Asymmetrical Integration: Public Finance Deprivation in China's Urbanized Villages

[Forthcoming in Environment and Planning A, 2012]

Lanchih Po, Visiting Associate Professor, International and Area Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Address: 101 Stephens Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-2306 Email: lanchih@berkeley.edu

AcknowledgementsThe author is deeply grateful for valuable comments from Kam Wing Chan, Guo Chen, Shenjing He, Larry Ma, and three reviewers. All mistakes are my own.

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Asymmetrical Integration: Public Finance Deprivation in China's Urbanized Villages

Abstract China’s unprecedented urbanization since the 1978 economic reform has

left many rural villages engulfed by expanding urban jurisdictions. Because of the

collective ownership of land, these villages have not vanished over night. On the

contrary, they have maneuvered to bypass planning and construction codes and rebuilt

themselves into high-density neighborhoods, housing millions of migrants in the

cities. This paper analyzes the continued survival of the collective economy of these

villages-in-the-city (chengzhongcun) from the perspective of public finance.

Urbanized villages remain financially responsible for public services within their

jurisdictions, including infrastructure, sanitation, policing, social welfare and even

education. Neither the problem of urban/rural disparities, nor the consequent lack of

adequate public services has been resolved by the integration of these villages into

urban areas. These villages have had to find new ways to cope with rapid population

growth, finance an urbanized community, and at the same time, bear the burden of

their stigmatization as a cancerous growth within otherwise “modern” cities. Using

the rapidly urbanized Pearl River Delta (PRD) region as an empirical case, this paper

explores how the urban villages are asymmetrically integrated within the cities: they

contribute to the city’s growth, but receive little or no public support. In contrast with

the common sense that incorporation into an urban jurisdiction will bring about rising

fiscal investment, in China, it is the rural villages that are financing the growth of

cities.

Keywords: China, urban villages, public finance, asymmetrical integration, Pearl

River Delta

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Introduction

China’s unprecedented urbanization since the 1978 economic reform has engulfed

many rural villages, leaving them marooned within expanding urban jurisdictions.

Because a specific rural property regime continues to bind villagers together under the

collective ownership of land, these villages have not been completely integrated into

the cities that have come to surround them. Historically, in order to avoid costly

compensation schemes, city governments have not completely removed and relocated

villagers as their jurisdictions expanded. These urbanized villages have also actively

taken advantage of their rural status to bypass planning and construction codes and

rebuild themselves into clustered, high-density neighborhoods, or what are now

known as “villages-in-the-city”, or chengzhongcun. These densely populated, poorly

regulated, mixed-use settlements have inevitably raised public concerns about health

and safety hazards. In a time when the official discourse puts more and more

emphasis on the making of global cities, villages-in-the-city have come to be seen as

symbols of backwardness. Various policy research initiatives have proposed different

ways to “terminate” (zhongjie) the villages-in-the-city phenomenon and assimilate

villagers into the modern sectors of the cities (Xie, 2005). However, villages-in-the-

city have stubbornly resisted despite near constant campaigns for their reform and

redevelopment. In the Pearl River Delta (PRD), generations of failed regulatory

policies have been developed in parallel with the expansion villages-in-the-city since

the 1980s, to little avail (Wang, et. al, 2009; Zhang, 2011). Illegal buildings have only

grown higher and denser in the intervening years. How is it that the urban villages

have survived the bulldozers, despite that the pressure on them is clearly increasing?

What special role have the villages-in-the-city played in China’s urbanization process

in the post-reform era?

This paper aims to explain the dynamic and symbiotic relationship between the

urbanized villages and urban government from the perspective of public goods

provision. Many scholars have pointed to the functional role of villages-in-the-city in

the provision of inexpensive housing for growing urban populations (Song et

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al.， 2008; Zhang et al. 2003; Tang and Chung, 2002). There is also increasing

literature categorizing villages-in-the-city as “transitional neighborhoods” in the

process of urbanization (Wang et al., 2009; Liu, et al., 2010). Scholars have

investigated how this informal sector has been shaped by the state’s intervention,

tolerance, and constant confrontation and negotiation with the urban villages (Zhang,

2011). This paper tries to complement existing research by highlighting the fiscal

politics of villages-in-the-city. One crucial but often overlooked consequence of

China’s urban/rural dual structure is that urbanized villages remain financially

responsible for public goods provision within their jurisdiction, including

infrastructure, sanitation, policing, social welfare and even basic education. Neither

the problem of urban/rural disparities, nor the consequent lack of adequate public

services has been resolved by the spatial and administrative amalgamation of these

villages into urban areas. These urbanized villages have had to find new ways to cope

with rapid population growth, to finance an urbanized community, and at the same

time bear the burden of their stigmatization as a cancerous growth within otherwise

“modern” cities. In other words, villages-in-the-city suffer socio-spatial

peripheralization and are excluded from the urban public goods provision.

