purchasing land conveyances
in peri-urban Kunming. Villagers that I interviewed in Kunming detailed how their land was
sold after it was incorporated in urban–rural conservation planning. The sale of land convey-
ance is generally also accompanied by either immediate or eventual sale of rural housing, but
not in all cases. Land sales offer one-time capital compensation for rural land. There are high
levels of variation in amounts of land and housing compensation. Some of the factors that con-
tribute to differentiation include the amount and quality of rural land holdings, infrastructural
materials of rural housing, the number of oors and total housing space, and whether or not
land and housing adjuncts are valuated – such as the land beneath the house or housing still
being built. Peri-urban ecological migrants discussed, for instance, subsurface housing fees
(dipifei), as a potential form of housing space that entails valuing the land beneath their house
for compensation (Rodenbiker, 2019). These volumes of land and housing are struggled over
in processes of peri-urban resettlement. How such spaces are valuated, and the time schedules
on which people are compensated are factors that shape uneven socio-economic trajectories
of peri-urban ecological migration.
High levels of compensation tend to promote petty entrepreneurism and resettlement com-
plex landlordism. For instance, numerous peri-urban ecological migrants in Kunming started
petty entrepreneurial enterprises with the compensation capital from their land sale. Others
decided to use their compensation capital to rent farmland nearby and continue small-scale
agricultural production, thereby spurring inter-village land leases. Still others became reset-
tlement complex landlords as their rural land and housing was compensated in the form of
multiple units within a resettlement apartment complex.
Low compensation for the sale of land conveyance, in contrast, contributes to a process
of urban proletarianization, often accompanied by resettlement into high-rise resettlement
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250 Handbook on China’s urban environmental governance
housing. Residents in some resettlement housing units, for example, described their ecological
migration process as moving into poverty, as they were poorly compensated for rural land and
housing and resettled into relatively low-quality housing.
Second, land can be leased through village collectives. I encountered cases of land leasing
across research sites in peri-urban Chengdu, Dali and Kunming. For instance, in peri-urban
Dali, I interviewed villagers who leased their land to the Municipal Forestry Bureau. The
bureau spearheaded a project to transform their farmland into a treatment wetland. The wet-
land was designed to treat polluted water from tributary rivers before entering Erhai – a lake
near Dali. In instances such as this, village collectives lease land zoned for ecological protec-
tion to an organization ranging from state, semi-state, or private, through processes adminis-
tered by the local state. Land conveyance fees apply in cases of land allocation but generally
not in cases of land-use grants to state entities, such as state-owned enterprises (Lin, 2009).
When land use is granted to a state organization, such as an environmental bureau, the organi-
zation does not pay the same land transfer fees that private entities do for leasing land. In these
instances, villagers may or may not retain their original rural housing. Annual land lease
amounts and schedules of payment vary across sites. However, as land is leased, villagers lose
access to agricultural land. This loss of access forecloses independent agricultural production.
The compensation schedule for the lease, which varies across sites, can provide an economic
cushion for rural people to transition into new economic activities. Many peri-urban villagers
discussed how annual payments for their rural land were enough to cover basic living costs
and home maintenance. This facilitated a range of labor transitions. For instance, a group of
rural women became day laborers working on other people’s farmland in the region. Others
decided to enter into migratory labor joining the workforce in China’s larger cities. Across
diverse cases, village land leases stimulated labor migration to cities, petty entrepreneurialism
and localized agrarian wage labor.
Third, villagers can corporatize to negotiate contracts and manage land leases or sales. I
encountered numerous cases of village corporatization accompanied by land lease or sale, par-
ticularly through eldwork in peri-urban Chengdu. Interviews with villagers in the Chengdu
municipal region revealed that in cases of village corporatization, residents tended to fare
relatively well compared to villages that did not corporatize. This process entails negotiation
of the sale of a land conveyance or land lease to an organization assigned responsibility for the
conservation land parcel ranging from state, semi-state, or private entities by a corporatized
village with centralized nancial management. Corporatized villages may or may not retain
original rural housing. Generally, these forms of social organization have yielded the highest
amounts of compensation.
