Land expropriation and the gender politics of citizenship in the urban frontier

China Journal

Volumn , Issue 64, 2010, Pages 19-45

  Sargeson, Sally ^a   Song, Yu ^a  

^a FUJIAN AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY UNIVERSITY   (China)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CITIZENSHIP; GENDER ISSUE; GENDER RELATIONS; POLITICS;

EID: 77954766978     PISSN: 13249347     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/tcj.64.20749245     Document Type: Article

References (82)

1. Zhou Feizhou, "Shengcai you dao: tudi kaifa he zhuanrang zhong de zhengfu he nongmin" (Creating Wealth: Governments and Villagers in the Development and Transfer of Land), Shehuixue yanjiu (Sociological Research), No. 1 (2007), pp. 49-82.
2. The Resolution of the CCP Central Committee on Some Major Issues in Rural Reform and Development (Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu tuijin nongcun gaige fazhan ruogan zhongda wenti de jueding) directs that governments' rights to expropriate rural land will be curtailed, while the rights of village collective organizations to transfer land planned for municipal construction directly into the primary market and to retain, invest and distribute profits from land leases will grow.
3. Virilocal marriage involves the bride's relocation to the groom's place of residence.
4. See He Lirong, "'Chujia nü' tudi quanyi baohu de kunjing yu chulu" (Difficulties and Solutions in Resolving "Out-Married Women's Land Rights"), Hebei faxue (Hebei Legal Studies), No. 9 (2008), p. 129;
5. Qin Wanping, "Minjian fa yu guojia fa shiye xia de chujia nü tudi buchang kuan an" (Cases of Land Compensation for Married Women from the Perspective of Customary Law and National Law), Yunnan daxue xuebao (Journal of Yunnan University), Vol. 20, No. 5 (2007) ;
6. Wang Zhuqing, "Shehui xingbie shijiao xia de nongcun funü tudi quanyi baohu" (Protection of Rural Women's Land Rights from a Gender Perspective), Nongcun jingji (Rural Economy), No. 2 (2007).
7. See Kevin J. O'Brien, "Rightful Resistance", World Politics, Vol. 49, No. 1 (1996), pp. 31-55;
8. Kevin J. O'Brien, "Villagers, Elections and Citizenship", pp. 212-31, in Merle Goldman and Elizabeth J. Perry (eds), Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) ;
9. Kevin J. O'Brien and Lianjiang Li, "Suing the Local State: Administrative Litigation in Rural China", The China Journal, No. 51 (2004), pp. 75-96;
10. Kevin J. O'Brien and Lianjiang Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) ;
11. Lianjiang Li, "Driven to Protest: China's Rural Unrest", Current History, Vol. 105, No. 692 (2006), pp. 250-54;
12. Lianjiang Li, "Political Trust and Petitioning in the Chinese Countryside", Comparative Politics, Vol. 40, No. 2 (2008), pp. 209-26;
13. Lianjiang Li and Kevin J. O'Brien, "Protest Leadership in Rural China", The China Quarterly, No. 193 (2008), pp. 1-23.
14. Only 15.8 per cent of Fuzhou respondents had no son, but 41 per cent had no daughter. On the correlation of lineages, gender-unequal land rights and son preference, see Laurel Bossen, "Reproduction and Real Property in Rural China: Three Decades of Development and Discrimination", in Tamara Jacka and Sally Sargeson (eds), Women, Gender and Development in Rural China (London: Edward Elgar, forthcoming 2011).
15. The 1, 050 survey respondents and 92 interviewees came from 33 villages: 10 in Fuzhou, 9 in Yuxi and 14 in Changsha. The "high tides" of expropriation occurred in Fuzhou between 2003 and 2006; Changsha, 2002-04; Yuxi, 2003-07. Women whose villages experienced multiple instances of expropriation between 2001 and 2007 were asked in which year the largest area of land was taken, and questions comparing conditions before and after expropriation referred to that instance of expropriation.
16. For similar sample selection methods, see World Bank, Gender Issues and Best Practices in Land Administration Projects: Synthesis Report (2005), Appendix, p. 55;
17. Wenfang Tang and Qing Yang, "The Chinese Urban Caste System in Transition", The China Quarterly, No. 196 (2008), p. 765.
18. Thomas H. Marshall, Sociology at the Crossroads and Other Essays (London: Heineman, 1963) ;
19. for a critique, see Birte Siim, Gender and Citizenship: Politics and Agency in France, Britain and Denmark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
