Encountering the articulation of the strongness of local authorities and market forces in China’s development, attention has been paid to the changing central state which recentralised the regulation capability of localities which has more discretional power on resources utilisation, land for example, in the post-reform era. Yet it is still not clear-cut what drives the state rescaling in terms of land governance and by what ways. After dissecting the evolving policies and practices of construction land supply in China with the focus on the roles of state, we draw two main conclusions. First, the policy trajectory of construction land supply entails a complicated reconfiguration of state functions, which is driven by three interwoven relations: land–capital relation, peasant–state relation and rural–urban relation. Second, state rescaling in terms of the governance of construction land provision works via four important approaches: limited decentralism, horizontal integralism, local experimentalism and political mobilisationism. By reviewing the institutional arrangements of construction land provision and the state rescaling process behind them, this article offers a nuanced perspective to the state (re)building that goes beyond the simplified (vertical or horizontal) transition of state functions.
Facing worsening problems, including the decreasing amount, quality, and deterioration of land ecosystems, cultivated land needs protective measures. China has been conducting an experimental fallow policy to deter these problems in five pilot provinces since 2016. However, inadequate and inconclusive studies of the impacts of fallow policy on food security have motivated the authors to fill this knowledge gap and to provide evidence for policy-making. Using the modified cultivated land pressure model, this study explores the cultivated land pressure at three scales (nation, province, and prefecture) to determine the capacity of feeding people using cultivated land, and examines the impact of fallowing cultivated land. There are three main findings. First, the cultivated land pressure in China continually decreased during the period of 2000–2016, and would remain in a decreasing trend during 2017–2020 even if the measures implemented doubled the fallowing scale every year. Second, the spatial patterns of the cultivated land pressure between the provincial and prefectural scale show a similar overview, with some nuanced disparities. Finally, the five pilot provinces show various amplitudes of variation in cultivated land pressure, ranging from 0.017% to 9.027% under three fallow scale scenarios. Thus, the results of this research support the argument that fallow policy will not threaten food security at a national and provincial scale, based on the current fallow scale and enlargement pace. The deeper understanding of the impact of fallow policy provides a scientific reference for policymaking and calls for further studies focusing on a more comprehensive measurement of cultivated land pressure and optimization fallow scale.
Deliberative forms of governance are on the rise as modern governments seek to engage more diverse participants in decision-making, but most studies have focused on how well deliberative cases are being practised in democracies. A few studies have examined how deliberative governance has been developed and improved in the authoritarian state of China. Very few, however, examine how deliberative governance could possibly be accommodated and reconciled to address difficult issues such as land transactions. In this paper, we adopt an interdisciplinary sociopolitical method to disentangle diversity in deliberative governance in China, by examining land transactions in Sichuan, and we put forward two arguments. The first is how a hybrid type of deliberation that mixes both traditional and modern methods is evident in Chinese grassroots governance in managing land transactions; and the second is how this pragmatic deliberation manages land transaction conflicts in both a political and capital sense, thus demonstrating the great potential for deliberative governance in China’s local politics.
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