I encountered multiple kinds of village shareholding corporations, which correlated with
different compensation outcomes. There are self-funded village shareholding corpora-
tions, those that partner with the local state, and those that partner with a corporate entity.
Self-funded corporatized villages tend to be relatively wealthy prior to incorporation into
municipal conservation planning, such that they can directly use their own nances to form
a shareholding corporation. Corporate partnerships are usually sought by villages with fewer
assets. These villages bring in corporate entities to assist with planning, nancing and manag-
ing rural enterprises. Each of these village corporations tended to obtain higher levels of com-
pensation than those that partnered with state entities. Corporatized negotiation for housing
tends to result in better-than-average resettlement housing. When villagers are given resettle-
ment housing in close proximity to newly zoned conservation land from which they have been
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Urban–rural conservation planning and resettlement 251
displaced, many strive to capitalize on the inux of tourists. In these instances, there emerge
new forms of localized entrepreneurialism that draw on displacement capital and corporatized
village assets. In some of these cases, new resettlement housing doubles as a site of social
reproduction. In several sites in Chengdu, for instance, corporatized villages repurposed their
free-standing resettlement housing into rural-themed guest houses and restaurants (nongji-
ale). Others opened retail shops in their homes specializing in the sale of local and regional
products. Many of these villagers reported experiencing upwards socio-economic mobility
through transitional processes.
Peri-urban ecological migrants, in instances such as these, readily used the phrase ‘moving
into riches’ (banfuyou) to discuss the process of accumulating wealth through resettlement.
Considering their description of moving into riches in the context of the political economy
of land and housing, I contend that peri-urban ecological migration entails accumulation
through displacement as people generate wealth and obtain upwards socio-economic mobility
through displacement and resettlement (Rodenbiker, 2023). Chang (2019, p. 173), writing in
the context of eco-city development and resettlement in Shanghai refers to similar processes
of gaining wealth through relocation as ‘accumulation by relocation’.
It is evident from these cases, that China’s peri-urban ecological migrations, which result
in accumulation through displacement, trouble structural political economic formulations
that theorize displacement as a process that necessarily produces poverty.2 Michael Levien,
writing in the context of India and building on political economic theory, argues that land
dispossession is a key structural force that produces social inequality (Levien, 2018). As
state and private actors seize control of land, in Levien’s account, rural people dispossessed
are proletarianized and impoverished. When capital accumulation does occur, it is limited
to local and extra-local elites. For Levien, displacement from land is a form of coercive
redistribution that structurally conditions proletarianization and produces poverty. Cases
of accumulation through displacement in China, in contrast, point to the spatiotemporal
politics of land and housing valuation and compensation as key drivers of uneven socio-
economic outcomes and trajectories that range from enrichment and upward social mobility
to impoverishment.
The outcomes for peri-urban ecological migrants are highly uneven and contingent on local
politics, as well as forms of rural social organization that shape processes of displacement and
the choices peri-urban ecological migrants make in how to use their compensation capital.
Without extensive reform to conservation policy and urban-rural planning processes within
China, these uneven socio-economic trajectories portend uncertain futures for a rural citi-
zenry navigating incorporation into the state’s project of ecological urbanization.
CODA: ECOLOGICAL URBANIZATION AND JUSTICE-ORIENTED
SUSTAINABILITY PLANNING
This chapter demonstrates how urban–rural conservation planning facilitates the territo-
rialization of peri-urban land by municipal governments. Ecological territorialization, in
municipal regions, entails conservation planning practices, multi-functional land zoning, and
mutualistic partnerships, which are crucial to extending municipal state power over rural land
and people. The process spurs myriad and uneven socio-economic trajectories for peri-urban
ecological migrants. In contemporary China, urban–rural conservation planning underlies
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252 Handbook on China’s urban environmental governance
the production of land-based accumulation frontiers and extends local state control over land
across the peri-urban fringe. As ecological territorialization extends the reach of the local
state, it simultaneously reorients rural people’s relationships to land, labor and housing in
ways contingent on the spatiotemporal politics of valuation, compensation and rural social
organization.