20. Iris Marion Young, "Mothers, Citizenship and Independence: A Critique of Pure Family Values", Ethics, Vol. 105, No. 3 (1995), pp. 546-50.
21. Mark P. Gaige, "Citizen: Past Practices, Prospective Patterns", in Jose V. Ciprut (ed.), The Future of Citizenship (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 121-44.
22. Ruth Lister, Citizenship and Feminist Perspectives (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2003), p. 37.
23. Margaret R. Somers, "Rights, Relationality, and Membership: Rethinking the Making and Meaning of Citizenship", Law and Social Inquiry, Vol. 19, No. 1 (1994), pp. 75-76;
24. Pnina Werbner and Nira Yuval-Davis, "Women and the New Discourse of Citizenship", in Nira Yuval-Davis and Pnina Werbner (eds), Women, Citizenship and Difference (London: Zed Books, 1999), pp. 1-38;
25. Richard Dagger, "Neo-Republicanism and the Civic Economy", Politics, Philosophy and Economics, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2006), p. 155.
26. Ayelet Shachar and Ran Hirschl, "Citizenship as Inherited Property", Political Theory, Vol. 35, No. 3 (2007), p. 258.
27. Joyce Kaufman and Kristen Williams, "Who Belongs? Women, Marriage and Citizenship", International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 6, No. 3 (2004), pp. 416-35;
28. Kif Augustine-Adams, "'With Notice of the Consequences': Liberal Political Theory, Marriage and Women's Citizenship", Citizenship Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2002), pp. 5-20;
29. Brigitte Studer, "Citizenship as Contingent National Belonging: Married Women and Foreigners in Twentieth-Century Switzerland", Gender and History, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2001), pp. 622-54;
30. Mika Toyota, "Editorial Introduction: International Marriage, Rights and the State in East and Southeast Asia", Citizenship Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 1-7.
31. Bryan. S. Turner, "Citizenship, Reproduction and the State: International Marriage and Human Rights", Citizenship Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2008), p. 46;
32. Pnina Werbner and Nira Yuval-Davis, "Women and the New Discourse of Citizenship";
33. Christian Joppke, "Transformation of Citizenship: Status, Rights, Identity", in Engin F. Isin, Peter Nyers and Bryan S. Turner (eds), Citizenship between Past and Future (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 36-47.
34. Cited in Peter Zarrow, "Citizenship in China and the West", in Joshua A. Fogel and Peter G. Zarrow (eds), Imagining the People: Chinese Intellectuals and the Concept of Citizenship 1890-1920 (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), p. 19.
35. Louise Edwards, Gender, Politics and Democracy: Women's Suffrage in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008) ;
36. Hyun Choe, National Identity and Citizenship in China and Korea, PhD dissertation submitted to University of California, Irvine (2003), pp. 84-86.
37. Robert J. Culp, Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912-1940 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 280.
38. Chen Duxiu, quoted in Elizabeth J. Perry, "Chinese Conceptions of 'Rights': From Mencius to Mao-and Now", Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2008), p. 46.
39. Serena Liu, "Social Citizenship in China: Continuity and Change", Citizenship Studies, Vol. 11, No. 5 (2007), pp. 465-79;
40. Wang Feiling, Organizing Through Division and Exclusion: China's Hukou System (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005) ;
41. Dorothy J. Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State and the Logic of the Market (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
42. Joan Judge, "Citizens or Mothers of Citizens? Gender and the Meaning of Modern Chinese Citizenship", and Margaret Y. K. Woo, "Law and the Gendered Citizen", in Merle Goldman and Elizabeth J. Perry (eds), Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China, pp. 23-43 and 308-29.
43. Kevin J. O'Brien, "Villagers, Elections and Citizenship";
44. Kevin J. O'Brien and Lianjiang Li, Rightful Resistance in R ural China, pp. 51-66, 135-37.
