ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the process of power at the periphery of state bureaucracy, with a focus on township governments and their land development projects since the late 1980s. There have been debates over the relationship between the central and local state in post-reform China. That debate is mainly focused on whether the central state has waned, and the local state been empowered by decentralization; and whether the local state has turned developmental or predatory as the result of decentralization.1
While the debate offers great insights into the outcome of decentralization, less attention is paid to the actual processes of territorial power under the grand scheme of decentralization. I will explore the latter issue in this chapter, and will treat decentralization as a contentious process of power reconfiguration instead of a top-down policy package. The concept of “process of power” is framed in the Foucaultian sense that power is not a fixed, cardboard-like entity and enclosed regime, but an open, endless strategic game (Foucault 1982). In order to understand the working of decentralization in specific histor-
ical moments and places, we need to unpack the general category of the “local state” and identify the specificity of each level of the local state. Examples of such efforts abound.2 I follow the footsteps of these writers, and choose to focus on the township government.3 I will examine the workings of the township government not just as an atomized actor, but also in its relationships with other state actors. The political and organizational characteristics of the local state lie in its relationship with other local states, especially those immediately above and below it in the territorial hierarchy.4
The power process of township governments can be better understood in their interaction with the governments above them, and the village collectives below them. The theoretical assumption is that the state itself is a set of multilayered territorial processes rather than a consolidated outcome and unitary actor (Crzymala-Busse and Luong 2002; Corrigan and Sayer 1985). The relationship built around the township government is particularly
interesting because of townships’ power position between the state and the peasantry. Lying at the lowest level of the state hierarchy, the township government has limited formal authority. Yet it is also the most authoritative
representative of the state in the villages. Located in this in-between space, township government officials’ political power bears two main characteristics. One is the high level of uncertainty in their delegated power. The general
principle of hierarchical supervision in China’s bureaucratic system leaves the boundary of authority between levels of governments under-defined. Thus, the scale, the scope, and the sustainability of township governments’ formal authority depend on the will of their superior governments. The latter can extend or withdraw township governments’ authority over resource allocation, and add or reduce township governments’ responsibilities in policy tasks. To cope with such uncertainty, township government officials’ strategies would be to bypass the scrutiny of the superior government while increasing the control over immediately attainable political and economic resources before they are taken away by the superior government. The second feature of township governments’ power is their under-defined
authority over the villages. As ambiguity produces uncertainty in township governments’ relationship with the superior government, such ambiguity proves to be an advantage for township governments in stretching their authority downwards over the villages below them. Theoretically the villages are “autonomous organizations,” not a part of the state system. In practice, however, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) state has become a strong presence in villagers’ lives through various organizations. The party branch secretary, appointed by the township party branch, is generally recognized as the “yibashou” (the number-one boss), while the elected villagers’ committee chair serves as the “erbashou” (the second man in charge) of the village.5 As a result, the commanding hierarchy of the CCP has made the villages an extension of the party-state, and village leaders subordinate to township governments. The ambiguity of the administrative status of villages gives township gov-
ernments an under-defined authority over them. Taking advantage of such ambiguity, township governments would try to stretch their influence and consolidate their control of village resources, including village land. With the uncertain and under-defined power, township officials operate as power brokers between the state and the peasantry.6 In this chapter, I will use the case of land rights transfer and farmland conversion to illustrate township governments’ power brokerage between the superior urban government, at one end, and villages, at the other. I argue that the property relation is a power relation, and the township officials’ property brokerage conditions and is conditioned by their power brokering between the state and the villagers.7
The main source of information comes from my fieldwork in towns and villages in Hebei, Sichuan, Shanghai, and Guangzhou between 2001 and 2004.
The rapid expansion of Chinese cities and the conversion of rural land for non-farm uses since the 1980s, especially in the eastern coastal regions, have
been well documented (Lin 2005).8 Urban expansion into rural areas has been led primarily by the urban government on the bases of two legal and administrative institutions.9 One is the state’s ultimate claim over rural land under the persistent state land tenure system. The other is the shift from a rural-to an urban-centered territorial governing system. Township governments’ land development strategies are conditioned by these two institutions. The state’s claim of rural land is a general legal stipulation. The Constitution
of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) stipulates that urban land belongs to the state and rural land to the collectives. Yet it also says that the state has the ultimate claim over “all land in China,” including both urban and rural collective land. The Land Management Law further stipulates that the state can requisition any land for “public interests.”10 Under this general yet powerful principle of the state’s ultimate claim over all land in China, those who represent, or claim to represent, the state are able to requisition rural land that is constitutionally designated as collective owned. Although collective land requisitions have to be based on “public interests,” the lack of definition of “public interests” has made this condition not a constraint, but a legitimizing factor in collective land requisition. Parallel with the legal regime of state land tenure are the administrative
devices for reinforcement and implementation. The first device is the shift from rural-to urban-centered territorial governance in the 1980s. During the Maoist era, China’s urban and rural areas were governed by two separate systems. Within each province, there were urban governments administering small urbanized and suburban areas, leaving the majority of the provinces ruled by rural-based administrative units like prefectures and counties (Chung and Lam 2004: 949-50). Since the majority of the Chinese population and land were rural at the time, prefectures and counties commanded greater influence than cities over rural resources, including rural land. Territorial administration underwent a major shift from a rural-to an
urban-centered system in the early 1980s. Since 1982, based on the principles of comprehensive regional planning and rural-urban integration, provincial governments started to turn rural counties and prefectures into cities, and/or merge them with existing cities.11 When a prefecture is merged with a city, rural counties (and townships below the counties) that were previously under prefecture administration will be ruled by the newly created prefecture-level city. These new prefecture-level cities are in fact city-regions that include urban centers and the rural hinterland within their jurisdiction. The key element of such jurisdictional restructuring is to put the rural hinterland under the administrative authority of the government of prefecture-level cities, called “shi guan xian” (city governing counties) or “shi dai xian” (city leading counties).12