Urban–rural conservation planning processes and ecological urbanization are key parts of
a complex triangulation of state scientic planning practices that reproduce and extend local
state power. These practices are the product of technoscientic imaginaries that hold the rural
population as decient and state intervention as necessary for socio-environmental improve-
ment. The social outcomes of municipal conservation planning reproduce structural inequal-
ities between urban and rural people and within rural communities. Differences between
urban and rural people and places, therefore, are reinforced through municipal conservation
efforts that aim to simultaneously conserve biophysical nature and improve the nature of
rural people through urbanization. Smith (2021), writing on the urbanization of rural China,
brings attention to the generative tensions between urban and rural categories. China’s urban
imaginary and urbanization policies are key to naturalizing urban–rural difference. ‘Rather
than an inevitable outcome of a natural process of development, China’s urban–rural inequi-
ties are actively produced by the party-state’s own administrative separation of urban and
rural areas, a policy that systematically excludes rural areas and populations from many of
the benets of urban development’ (Smith, 2021, p. 4). The ongoing social reproduction of the
urban–rural binary and the imaginary of rural populations as backwards undergird urban–
rural conservation planning and the new forms of inequality produced through ecological
urbanization.
The enduring logics, practices, and processes engendered through ecological urbanization
disproportionately affect those with the fewest resources, that is those for whom losing access
to rural land and housing mark a socio-economic freefall from crucial social safety nets.
Villages have historically fostered collective welfare and facilitated semiautonomous self-
reliance. Given the uneven outcomes of China’s green urbanization efforts and the forms of
social inequality they continue to reproduce, how might urban planners foster more equitable
planning processes and advance more effective mechanisms for social welfare?
In closing, I point to the pressing need for justice-oriented approaches to sustainability
planning in Chinese cities. Greenberg (2013) and Sze (2018) advance critical interdisciplinary
perspectives on sustainability by pointing to how sustainability operates as a multifaceted sig-
nier, one that differs in meaning and aims across context. Sustainability, therefore, requires
substantial attention to the underlying social, political, and historical contexts in which it is
deployed. In the context of China, urban sustainability planning and ecological urbaniza-
tion have predominantly been approached through technocratic spatial planning practices that
focus narrowly on biophysical relations in ecosystems, such as planning for ecosystem services
or efcient energy use. Additionally, the planning focus has centered around market-oriented
approaches that attempt to generate prots through green infrastructural construction and
upgrading, such as green building certication programs like the Three Star Green Building
Label (Zhou, 2015). A justice-oriented approach to sustainability planning, in contrast, fore-
grounds social inequality and environmental injustices, such as the uneven socio-economic
effects of urban–rural conservation planning, and explicitly undertakes planning measures to
address such issues. With limited capacity for political critique, China has yet to substantially
integrate issues of social inequality and public participation processes into urban planning.3
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Urban–rural conservation planning and resettlement 253
In this vein, recent work has called for centering justice in urban and regional planning. One
approach to centering justice in planning entails making justice the subject of planning, rather
than aiming to retroactively address social injustices stemming from urbanization processes
and urban planning for economic growth (Lake, 2016). This approach entails not merely pri-
oritizing the needs of those facing resettlement, but fundamentally reconguring the purpose
of planning as a commitment by planners and the state to provide high-quality infrastructure
and social services, particularly for those undergoing resettlement (Otsuki, 2021). Moreover, it
entails inclusive participatory planning processes for those who would otherwise be excluded
from formal planning processes. Advancing justice-oriented planning approaches in China,
however, requires substantial changes in national planning priorities, which have historically
been dominated by state-led entrepreneurialism and economic growth imperatives, and more
recently by logics of socio-environmental optimization, sustainable development, and eco-
logical civilization building (Rodenbiker, 2022, 2023).