Henri Lefebvre’s analysis of the “right to the city” helps pose fundamental

questions such as “Who exactly counts as a citizen?” and “Who has the right to use

and change the city? ” The answers to these questions may reveal how public

resources are unequally redistributed; and, more importantly, how different groups are

marginalized, segregated, and excluded by the exercise of hegemony. In other word,

the social production of space is a tool for the hegemonic class to reproduce its

dominance (Lefebvre, 1991,10–11). In China, the issue of citizenship has been

associated with the invisible wall that has been built between rural and urban areas

since the adoption of household registration (hukou) system in the 1950s (Chan,

1994). A dual system of land ownership, production, employment, social services and

public finance has been operating on separate tracks in rural and urban China. After

the introduction of economic reform and opening policies in the late 1970s, the

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restrictions on rural urban mobility have been loosened, however, the hukou system as

a major divide between the rural and urban population remains potent (Chan, 2009).

In her seminal work on peasants living on the margins of China’s urban regions,

Dorothy Solinger, following Bryan S. Turner (1993), points out two dimensions of the

citizenship issue: social membership, and the right to allocation of resources (1999).

In the same vein, other scholars have continued on to identify the formation of a

hierarchy of segmented allocation of citizen rights and entitlements in China and refer

to this system as a form of “differential citizenship” (Wu, 2010) or “stratified

citizenship” (Li and Chen, 2011). Even within the overarching categories of urban or

rural hukou, differential membership and entitlements can be further demarcated. As a

result, China’s urban growth entails a great number of people who are in the city but

not of the city (Chan, 2011). This paper aims to pinpoint the remaking of the rural-

urban divide in the new context of rapid urbanization. I argue that the legacy of the

rural/urban dualism under Mao has been transformed into a new and unequal center-

periphery relationship, leading to the marginalization and exclusion of villages-in-the-

city from the urban financial system, even as spatially the villages have been absorbed

into the urban center.

While the inequality of entitlement among citizens in China seems an obvious

and persistent fact, it is important to emphasize that segregation does not come from a

constant and uniform strategy of powers (Lefebvre, 1996: 140). In fact, cities are

shaped by contradictory and sometimes inconsistent social practices of integration and

segregation. “This society wants itself and sees itself as coherent,” Lefebvre states,

even as its actual practices of spatial segregation countervail its own stated ideals.

(Lefebvre, 1996: 144). Ironically, Lefebvre’s own phrase, “the right to the city,” was

later adopted as part of the opening article of the 1991 Urban Development Act in

France, a legal document aimed at abating the phenomena of segregation (Gibert and

Dikec, 2008: 250). However, as Lefebvre himself also notes, “whenever an organized

action had attempted to mix social strata and classes, a spontaneous decantation soon

follows” (1996: 140). The result is paradoxical phenomena of what he terms

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“disintegrating integration” (p. 145). In China, urban-rural integration (chengxiang

yitihua) has similarly become the dominant rhetoric of rural development, as

announced in the decisions made by the Third Plenary Session of the Seventeenth

Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in 2008.1 In 2010, the country’s

Central Document No. 1 (zhongyang yihao wenjian, historically the most important

policy announced by the central government in the beginning of a new year) was

entitled: “Increase the efforts to coordinate urban and rural development.” This policy

also aims at “narrowing the gap between urban and rural public services

development.”2 It is no doubt true that a harmoniously integrated society has become

a national policy goal. And yet, it is exactly in this context that we need to question

the asymmetrical power relations shaping not only the articulation between policy and

practice, but also the underlying social and political conditions. Do such policies

merely lead to a kind of “disintegrated integration,” an “organized action” followed

by a “spontaneous decantation”? Who is integrated by whom? Is the integration

effective? And how do such efforts often lead to a situation in which “blaming the

victim” further stigmatizes a social group or spatial boundary that has proved

particularly difficult to integrate?

Villages-in-the-city have become widespread in China as the number and size of

cities continue to grow. Varied in their geographical location, local politics, customs

and culture, these urbanized villages, however, share the same institutional constraint:

the dual structure in public goods provision. But the villages-in-the-city phenomenon

remains most visible and acute in the Pearl River Delta region due to Guangdong

Province’s “one step ahead” status in urbanization and industrialization ever since the

country started its economic reforms in the 1970s. With the absence of effective laws

and rules in the early reform era, large-scale illegal uses of land and informal building

1 “CPC Central Committee’s Decision on a Number of Major Issues on Rural Reform and Development” (zhonggong zhongyang guanyu tuijin nongcun gaige fazhan ruogan zhongda wenti de jueding), passed on October 12th, 20082 “CPC Central Committee and State Council’s Several Opinions on Increase the Coordination of Urban and Rural Development and Further Develop the Basis of Agriculture and Rural Villages” (zhonggong zhongyang, guowuyuan guanyu jiada tongchou chengxiang fazhan lidu, jinyibu hangshi nongye nongcun fazhan jichu de ruogan yijian), 2010/1/1;http://www.chinanews.com/cj/cj-plgd/news/2010/01-31/2101018.shtml, accessed on 2/20/11.

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have become accomplished facts associated with the real interests of different parties

in many urbanized areas. The materials of this paper come from the fieldwork I

conducted in the Pearl River Delta region between 2004 and 2009. My field sites

comprised 14 urbanized villages: 3 in Shenzhen, 3 in Guangzhou, and 8 in Dongguan.