45. Baogang He, "Village Citizenship in China: A Case Study of Zhejiang", Citizenship Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2005), p. 215.
46. Baogang He, "Village Citizenship in China", pp. 216, 217.
47. Ellen R. Judd, Gender and Power in Rural North China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 58-59.
48. For another view of uxorilocal marriage, see Weiguo Zhang, "State, Gender and Uxorilocal Marriage in Contemporary Rural North China", The China Journal, No. 60 (July 2008), pp. 111-32.
49. The village assembly comprises a majority of adult village members or representatives of two-thirds of village households.
50. See Xiajuan Guo, Yongnian Zheng and Lijun Yang, "Women's Participation in Village Autonomy in China: Evidence from Zhejiang", The China Quarterly, No. 197 (2009), pp. 145-64;
51. Tamara Jacka, "Increasing Women's Participation in Village Government in China", Critical Asian Studies, Vol. 40, No. 4 (2008), pp. 499-530;
52. Zhen Yan (ed.), Zhongguo nongcun funü zhuangkuang diaocha (Report on the Situation of Rural Women in China) (Beijing: Shehui Kexue Wenxian Chubanshe, 2008).
53. The Organic Law stipulates that village charters and rules may not contravene China's Constitution and laws, which endorse women's equal rights. Article 33, Law on the Protection of Rights and Interests of Women (Funu quanyi baozhang fa [Revised 2005]), states: "No organizations or individual shall infringe upon women's rights and interests in rural collective economic organizations on the pretext of their being single, married, divorced and widowed".
54. Similar rules were observed in some Zhejiang villages. See Sally Sargeson, "Women's Property, Women's Agency in China's 'New Enclosure Movement': Evidence from Zhejiang", Development and Change, Vol. 39, No. 4 (2008), pp. 641-65. However, Andrew Kipnis notes, in a personal communication, that in Zouping County, Shandong, village rules are gender-neutral, and each household may replace itself with only one couple per generation.
55. Kif Augustine-Adams, "'With Notice of the Consequences'", p. 17.
56. The Chinese government announced in the 1980s that land contracts were valid for 30 years. However, many villages periodically readjusted contract land to accommodate changes in household size caused by births, marital movements and deaths. In 2002 the Rural Land Contracting Law (Nongcun tudi chengbao fa) prohibited readjustments except in specific circumstances.
57. He Lirong, "Chujia nü", p. 128.
58. See Ellen R. Judd, "No Change for Thirty Years: The Renewed Question of Women's Land Rights in Rural China", Development and Change, Vol. 38, No. 4 (2007), pp. 689-710;
59. Li Yang and Yingsheng Xi, "Married Women's Rights to Land in China's Traditional Farming Areas", Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 15, No. 49 (2006), pp. 621-36.
60. Quanguo fulian, guojia tongjiju, "Di'erqi Zhongguo funü shehui diwei chouyang diaocha zhuyao shuju baogao" (Report on Main Data from the Second Chinese Sample Survey on Women's Status), [EB/OL] (2001), http://www.stats.gov. cn/tjgb/qttjgb/qgqttjgb/t20020331-15816.htm, last accessed 14 August 2009.
61. Hsiao-hung Nancy Chen and Tsung-hsi Fu, "Older People's Income Security in China", in Tsung-hsi Fu and Rhidion Hughes (eds), Aging in East Asia: Challenges and Policies for the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 37-53.
62. Independent livelihoods were classed as farming, waged work, business, own savings, dividends, pension, compensation and "other" own income. Although farming and business often involved cooperative use of assets registered under men's names, women said that their contribution of labor to those activities entitled them to income.
63. See also Peter Zarrow, "Citizenship in China and the West", pp. 12-13;
64. Huang Yuqing, "Labour, Leisure, Gender and Generation: The Organisation of 'Wan' and the Notion of 'Gender Equality' in Contemporary Rural China", in Tamara Jacka and Sally Sargeson (eds), Women, Gender and Development.
65. The Land Administration Law (Tudi guanli fa) stipulates that compensation for land should be paid to the rural collective economic organization representing collective owners, so that it can provide for their future livelihood. Resettlement compensation should go to the organization arranging villagers' relocation, re-employment and social protection. Frequently, both are rolled into a one-off monetary payment from governments to Village Committees. Individual owners should be compensated for loss of fixed assets, businesses and crops. Hence, women farmers should be compensated for destruction of their crops.