Without substantial changes to urban planning practices, peri-urban ecological migrants
will continue to experience a range of differentiated socio-economic trajectories with sub-
stantial pressures on poorly compensated and newly landless migrants. A justice-oriented
approach to sustainability planning could incorporate measures to include China’s citizenry
within planning processes to a greater degree, especially those directly affected by urban–
rural comprehensive planning processes. Currently, cities within China are experimenting
with phone lines that can address public concerns related to urban planning and mobile-based
apps that allow for a limited degree of participation (Wang etal., 2021). These modes of public
engagement, however, remain limited. Justice-oriented sustainability planning, in contrast,
could bring issues of equity in resettlement and displacement compensation into the public
realm. A retrospective approach, in contrast, entails explicit planning mechanisms to redress
the inequitable outcomes of past planning processes. Such approaches may also take into
account ways to create social safety mechanisms for rural communities that forfeit access to
rural land and housing but lack corporatized economic structures that provide social protec-
tions (Tang, 2015).
On a more fundamental level, reorienting sustainability planning with justice as the subject,
may call into question the pervasive logic that urbanization is central to China’s sustainable
development. Current debates within China’s state planning circles regarding the urbaniza-
tion drive in state development planning routinely foreclose alternative development agendas.
For instance, other frameworks for China’s development value rural lifeways and advocate for
their maintenance to be made explicit in state planning (Day and Schneider, 2018). Insofar as
state-led urbanization remains a central pillar of China’s developmental platform, the nd-
ings of this chapter point to the need for deeper reform within the complex political economic
context of state-led conservation, land development, and resettlement. The nexus of local state
and private prots from conservation-oriented land development, for example, are clear routes
through which compensatory capital can and should be derived to reect, at minimum, uni-
versalizable compensation at market values for land and housing. The universalization of
equitable compensation is, however, a minimal policy advancement toward more equitable
planning practices. In this regard, Wilmsen (2018) stresses the need to take the differential
costs of urban life into account when tabulating compensation, not merely assessing rural
land and housing values. Additionally, Wilmsen stresses the importance of providing train-
ing in nancial management and skills training to rural-to-urban migrants. Adequate pricing
at market value for rural land and housing remains, as it were, inadequate to keep ecological
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254 Handbook on China’s urban environmental governance
migrants aoat. Many rural people who have undergone resettlement nd themselves living
on the margins of urban society.
In addition to the real economic costs of rural–urban transition and compensatory equity, it
is necessary to consider psychological violence stemming from the near total transformation
of rural ways of life. As research shows, village residents often experience severe psychologi-
cal stresses when leaving the security of their land and homes (Chuang, 2015) because they
value rural land and housing as a personally owned asset (Liu etal., 2021). Forced migration
into resettlement complexes transforms rural peoples’ daily lives and socio-economic rela-
tions to land, labor and housing. For many, this marks an uprooting from the social safety
nets that have sustained them. Moving forward, more work is needed to explore how justice-
oriented sustainability planning and alternative planning logics can be integrated within the
dynamic context of urban–rural conservation planning. Such work is crucial to ameliorating
the social inequalities embedded in China’s ecological urbanization.
NOTES
1. This contrasts with the neoliberalization of urban governance in the West and the rescaling of the
municipal state (Brenner, 2004).
2. David Harvey, for instance, conceptualizes ‘accumulation by dispossession’ as ongoing processes
of dispossession necessary for capital accumulation (Harvey, 2005). For Harvey, land-based
accumulation entails commodication and privatization of land with elites capitalizing on land
dispossession.
3. In other contexts, such as the United States, for instance, justice-oriented approaches to planning
remain in nascent stages but are becoming more widely integrated into practice as a normative
strategy (Agyemen, 2013; Broto and Westman, 2019).
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