I visited the villages’ shareholding organizations that are in charge of the management

of the villages’ collective economy to investigate how collective revenues are earned,

spent, and redistributed. Interviews often took the form of panel discussions with the

leaders and shareholder representatives of the shareholding organizations,

complemented by the collection of their bylaws and documents about their revenues

and expenditures. I also visited various institutions within Municipal governments

that are in charge of the management and supervision of these urbanized villages,

including Agricultural Bureaus, Civil Affairs Bureaus, and Land Management

Bureaus. In Shenzhen, because they have nominally fully urbanized all the villages,

the responsibilities of taking care of former peasant communities are shifted to State

Resource Bureaus under district governments. Various local regulations were also

collected during the interviews.

This paper analyzes the financial burdens of village collectives in PRD to point

out how rural/urban disparities in public goods provision have not been solved in the

process of urbanization. In the following sections, first of all, a review of global slums

is offered to highlight how the problems of unequal access to urban services, social

and political exclusion, and stigmatization are formed in specific urbanization

trajectories. I will go on to discuss how China’s villages, located at the bottom of the

hierarchical fiscal system, are marginalized in public finance. Even more startling is

that my fieldwork data shows that in the PRD’s self-financed urbanization process, it

is the rural collectives that have been subsidizing the increasing cost of public

services on the heels of urban expansion, even though the municipal governments

have been launching various city-based projects aiming to eliminate the existing

urban-rural patchwork. A typical village-in-the-city’s collective economy is also

presented to illustrate public finance in villages’ everyday practice. In a seemingly

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paradoxical process of disintegrating integration, urbanized villages have indeed been

integrated into the city, but in a manner that is profoundly asymmetrical.

Unequal Access to Urban Services: Global Slums RevisitedFinancing rapid urban growth has been a great challenge for governments

everywhere in the world. It is also a governance issue implicated with decisions as to

how state resources are allocated and how services are delivered to local populations:

“who decides, who benefits, and who pays?” (Crane, 2007). In developing countries,

underprivileged populations are often unable to receive services provided by the

higher levels of government or the private sector, and hence rely on local

communities for their survival (World Bank, 2000). This has been best manifested by

the emergence of large-scale slums along with rapid urbanization since the 1960s. As

the provision of infrastructure and housing, either by the government or by means of

the market, cannot catch up with the growth of population, a great number of low-

income rural-urban migrants (and increasingly, their offspring) are forced to settle as

squatters in crowded slums built with cheap materials on public or private lands

(Davis, 2006). According to UN-HABITAT, one billion people worldwide live in

slums and the figure is projected to double by 2030 (2003). In fact, China has long

considered the expansion of urban slums in Latin America as a negative consequence

of “over-urbanization” and hence invoked this lesson to control the scale and speed of

urbanization. Accordingly, even with the reality of increasing rural populations

flocking into the cities, the hukou system persists not only in limiting the rural-urban

migration but also in creating hierarchies of citizenship associated with differential

social and political rights and entitlements to welfare provision (Chan and

Buckingham, 2008). If we situate China’s villages-in-the-city in the global context,

what can we learn from the evolution of urban slums in the Third World? The slum

question is complicated and variant across different social and historical contexts. The

following review centers on how stigmatization is formed and how the goal of

integration never fully achieved.

In the late 1960s, the concept of marginality dominated many scholars’ and

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policy-makers’ understanding of the urban poor. It was argued that squatter

communities were populated by “peasants in cities” who “had left the rural life, but

lacked the attitudinal pre-requisites for full participation in the modern urban milieu”

(Perlman, 1975: 136). Squatters were considered lazy, socially isolated and

disorganized, politically apathetic, and therefore, trapped in a “culture of poverty”

(Leacock ed., 1971). Marginality theory thus entailed a policy that emphasized

integration, often by means of the demolition of squatter settlements which were seen

to be shadowed by cultures of traditionalism, the relocation of inhabitants into modern

public housing, and their assimilation into a more authentically urban life. However,

none of these relocation projects proved to be successful. Through her study of

favelados, or rural migrants to the favelas in Rio de Janeiro (1975, 1976), Janice

Perlman was among those who helped break the myth of marginality. Perlman

contended that favelados were hard working, actively participated in the urban

economy, and socially well organized: “they are not economically and politically

marginal, but are excluded and repressed; … they are not socially and culturally

marginal, but stigmatized and excluded from a closed class system” (1975:131). In

short, they were in fact tightly integrated into the society, albeit in a severely

asymmetrical manner: “they contribute their hard work, their high hopes, and their

loyalties, but do not benefit from the goods and services of the system” (1976: 195).

Perlman and others thus triggered a paradigm shift in slum studies (Ward, 2005).

By rejecting a simplified modernization narrative, they acknowledged and affirmed

the subjectivity of squatter settlements and their power of self-organization and self-

provision (Castells, 1983). Practitioner John Turner’s assertion of the “Freedom to

build” (1972, 1976) further helped to trigger policy changes. Large-scale resettlement

projects gave way to bottom-up mobilization and self-housing. The government

started to gradually legitimize squatters’ occupations, to provide infrastructure such as

water, electricity, and postal services, and even to grant titles to legalize the

transactions of property in the squatter communities (de Soto, 2000). The “problem”

of the informal sector, therefore, became its own “solution” (Ward, 2005: 280).

