Environmental Degradation in Heilongjiang: Policy Reform and Agrarian Dynamics in China's New Hybrid Economy

Abstract

This paper analyzes environmental degradation in rural China as structurally embedded in China's rapid economic growth in the post-Mao era. The theoretical discussion focuses on changes in the organization of production, resource use, and regional development. A critical assessment of the Chinese hybrid economy challenges standard views of the reforms. The overall environmental problems of state socialist agriculture in China have been aggravated following the agrarian reforms of the current regime. Rather than mitigating negative trends, marketization and privatization have brought new, qualitatively different, environmental problems. Resource decline and its attendant social problems are not limited to aspects of transitional economy but are a fundamental part of the new hybrid system. I offer an alternative explanation for interpreting increases in rural productivity as an appropriation and use of collective assets, suggesting that the mining of communal capital is hidden behind the economic growth of the rural economy. Case studies in Heilongjiang Province based on long-term field data provide a profile of three aspects: intensification of land use, agroindustrial pollution, and declining social/communal capital. Further, the political legitimacy of the state is gradually eroded by mutually exclusive fiscal constraints on expenditure and political commitments to peasant producers. Recent repression of political dissent by peasants in hinterland regions forces indirect forms of resistance to state policy. Opportunities for sustainable development are nonetheless present within China, providing that policy makers attempt to address the structural conditions of the rural sector.

Cultural strategies of development: implications for village governance in China

“…The widespread attitude of villagers is that 'tunpu culture' is a village resource that has been privatized by Wang Ji so that only he benefits from its production and sale. The situation is similar to those documented in hundreds of cases throughout rural China, of collective assets becoming privatized and sold to the benefit of a few enterprising locals who are typically in positions of political leadership which enable them to capitalize on the economic restructuring associated with rural reforms (see Unger and Xiong 1990;Croll 1994;Muldavin 1997). Yet in this case the collective resource is not a fish pond or a grove of trees or a coal mine, but 'culture'.…”

Retrospective on Nature–Society Geography: Tracing Trajectories (1911–2010) and Reflecting on Translations

“…6 Governance institutions and landscapes examined include: (1) community-and user-based management (nationally and internationally influenced) of fisheries, marine organisms, and forestry and range resources (Robbins 1998;St. Martin 2001;Young 2001;Mutersbaugh 2002;Mansfield 2004;McCarthy 2006;Campbell 2007); (2) water resources in urban planning, international relations, and irrigation, including response management and mitigation of climate change (Emel and Roberts 1995;Perreault 2008;Birkenholtz 2009;Feitelson and Fischhendler 2009;Norman and Bakker 2009;Gober et al 2010); (3) biodiversity and environmental conservation (Zimmerer 1999;Campbell 2007;Roth 2008); (4) agriculture, land tenure, land change, pesticide use, and agrarian reform and policy institutions, including urban and periurban food production (Bebbington and Carney 1990;Grossman 1993;Muldavin 1997;Schroeder 1997;Awanyo 2001;Freidberg 2001;Hovorka 2005;Unruh 2006;Galt 2010;Jepson, Brannstrom, and Filippi 2010); (5) modern environmentalism and justice movements (Bowen et al 1995;Pulido 2000;Liu 2008); (6) state environmental and energy agencies (Feldman and Jonas 2000;Heiman and Solomon 2004); and (7) industrial and manufacturing regulation (Willems-Braun 1997;R. A. Walker 2001;Prudham 2003).…”

Introduction

“…It has been deployed by a number of scholars in several distinct contexts. Muldavin (1997) and Kime (1998), for example, describe the complex amalgam of capitalism and central planning in China as a 'hybrid economy', as does Fahey (1997) in relation to Vietnam. Yang (2000) uses the expression to refer to a local economy in rural China that combined indigenous, state-socialist and market components, and in which ritual consumption subverts the logic of capitalism.…”