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Decoding Urban Land Governance: State Reconstruction in Contemporary Chinese Cities. Jiang Xu & Anthony G.O. Yeh Centre of Urban Planning & Environmental Management The University of Hong Kong December 2007. Why this topic?.
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Decoding Urban Land Governance: State Reconstruction in Contemporary Chinese Cities Jiang Xu & Anthony G.O. Yeh Centre of Urban Planning & Environmental Management The University of Hong Kong December 2007
Why this topic? • Too many authors have focused on particular aspect of urban transformation – economic decentralization and the significant role of the local state: • That the distinctive decentralised form combined with proper incentives allows local state to play an increasingly corporatist role (Oi, 1992, 1995); • Local state: manger of public industry as diversified market-oriented firms (Walder, 1995) • Entrepreneurial local state – direct involvement in the market economy (Duckett, 1998). • Central government: less relevant in local economic governance (e.g., Wong et al., 1995 ) • De-hierarchisation’ & ‘territorialisation’ in urban development (Wu, 2002).
Why this topic? • These discourse suggests a widely recognised and intensively researched phenomenon in post-reform China –the rapid downward re-articulation of state functions to lower levels of politico-institutional organizations. • In this sense, urban development is being increasingly attached to and embedded in places and territories on the sub-national scale. • With these theoretical interpretations, it is very tempting to view the contemporary urban transformation in China only as a major consequence of the decentralisation process.
Why this topic? • These interpretations only focus on one side of the changing urban governance. They ignore a counter-trend that is at least equally important to the current significance of economic governance. The process of decentralisation is now counterbalanced by the rise of state strategies to control the articulation of scales through which a more centrally consolidated power can be achieved.
What issues to address? Two major issues: • Investigate the changing urban conditions inside and outside the state that have driven the state to re-hierarchisatize and re-centralise its structure in urban governance. • Examine how the state function is being recentralized and rehierchicalized.
How to address these issues (1)? • Establish perspectives to look at state reconstruction in space commodification • Space commodification is always an object of regulation by the state because the market cannot be self-regulating. • Decentralisation does not mean a reduction of state intervention and relaxation of control. • Decentralization does not evolve into a zero-sum relationship. The central state is still an important strategic site for economic governance. • That the state continues to play a role in economic development at both central and local levels should not be viewed as the ‘legacy of state socialism.’
How to address these issues (2)? • Putting the analysis into context • Rearticulating state function versus transformation of the regime of accumulation. The transformation of accumulation regime and urban and regional growth
How to address these issues? • Putting the analysis into context: forces Within the state • Denationalization • Destatization • The formation of a new public policy that emphasizes the structural competitiveness of cities. Outside the state • Social exclusion • Spatial fragmentation
How to address these issues? • Land governance as a case study Land governance is currently being de-territorialised and re-centralised for better regulation Regulatory land control is becoming an important way for the state’s involvement in space commoditisation.
Major conclusion • There is a powerful trend of fragmentation and decentralization ofurban transformation in contemporary China. Because of this, a decentralized structure has been justified as a basic institutional precondition for promoting territorial development. • Indeed, decentralisation and fragmentation have grown markedly in the past decade. But this trend is beginning to be counteracted by a wave of consolidation that cannot be ignored. The more the structure is fragmented, the more centralized the top-level control operation might become. • A regulatory land control that emphasizes the hierarchical relationship for a more centralized power is becoming the new way that the state is involved in space commodification. • All these indicate a resurgence of the state’s regulatory power, oriented towards the priority of ‘re-centralisation’ and ‘re-hierarchisation’ in Chinese cities. • Land governance only presents one dimension of change in which counter-trends might be constructed. Our observation is that recentralisation happens in many other areas and on different scales. • In this sense, new interpretations of ‘commoditised urban transformation’, especially ‘commoditised production of the built environment’ within contemporary Chinese cities, should be understood by underscoring the interplay between trends of decentralisation and territorialisation and counter-trends of recentralisation and hierarchisation.
