Farmland Protection, Mass Peasant Relocation, and Green Governmentality in China

• In Event: 3167 - Section on Sociology of Development Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 3. Land Grabbing and Dispossession

Abstract

This article develops analytical frameworks to explain the environmental protection failure of an authoritarian regime. Specifically, it examines China’s farmland protection practices against the state’s highly fragmented bureaucratic system through an ethnographic study of five county land bureaus. The article reveals that despite the state’s efforts to develop farmland science and technology to supervise and control land conversion, the farmland protection regime deviates from the state’s plan and causes mass peasant displacement and accelerated urban sprawl. Drawing insights from the post-structural strands of political ecology, and the ‘governmentality’ perspective, the article examines mechanisms that result in deviations from the state’s plan. It reveals the process of farmland data collection as a reproduction of the power relationships between the central and local states, resulting in highly contingent consequences. The article also unravels local strategies of repurposing technology to construct alternative discourses, blaming peasant households for spatially inefficient housing patterns, and applying farmland science and technology to the systematic restructuring of local communities

Author

• Yue Du, Tsinghua University