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However, this process of formalization also demonstrated paradoxically that the state,

especially the central state, had given up its efforts to house the poor in a systematic

and comprehensive manner. Patterns of government intervention or toleration,

formalization or informalization, became shaped dynamically by the mobilization of

squatter settlements and their struggles and negotiations with governments in real

political processes on a case-by-case basis (Castells, 1983).

As the slum problem persisted over time, new voices of opposition emerged, and

the discourse turned toward concepts of social exclusion in the 1990s. Naila Kabeer

describes social exclusion as “the phenomenon of being ‘locked out’ of participation

in social life as a result of the active dynamics of social interaction rather than as a

condition of dependence stemming from some anonymous processes of

impoverishment.” She uses it to recapitulate the process in which “factors of power

relations, agency, culture and social identities come into play, an environment in

which individuals do not have access to public resources, as a result they are able to

contribute but not able to receive” (1999, cited in Perlman 2005: 12). This echoes

what Perlman described thirty years ago as the asymmetrical integration of the

squatter settlements with the cities. What sets the concept of social exclusion apart is

its nuanced account of the political potential of actors in processes of exclusion and

inclusion. In practice, this discourse has been directly linked to citizenship

movements in various contexts. This is because it posits the equal protection of

universal citizen rights as the essential precondition to solving problems of exclusion

or segregation resulting from man-made demarcations based on ethnicity, region,

culture, or various institutions in various social contexts.

China’s villages-in-the-city share with global slums the problems of unequal

access to urban services, social and political exclusion, and stigmatization. This

review of global slum question also makes it clear that the problem of exclusion

cannot be solved without questioning how boundaries are made as part of a political

process. As Lefebvre has proposed: “the first thing to do is to defeat currently

dominant strategies and ideologies” (1996:154). Let’s examine China’s system of

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public finance in greater detail to see how urbanized villagers are excluded from

public service provision.

Public Finance Deprivation in China's Urbanized Villages

The provision of public goods ideally relies on a sound system of public finance.

China’s fiscal system has two significant characteristics: centralization and urban bias,

and both of these tendencies seriously undermine the provision of public services of

villages, which lie lowest on the fiscal hierarchy. China’s 1994 fiscal reform

centralized much revenue collection without changing the expenditure responsibilities

among different levels of government, creating a huge fiscal gap for local

governments (Wong, 2000). At the sub-national level, with the lack of clearly

assigned expenditure responsibilities and horizontal accountability mechanisms, lower

levels of governments have neither incentives nor capabilities to deliver public

services efficiently (Martinez-Vazquez and Qiao, 2011).

China’s public finance for rural and urban areas is separate (Wong, 1997). As a

legacy of the rural communes, rural communities generally have to finance their own

public services. Rural populations rely on villages to provide basic infrastructure such

as irrigation, drinking water and roads, even though communes no longer exist and

villages’ communal land has been subcontracted to individual households in the

reform era. Because public finance provides very little support to rural communities,

China’s public services have been disproportionately concentrated in the cities. For

example, in 2002, 77% of China’s education expenditure and 85.5% of public health

expenditures were spent in cities (Chen, et al., 2005). As a result, rural-urban

inequality in access to schooling and medical care remains substantial (Hannum, et al,

2010; Yip, 2010). To make things worse, under the system known as “cities-

managing-counties” (shiguanxian), the majority of Chinese municipalities are half-

urban, half-rural. Cities also have to govern a large proportion of rural areas and rural

populations. When municipal governments have to rely on self-fundraising to finance

public infrastructure (Mikesell, at al., 2011; Wu, 2011), their efforts tend to be

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concentrated on the urban and industrial sectors, and oriented toward GDP growth,

rather than the demands of urban residents, not to mention those in rural areas.

Although Guangdong’s GDP is the highest in China, its per capita fiscal

expenditure ranks only 19th (Yangcheng Evening News, 2011/3/29). As a rich

province, Guangdong has a relatively low reliance on fiscal transfers from the central

government. However, lower levels of governments have to heavily count on transfers

from the provincial government. As these transfers have to be filtered downwards in a

hierarchical manner, the lowest levels of local government (counties, townships and

villages), where many important social services are concentrated, see their

expenditure commitments outweighing their revenue allocations. The municipal

government usually marshals their limited resources for villages that are in serious

deficit. In 2008, for example, the Dongguan Municipal government allocated a special

fund of 233 million yuan to subsidize villages in serious financial trouble.3 The

majority of villages, however, receive very little or no help from municipal public

finance. Empirical research shows Guangdong’s economic growth has not lead to the

expansion of expenditures in rural public services, such as basic education and social

security (Jiang, 2011). In some cases, the services have even been reduced after the

termination of agricultural taxes in 2006 (Huang and Dai, 2008). Without fiscal

equalization, the urban rural gap in public service expenditures in Guangdong is

widening (Wang, 2010). Such disparity exists not only between rich regions and poor

regions, but also between rural and urban sectors within the cities and regions.