66. Article 32, Law on the Protection of Rights and Interests of Women (Funu quanyi baozhang fa [Revised 2005]), states: "Women shall enjoy equal rights with men in... distribution of the earnings of the collective economic organizations, and use of the compensation for expropriated or requisitioned land".
67. The Land Administration Law pegs compensation for land and resettlement to the production value of the land over the previous three years. However, municipal governments have long paid higher amounts for land in the urban perimeter. See Zheng di zhidu gaige yanjiu ketizu, Yanjiu zheng di wenti, tansuo gaige zhi lu (Research on Problems of Land Expropriation, Exploration of Reform Paths) (Beijing: Zhongguo Dadi Chubanshe, 2002). State Council Documents 28 (2004) and 32 (2006) require that land compensation must be sufficient to ensure that affected villagers' standards of living become "no worse" and incorporate their social security premiums. Compensation also might comprise villagers' transfer to urban hukou, re-housing, vocational training or re-employment.
68. See, for example, Zhao Yan, "Qingkou zhen xiandaihua de daijia" (The Cost of Modernization in Qingkou Town), http://www. Chinaelections.org/ PrintNews.asp? NewsID=67166, accessed 5 November 2008.
69. Fujian Department of Agriculture, 15.5. 2008.
70. He Fuping, "Fujian sheng shixing 'tudi chengbao fa' zhong nongcun funü tudi chengbao quanyi baozhang yanjiu" (Study of the Protection of Rural Women's Land Contract Rights during Fujian Province's Implementation of the "Land Contract Law"), Zhonggong Fujian shengwei dangxiao xuebao (Journal of the Fujian Communist Party School), No. 12 (2004), pp. 61-66.
71. Fujian WF, 9.12. 2008.
72. "Fuzhou shi bei zhengdi nongmin xiangshou dibao" (Fuzhou City Expropriated Farmers Receive Dibao), Zhongguo guotu ziyuan wang (China Land and Resources web) http://www.clr.an/front/read/read.asp?ID=15829, accessed 6 November 2008; Fujian sheng minzhengting, "Yidian daimian zhenghe ziyuan jiji tuijin chengxiang shehui qiuzhu tixi jianshe" (Promote Work in All Areas and Appropriate Resources to Actively Advance Construction of a System of Urban and Rural Social Relief), 6 June 2006.
73. Yuxi nianjian 2007 (Kunming: Yunnan Renmin Chubanshe, 2007), p. 98.
74. See, for example, Xu Yang and Li Xinde, "Hongta jituan bamai nongtian da gai haohua bieshu neimu" (The Inside Story on Hongta Group's Forcible Acquisition of Farmland to Build Luxury Villas), Shijie shangye baodao (World Business Report) (10 October 2006), http://biz.icxo.com/htmlnews/2006/10/ 10/953700-0.htm, accessed 17 December 2008.
75. Between 2005 and 2008, the average compensation per mu paid to Village Committees in Liqi township doubled, to around 350, 000 yuan.
76. Yuxi Fenghuang jiedao banshichu, "Guanyu shidi nongmin jiuye fuwu wu xiang tixi ji shengcun fazhan de sikao" (Reflections on a System of Five Principles for the Sustainable Development of Landless Villagers' Employment Services), 13 November 2006.
77. A 2006 Statistical Bureau survey of expropriated villagers in five cities in Yunnan showed that only 9.2 per cent of those whose income was below the poverty line received dibao. See Huang Lifei, "Yunnan sheng shidi nongmin wenti ji duice sikao" (Reflections on Problems and Countermeasures for Landless Villagers in Yunnan), Xiandai nongye keji (Modern Agricultural Science and Technology), No. 4 (2007), pp. 122-26.
78. Yuxi shi, Yuxi shi beizhengdi nongmin yanglao baoxian shishi xize (Implementation Regulations on Yuxi City Old Age Insurance for Expropriated Villagers), 1 November 2008.
79. Dorothy J. Solinger, "The Dibao Recipients: Mollified Anti-Emblem of Urban Modernization", presented at ANU 26 March 2009, pp. 3-4.
80. Elizabeth J. Perry, "Chinese Conceptions of 'Rights'"
81. see also Lianjiang Li, "Rights Consciousness and Rules Consciousness in Contemporary China", The China Journal, No. 64 (July 2010), pp. 47-68.
82. Thomas H. Marshall, Sociology at the Crossroads.