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State and the Making of Socialist Rent in China’s Urbanization
Organizer: Yia-Ling Liu, National Chengchi University, Republic of China
Chair and Discussant: Joseph Fewsmith, Boston University
As China took the path of market transition, rent-seeking behavior has turned rampant and the socialist rentier class is in the making through socialist institutional legacies and networks of clientelism in the process of urbanization. On the one hand, the exclusion of migrant workers from the entitlement of social welfare and other urban privileges in the cities provides many rent-seeking opportunities for government departments and officials; on the other hand, the windfall derived from the appreciation of land value has turned the suburban villagers into rentier class as a result of rapid urban expansion. This panel examines four crucial issues on the making of socialist rent in China’s urbanization: migrants tactics of claiming citizen rights, rent-seeking relations, the rising of socialist rentier class, and the internal conflict of the state bureaucracy. All the papers draw on extensive field research, including in-depth case studies and interviews with elite bureaucrats, peasants, and migrant workers.
Jeih-min Wu’s paper discusses how migrants and their families striving to claim or reclaim their citizen rights in the cities. Focus is placed on how they obtain urban huhou or long-term residence status (“denizenship”), and right to receiving compulsory education under the urban regime based on the principle of differential citizenship.
David L. Wank’s paper draws on Clifford Geertz’s distinction between extensive and intensive clientelism to distinguish two new configurations of rent-seeking relations between entrepreneurs and officials.
Yia-Ling Liu’s paper will examine the resurgence of the socialist collectivism and the upholding of peasant status for the urbanized villages. The focus is on the rise of socialist rentier class, which is based upon rural collective ownership of land property.
Hsin Hsien Wang’s paper develops a new framework of “bureaucratic competitive model” to analyze the debate of “Environmental Protection Storm,” initiated by the environmental non-governmental organizations in the events of Nujiang River Hydropower development and Three Gorges Dam Project.
Migrants Tactics of Claiming Citizen Rights in Urban China
Jieh-min Wu, National Tsing Hua University, Republic of China
Rampant rent-seeking environment in Chinese cities is hostile to new comers from rural areas. The urban citizenship is employed by officials to seek rents by allocating privileges to those non-local residents who can afford to “bid” for the urbanite status. As a principle, the migrants who hold rural household registration (hukou) enjoy very limited urban entitlements and benefits granted to urbanites. Although the central state has been sending down new policies to alleviate the unequal treatments on migrants since the early 2000s, there have been enormous reports about abuse, resistance or shirking by local officials. Therefore, the actual policy results are yet to be closely watched and evaluated. This paper intends to shed light on how migrants and their families strive to claim or reclaim their citizen rights in the cities. Focus will be placed on how they obtain urban huhou or long-term residence status (“denizenship”), reproductive right, and right to receiving compulsory education under the urban regime based on the principle of differential citizenship. The paper will also examine the effects of policy changes: in what ways the new policies have helped retrench rent-seeking behavior, reshape migrants opportunity structure and thus facilitate migrants to reclaim their rights. Migrants tactics and “weapons of the weak” in their daily life will be documented at the micro level. The author has done field research in Beijing, Southern Jiangsu, and the Pearl River Delta area, where 25 migrant families were interviewed; in addition, government archives were collected and interviews with officials were conducted.
Extensive and Intensive Rent-Seeking Relations in China's Private Sector
David L. Wank, Sophia University, Japan
How have rent-seeking relations between local state officials and private entrepreneurs changed with growth of China’s market economy? Existing studies tend to depict them as dyadic exchanges of power and wealth that are generated by structural rent-seeking opportunities in the political economy. Therefore, discussions of change tend to focus on the overall decline or persistence of the dyads while new non-dyadic and non-network relations are not accounted for.
This paper draws on Clifford Geertz’s distinction between extensive and intensive clientelism to distinguish two new configurations of rent-seeking relations between entrepreneurs and officials. Extensive rent relations are a broad web of patron client ties with individual officials scattered in multiple state agencies. The classic strategy of dyadic face-to-face gift-giving has been expanded to include other non-dyadic strategies that enhance the efficiency of entrepreneurs’ reward-giving to officials. Intensive clientelism refers to the bureaucratic integration of a local state agency with a private firm to enhance efficiency in administrative coordination and support. It consists of the orientation of administrative routines in the state agency to support the profit and protection of the private firm, personnel assignments to support the private firm, and entrepreneurial capture of the lion’s share of the rent.
The paper makes overall conclusions about the extensive and intensive rent-seeking relations. First, these relations are roughly sequential in the overall development of a firm. Economic capital is first accumulated through classic patron client ties, and then reinvested in the other two relations. Second, these relations co-exist within the firm: the extensive strategy is used to expand opportunities for profit and protection; the intensive relationship focuses on one particularly valuable state agency; and classic dyadic strategy is deployed by entrepreneurs to cultivate relations with the highest ranking patrons of the firm at any given time.
The data consists of published accounts of economic corruption involving private firms and the author’s fieldwork experiences in China.
Windfall or Disaster? The Rise of Socialist Rentier Class in Urbanization of Rural
Yia-Ling Liu, National Chengchi University, Republic of China
Despite the dissolution of collectivization and the embrace of capitalist economy for the past 30 years, socialist collectivism reemerged and took the stronghold among the suburban villages as they were incorporated into the adjacent cities in the process of urbanization in rural China. Surprisingly, the majority of the villagers would rather keep their collective identities as peasant status than taking the citizenship offered by the municipal government in the process of urban integration. Even the villagers already taken the citizenship identification wanted to switch back to peasant household registration. This paper will argue that the resurgence of the socialist collectivism and the upholding of peasant status for the urbanized villages are mainly derived from the collective ownership of land property, upon which revenue and rents are generated and distributed to the original villagers with peasant status. Specifically, as the value of land appreciated so fast in rapid urbanization, the rents generated from urban commercial and real estate undertakings turned to be a windfall for suburban villagers, a financial source for their daily stipend, health care, and pension fund. As a result, as nominal owners of the collective property of land, suburban villagers and cadres turned into socialist rentier, collecting rents by leasing their units of apartments, and dividends from the share of other economic engagements. Ironically, the beneficiaries of peasant-turn-rentier bring unintended backlash for themselves. Enjoying the easygoing life of the socialist rentier, many villagers lost their will to fight for survival, even drifting into deviance and crime. Socialist blessing turns into disaster. This paper argues that the windfall generated from the socialist collective property strengthens villagers’ rural identity, as well as unintended misfortune. The data of the paper consists of the author’s fieldwork in Wenzhou of Zejiang, Wuxi of Jiangsu, and various published works and newspapers.
Embeddedness or Autonomy? Environmental NGOs in Transforming China: The Bureaucratic Competitive Model
Hsin Hsien Wang, National Taipei University, Republic of China
This article develops a new framework of “bureaucratic competitive model” to analyze the “Environmental Protection Storm” initiated by the Chinese environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) in the events of Nujiang River Hydropower development and Three Gorges Dam Project, and their interactions with the Chinese state. Different from the concepts of civil society and corporatism in analyzing the Chinese state-society relation, the “bureaucratic competitive model” provides us an insight into the debate of the Storm. It stresses that the debate of the Storm is not the effect of the ENGOs in society, but rather the result of inner conflict of the state bureaucracy. This article examines the sharp cleavages between the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) and other economic bureaucracies within the state, illuminating the predominance of the party-state in economic governance in market transition. In further examining the ENGOs in the Chinese society, this article stresses the ENGOs’ both features of autonomy from and embeddedness in the state. The data of the article consists of interviews with elite bureaucrats, the ENGOs, the published works, and the author’s field research.