Disproportionate public resource allocations in the cities allow Chinese urbanites

to enjoy a range of benefits and entitlements: what is called an “urban public goods

regime” by Solinger (1999). Although the coordination of rural and urban

development has been emphasized in various government policies, it has remained

unclear how the provision of public goods can be integrated across rural/urban

boundaries. Even in urbanized rural areas, services are not equally distributed. The

villages-in-the-city remain excluded from and unaccounted for in urban public finance

because they are caught in-between the rural-urban divide. The population of villages-

3 Interview, Dongguan Agricultural Bureau, 2009/8/4。12

in-the-city consists of mainly two groups: native villagers and migrant tenants;4 both

continue to be labeled as “peasants” (nongmin) by urban dwellers.

Because the public services of villages-in-the-city continue to be financed mainly

by the collective economy of native villages, it is important to understand the

transformation of the villages’ governance in an urbanized context. The strongest

feature of native villagers is that this social group is bound together by their collective

property. Once a village is annexed into an urban jurisdiction, administratively, the

old villagers’ committees are to be dissolved, and the function of community

management falls to newly-built urban residents committees (juweihui). But in the

process of administrative reorganization, what the villagers care about most is how

the old collective property is managed in the new context and how villagers keep their

entitlement to the collective property. As sociologists Li (2004) and Lan (2005) have

demonstrated, with the “vanishing” of the villages in administrative terms, “village

membership” (cunji) has become even more important than before. The ownership

and redistribution of collective property became hotly contested issues when formerly

seemingly worthless communal land started to create significant and tangible cash

income after urbanization. In order to mitigate rising conflicts regarding the

redistribution of windfall land rent among villagers, a shareholding system was

introduced in Guangdong Province to redefine collective property rights by

securitizing collective assets and converting villagers into shareholders (Fu, 2003; Po,

2008). These shareholding companies, which evolved out of the vanishing native

villages, are now the major economic agents in villages-in-the-cities (Jiang, 2005;

Zha, 2008). Corporate village collectives are in charge of the development,

maintenance and management of collective property. In short, they build real estate on

their communal land to create rental income. A proportion of the collective income is

retained for collective uses, and then the rest of the profits are to be delivered to

shareholders as dividends.

The tenants that contribute to the villager’s rental income are, of course,

4 There are some non-migrants as well, most of whom seem to be attracted by the low rent.

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thousands of rural-urban migrants, a group which has long been referred to as the

“floating population” under China’s hukou system. Survey data shows that half of the

migrant workers in the PRD region live in dormitories provided by their employers;

the other half end up settling in various villages-in-the-city (Ren and Liang, 2009).

The institutional and discursive discrimination against the floating population has

long been associated with the practical concern that China’s cities, in general, have

faced a shortage of public goods provision due to the long term neglect of

infrastructural development under Mao (Solinger, 1999). Without hukou registration,

with meager income and no chance to settle legally in the cities, migrants can only be

crammed into the marginal spaces of the villages-in-the-city.

Although villages-in-the-city are physically located in urban territories,

institutionally, their land, management and public goods provision are managed as

rural jurisdictions. In the context of rapid urbanization, the formation of villages-in-

the-city stands as a material manifestation of the remaking of the rural-urban divide in

post-reform China (Sui, 2005, 2007). The question at hand is not about whether or not

these people are poor, or how some villagers have actually been taking advantage of

institutional loopholes for rent-seeking by avoiding more stringent urban development

codes, as labels such as “Maoist landlords” (Siu, 2005) or the “peasant rentier class”

(Liu, 2009) suggest. What I am interested in are mechanisms that are sustaining or

remaking this rural-urban divide and how this divide serves to peripheralize

communities that are labeled as rural. In the following sections, I will explore the

issue of public service provision in the everyday life and space of villages-in-the-city

and examine how this reconstitution of the rural/urban divide has created an

asymmetrical integration with Chinese characteristics.

Self-financed Urbanization in the PRD Region

The existence of villages-in-the-city has stemmed from the municipal

governments’ lack of financial provision from the outset. China’s Constitution

stipulates that urban land is owned by the state, while rural land is the property of the

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rural collectives. When rural land is converted into urban uses, it must undergo a

process of requisition (zhengdi). In the PRD region, which pioneered the new wave of

industrialization and urbanization, municipal governments tended to have very limited

budgets to finance urban expansion in the early reform era. When they requisitioned

rural land for urban uses, they took only farmland, bypassing farmers’ residential land

(zhaijidi) so as to avoid paying the large amounts of compensation necessary for their

relocation. And because these urban governments lacked the financial wherewithal to

create jobs, social security, and public services to accommodate peasants who became

landless, they elected to return a certain portion5 of acquired farmland area back to the

villages. These parcels, called “returned land” (fanhuandi), were intended for village

self-development and self-provision. It is important to note that the compensation fees

for communal farmland mainly went to the village collective, with only a small

portion being redistributed to individual villagers. Therefore, the general practice

became that village collectives (which were later converted into village shareholding

companies) would use farmland compensation fees to build rental property on the

returned land to create stable income for the villages. In the meantime, villagers also

strove to maximize the value of their own residential land by augmenting its floor

area. Villagers could then reap the benefits of rental income realized from this

additional housing space—thanks to the influx of migrant workers looking for

inexpensive housing.

