ABSTRACT
The conversion of the collective land was not accompanied by top-down expropriation, nor by industrialisation, but rather by the speculative coalition between the elites of the village collectives who possessed the right to use the land. Whether as a local strategy or as a result of planning by the higher-level urban authorities, conversion has been central to the strategies of development in the Pearl River Delta. The urbanisation of the Pearl River Delta, in particular, that is the two corridors to the west and east of the Delta, has been both impressive and uneven. The chapter discusses one case of shangjiao in Apricot Town, where the strength of the collective indeed mattered but where the entire bargaining process was embedded in deeply seated conditions of the local political economy. The legal protection guaranteed by law to village-owned collective land results in rules of membership and redistribution within the collectives that change from village to village.
