Search

This article examines the government purchase of social services in China as a window by which to investigate the evolving relations between the party-state and social organizations. Going beyond the conventional focus on state–non-governmental organization (NGO) dynamics in urban areas, we explore the expanded role of social organizations in rural service provision under state-led campaigns of rural modernization. Engaging with institutional theory and the consultative authoritarianism thesis, we argue that NGOs initially operated in an emerging organizational field where they exercised considerable autonomy in setting agendas and designing services. As the party-state's incentives to utilize and co-opt the social work profession grow, however, we observe a trend towards incorporation, wherein social workers now play a bigger role alongside the strengthening of state control over the sector. Through tracing the inception and eventual termination of a decade-long social service project in Guangdong, this article shows how state incorporation might undermine the future role of NGOs in rural development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The globalisation of food and agricultural trade has brought issues of food safety and biosecurity to the centre of geopolitical research. This paper explores the relationship between food risks and sovereignty practices, a topic that has received relatively scant attention in the scholarship. Going beyond conventional conceptualisations of sovereignty as an external-legal notion that is delimited to the realm of 'high politics' in international relations, this paper points to how it is also expressed and negotiated in quotidian practices of food import and consumption, and how this has contributed to the politicisation of food safety. Focusing on the case of Taiwan, a de facto island state with contested sovereignty status, and comparing the food safety discourses that arose during the outbreaks of Mad Cow Disease and African Swine Fever, we argue that food risks provide opportunities for social and political actors to participate in the everyday construction of sovereignty. While the Taiwanese government's handling of the Mad Cow Disease shows it to be ultimately constrained by the geopolitical reality of fragile sovereignty, the outbreak of African Swine Fever enabled it to legitimise the securitisation of borders and bolster its legitimacy by staging collective defensive actions against perceived external risks. By drawing attention to how sovereignty is produced and performed through practice, this paper further advances recent discussions of sovereignty as a dynamic, social process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urbanization in China has involved not only the large-scale transfer of population from rural to urban areas through processes of labor migration and land dispossession, but also the re-designation of rural areas and populations as urban through top-down administrative conversion. Despite their significant role in accelerating rural urbanization, in situ processes of administrative-territorial change have remained under-examined in the literature. Drawing on a national survey of 40 townships, this article sheds light on the strategies by which territorial urbanization is achieved at the township level. By comparing the socioeconomic profiles, employment, land ownership, housing conditions, and social welfare coverage of 3,229 respondents, the article demonstrates how different pathways of territorial urbanization map onto differentiation in livelihoods among urbanized rural residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of labour migration in China usually focus on rural residents seeking wage employment in the urban industrial or service sector. This article provides an account of migrant farmers who have moved from the impoverished countryside to peri‐urban villages in more developed areas to engage in substitute agricultural production. They took over fields abandoned by local villagers and lived and worked among them as tenants. This article situates the analysis of migrant farming within the changing regimes of rural accumulation in post‐socialist China. It shows how migrant farming subsidized rural industrialization by providing low‐cost substitute labour, which facilitated the incorporation of local villagers into the industrial workforce as semi‐proletarianized workers. Into the 2000s, the transition towards land‐based accumulation incorporated local villagers into proprietorship while dispossessing migrant farmers. The amplification of inequalities reveals how the shifting regimes of accumulation constitute an important source of differentiation in Chinese villages today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As urbanization continues to fuel land and property conflicts in rural China, shareholding has been promoted as a reform in property rights that would enhance bottom-up control in the governance of collective assets. The recent proliferation of community-based shareholding companies has been credited for giving villagers new identities as shareholders, which entitle them to vote, receive their share of collective profits, and elect the managers of their wealth. This paper critically appraises these reforms and offers a contrarian perspective to singular narratives of villager empowerment. While shareholding clarifies villagers' rights of control, income and transfer in collective property, the effective exercise of such powers is often forestalled on the ground by the concentration of power in elite hands. To the extent that formal and informal constraints on cadre power remain tenuous, shareholding could function as a vehicle for the powerful to appropriate collective wealth rather than as a weapon of the weak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]