A process of “spontaneous urbanization” of the PRD (Shen et al., 2002) has also

spurred on the prevalence of informal building developed in the absence of planning

regulation. Driven by the region’s early adoption of reform policies and

industrialization, the urbanization rate quickly rose from 25.6% in the late 1970s to

72.65% in 2001; a rate much higher than the nation’s average at 37.7% (The

Coordinate Development Plan of City Clusters in the Pearl River Delta, 2005). The

provincial capital of Guangzhou used to be the only city with a population over one

million. Now Shenzhen, Dongguan and Foshan have been added to this list of

5 The percentage varies in different cities, ranging from eight to twelve percent. Interview, Guangzhou Land Bureau, 2009.

15

megacities, although they also govern huge rural areas. Because the pace of

industrialization and urbanization far exceeded the expectations of the government,

development always came first, and planning followed. Regulatory and legal

developments were also left behind by the dynamism of social reality. Rapid,

spontaneous urbanization, superimposed upon a socialist legacy of rural/urban

dualism, thus created a mixture of urban and rural landscapes. Scholars identify the

spatial characteristics of this urban-rural continuity as a kind of peri-urbanism (Lin,

2006; Zheng at al., 2003). The fact that villagers’ residential land was not regulated by

urban planning statutes meant that the height and density of buildings in urban

villages soon careened out of control. Indeed, whenever local governments would

announce a new policy to quash illegal building, they would induce a rush to build

even more floor space —in order to maximize the compensation that would follow.

After some twenty to thirty years of urbanization, unregulated residential buildings in

the urban villages of Guangzhou and Shenzhen have reached as high as eight stories,

with some shooting up to eleven stories, all without elevators. And thus, narrow plots

of residential “rural land” have yielded communities with an even higher population

density than the “real” cities that encircle them.

New migrants have caused this explosion of urban population, but public goods

provision lags far behind. Although the shortage of urban infrastructure is a prevailing

issue in developing countries, in China this phenomenon, once again, is associated

with the rigid administrative divide between rural and urban areas. Resource

allocation, including administrative personnel and public goods, is decided by the size

of the registered (or de jure) population with an urban hukou (Chan, 2007). For fast-

growing cities that have a floating population which significantly outnumbers

registered urban hukou holders, local administrative and financial resources often do

not match their level of socio-economic development. In the PRD, cities that are

economically competitive usually have poor performance on public goods provision

(Yu, 2009). From 1978 to 2009, for example, Guangzhou’s de jure population had

grown from 4.84 million to 7.9 million. But the city’s de facto population had

16

exceeded 1.2 million in 2010 population census (Table 1). Within the same period,

Dongguan’s de jure population only saw a small increase from 1.11 million to 1.79

million. But its de facto population soared to 8.2 million — an almost eight-fold

increase in three decades. The most serious inversion of registered population and

floating population can be seen in Shenzhen. A brand new city of the reform era, its

population had risen from 0.3 million in 1979 to more than 10 million in 2010, among

which only 25% are hukou holders (Table 1). Because neither the government nor the

market offers housing for low-income migrants, they found homes in villages-in-the-

cities. Shenzhen alone has 320 villages-in-the-cities, accommodating 5.2 million

migrants. Guangzhou’s 138 villages-in-the-cities have housed over 1 million

migrants.6 In Dongguan, 208 villages in urbanized areas have been administratively

integrated into the cities in the past decade.7 Yet due to the city’s peri-urbanism (Lin,

2006), urban-rural boundaries are vague, and industrial production is tightly mixed

with urban life and residential areas. As a result, villages-in-the-cities are indeed

everywhere.

As urban governments fall short of adequate administrative and fiscal

resources to coordinate planning and development to cope with rapid urban growth,

village collectives have played an important role in this process of spontaneous

urbanization. With the continued urban/rural dualism, rural villages are required to be

self-financed and self-sufficient. In Dongguan, for example, rural collectives in 2008

spent 610 million yuan on physical infrastructure and various social services, eating

up more than three fourths of these villages’ collective income. Because village

revenue is uneven, 42% of villages were in deficit by 2007. In 2008, as the global

financial meltdown hit factories in the PRD hard, villages saw a sharp drop in their

rental income. Accordingly, 63% of villages were in deficit.8 The most alarming issue

here is that this system of rural self-sufficiency continues even after villages have

been urbanized. In Dongguan, the municipal government started to actively convert

6 Data of this paragraph is collected from my interviews with local governments in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Dongguan, supported by the internal, unpublished documents offered by local officials. 7 Interview, Dongguan Municipality Civil Affairs Bureau, 2009/9/5.8 Data collected from Dongguan Municipality Agriculture Bureau, 2008/7/25.

17

urbanized villages into urban residential committees in 2004. However, of the 208

newly established residential committees, the municipality has been able to provide

public financing to only six of them; the rest still must be financially self-sustaining.9

In Longgang, a relatively “rural” district of Shenzhen in which rural villagers have

officially been designated as urban residents, urbanized villages still had to spend 800

million yuan, fully one fourth of their collective income, to finance public services in

2008.10 In short, then, it is the collective economy at the village level, and not urban

governments, that have been financing urban expansion in the PRD region.

