ABSTRACT
In this chapter we turn to the analysis of the state’s urbanization project in China. This idea of the state’s urbanization project is drawn from James Scott’s perceptive study entitled Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1988). This book is basically about the efforts that states make to create development through preferred “forms of planning and social organization (such as huge dams, centralized communications and transportation hubs, large factories and farms and grid cities) because those forms fit snugly into a high-modernist view and also answered their political interests as state officials.”2 Scott identifies four main elements of these state-initiated projects. First the “administrative ordering of nature and society”; second, the reliance upon on a “high modernist ideology” that includes the “acceptance of the idea of scientific and technological progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature) and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws”; third, the existence of an authoritarian state that has the power to bring the project into being; and fourth “a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans.”3 Much of Scott’s book is devoted to a historical examination of such schemes and the reasons for their failure. To summarize, at great risk to a complex argument, Scott’s explanation of the failure of these schemes is that they paid insufficient attention to the knowledge, views and understandings of people on the ground. In our language this means that the voices emanating from local spaces were given limited input even though the intentions of the state policy-makers were often directed to improving the overall condition of people in their nations.