Incomplete Urbanization Projects

In order to contend with increasing competition from cities in the Yangtze River

Delta region, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Dongguan have all embarked on city-based

urbanization policies to remake and upgrade the region’s business environment since

the late 1990s (Lin, 2006, 2007). The elimination of the existing urban-rural

patchwork is considered the first step in moving toward the construction of a real

modern city. This new city-centered social and spatial engineering project relies on

various schemes to change what used to be rural into urban, including turning all

native villagers into urban hukou holders; turning all rural collective land into state-

owned urban land (zhuandi); turning villager’s committees into urban residential

committees (cunzhuanju); and ultimately, turning all villages’ collective property into

shares managed by a new economic organization. These changes aim to force villages

and villagers to really assimilate into the cities, that is, to vanish. The irony lies in the

fact that just as urban governments attempt to reduce peasants’ economic dependence

on the village collectives, they themselves are depending on the villages’ collective

economy to fill the holes in the region’s system of public goods provision.

The aforementioned mechanism of “returned land” provided basic protections for

villagers when urbanization took away their farmland—although the implementation

of this policy varied in different local contexts. The village economy, in general, has

9 Interview, Dongguan Municipality Civil Affairs Bureau, 2009/9/5.10 Data collected from Longgang District State Resource Office, 2009/9/3.

18

shifted from cultivating food to cultivating real estate. Except for the residential land

owned by individual households, collective land and property continue to be managed

by collective economic organizations: the village shareholding companies. The village

collectives generally hold 30% to 80% in “collective shares” (jitigu), revenue from

which is reserved for public goods provision. In other words, the majority of

collective income is used for management, administration, and public services; and

the residuals are then redistributed to individual shareholders. Villages are heavily

burdened by the high cost of infrastructural development, public security, sanitation

and education—public goods that should be covered by urban public finance. In

addition, villages served throughout the socialist period as the locus for the delivery of

social welfare, and that expectation also continues today. Villagers remain reliant on

the collectives to pay for their health and social insurance, to offer food subsidies for

important festivals, monetary subsidies for the elderly, educational subsidies for rural

youth to attend college, and the like. The power of custom and the fact that there are

village-level elections (for both the grassroots governments and the shareholding

companies) make it impossible to cut existing expenditures on welfare.

The problem, of course, goes well beyond merely taking care of the needs of

native villagers. Village collectives (whether they are designated as villager’s

committees, residential committees, or shareholding companies) are in fact

responsible for the management of a very large urbanized community with an influx

of new migrants. Migrant tenants generally outnumber native villagers six- or seven-

fold; sometimes the ratio is closer to ten to one. Crime rates have also risen in step

with the explosion of population and of rental apartments, an urgent issue with which

municipal police departments have very limited resources to cope. Guangdong

province stipulates that local governments should maintain 30 police officers for

every 10,000 residents. Only Guangzhou, the provincial capital, can meet this

criterion. The rate is 13.4 in Shenzhen, and descends to a mere 7 in Dongguan.11

Unsurprisingly, the mismatching of the size of the police force and the population is

most acute in villages-in-the-city. Take Buji Street Neighborhood, in Longgang,

11 Interview, Dongguan Municipality Civil Affairs Bureau, 2009/9/5.19

Shenzhen, for example. Of its population of 1.04 million, mostly rural-urban

migrants, 650,000 live in villages-in-the-city, creating the highest density in Shenzhen

with 50,000 people per square kilometer. Yet for every 10,000 residents, there are only

3.3 police officers.12 As a result, urbanized villages in PRD have established private

security forces (zhi’an dui) to patrol their own jurisdictions. This army of informal

police significantly outnumbers the formal force. The municipality of Guangzhou

maintains 30,000 police; but the villages have hired 160,000 private security officers.

In Dongguan, the number is 10,000 versus 150,000.13 The allocation of police forces

is an important state resource, controlled strictly by the central government. Ironically,

in China’s rapidly urbanized regions, the village-level private police force has grown

to be significantly larger than the official one. It is common for a village to spend

more than one million yuan annually to hire security guards. For villages that have set

up a closed-circuit television systems for crime prevention, the expenditure often

exceeds two million.14 These informal police forces have very weak legitimacy and

legal power. The problem is not only that they are inefficient; sometimes their

misconduct triggers serious conflicts between native villagers and migrant tenants. In

other words, because of the lack of coherent operation of public power, informal

police forces at the village level, created to monitor and control the floating

population, have only intensified the differentiation and inequality between the

natives and outsiders.15

Inequality of resource allocation also prevails in basic education. Wusha, for

example, is a famously rich village in Dongguan. Although the village was already

converted to an urban residential committee administratively in 2005, it continues to

finance its own elementary school at a cost of 4,000 yuan for each student per year.

Therefore, Wusha Elementary School doesn’t accept any non-villager students.16 Why

12 Interview, Buji District Government, 2009/9/2.13 Interview, Dongguan Civil Affairs Bureau, 2009/8/4. 14 Interview, Tianhe District Government, Guangzhou, 2009/9/11.15 Regarding the informality of police force, another contested issue is the existence of a large army of “chengguan”—city management officer that is responsible for controlling street vendors, hawkers, shoe shiners and illegal cabs. Misconducts of this group of informally-hired, poorly-trained law enforcement officers have triggered many mass riots in China in recent years. See Ramzy, 2009, for example. 16 Interview, vice village head, Wusha Village. 2006/6/7.

20

do urbanized villages have to self-finance their schools, while ordinary urban

residents tend to take for granted that compulsory education is covered by public

finance? And, in Wusha’s case, isn’t this practice further enlarging the education gap

between villagers and migrants? It is not that the local governments are unaware of

this inequality. Dongguan has slowly begun to take over the education spending of

urbanized villages. The city’s education expenditure is some 2 billion yuan per year,

shared among the municipality, township and village. Beginning in 2007, the burden

was alleviated for village level governments.17 During my fieldwork, grassroots

leaders contended that their schools’ operational costs have been gradually covered by

municipal public finance. However, villages continue to spend a great amount of

money subsidizing local schools’ infrastructure and equipment in order to upgrade to

an urban standard. The elimination of rural-urban dualism in education provision

remains incomplete.

City-centered urbanization projects have advanced most rapidly in Shenzhen.

Shenzhen launched an aggressive pro-urbanization policy to integrate all their villages

into the urban system in 2005, and declared that they would be “the first city in China

that has no peasants.” Shenzhen also proclaimed 2005-2007 as a three-year rural-

urban transitional period, and the municipal government vowed to take over the

responsibility of public goods provision from the village shareholding companies

within three years. In 2008, with the transitional period coming to a close, the

municipal government issued relevant documents providing for the transfer of

municipal facilities.18 In reality, however, resources had yet to be put in place to

finance these transfers. As city governments and village shareholding companies

wrangle over the ownership, control, maintenance and management of a long list of

facilities, ranging from street lamps, water pipes, garbage disposal plants, community

parks, and kindergartens, public goods provision has in fact worsened in many

17 Interview, Dongguan Municipal Government, 2008/7/25. 18 Including “Opinions on Improving the Development and Management and of Municipal Facilities in Baoan, Longgang and Guangming, Shenzhen Municipality,” 2008, No. 104; and “The Implementation Plan Regarding the Transfer, Management, Maintenance of Municipal Facilities in Baoan, Longgang and Guangming after the Expiration of Urbanization Transitional Period ,” Shenzhen Urban Management Bureau, 2008.

21

villages-in-the-city.19 Similar processes have taken place in Guangzhou and

Dongguan, except that there, subsidies from urban public finance to the urbanized

villages have trickled down at an even slower pace as villages in these two cities are

even more scattered. Along with the announcement of a 2009 policy in Guangdong

Province to promote the redevelopment of old towns, old factories and old villages

(three olds)20 in order to support the efficient uses of urban land, it becomes obvious

that the municipal governments have prioritized the demolition of urbanized villages

over the maintenance and improvement of these existing communities.

Public Finance in Villages’ Everyday Practice

Let’s look at how villages’ public finance functions in everyday life. It is agreed

that the most expensive public goods are public security, sanitation and basic

education. Because villages differ in terms of their economic capacity, the financial

subsidies they receive from upper level governments also vary. Huangcun Village in

Nancheng District, Dongguan City stands as an example of this problem.21 The village

is a typical, medium sized urban village (see Figure 1) located at the city’s new

administrative center, just a few blocks from the City Hall, the Trade Exhibition

Center, and various brand new facilities built in the 2000s as part of the city’s scheme

to upgrade its profile. This village consists of eight village groups. With 2,939

registered villagers and some 7,000 migrant tenants, this is a community of more than

10,000 people. In 2002, the village government was officially converted into an urban

residents’ committee. Collective assets at the village and village group levels were

securitized separately, and two tiers of shareholding organizations were established.

At the village level, their 380 mu of communal farmland have long been turned to

industrial use, managed by a real estate company.22 With the 2002

19 Observation and interviews in three villages-in-the-city in Shenzhen, 2009.20 Guangdong Provincial Government announced “Opinions on the Promotion of ‘Three-Old’ to Promote Economical and Intensive Land Reform” (No. 78) in 2009 to make way for large-scale urban redevelopment projects in the PRD region. Guangzhou and Dongguan quickly followed suit and formulated their local policies, which means, new ways to cleanse up blighted areas for new development. 21 Data of the following analysis is collected from a panel meeting at Huangcun Residents’ Committee on July 26, 2008. The chair of the village-level shareholding organization, Huangcun Economic Cooperative Society, and eight representatives from eight village groups attended the meeting. 22Hongyuan real estate company, established by the village’s former village head in 1987, has a very

22

shareholding/urbanization reform, Huangcun Economic Cooperative Association

(Huangcun jingji lianheshe) was established, which owns 35,198 square meters of

factory space and 8,495 square meters of commercial space. This property’s rental

income has become the main source of revenue for the new residents’ committee. The

annual revenue of some 10 million23 has been used exclusively for public services.

The village budget has only a very minor deficit. The collective assets of each of the

eight village groups were also converted into shares, managed by an elected board.

With 10-18% reserved for public uses, the majority of their collective income is

redistributed to individual shareholders. Eight village groups’ collective income

totaled 16.08 million in 2008. The monthly yields vary across different village groups,

ranging from 300 to 600 yuan per person. For villagers, this bonus accounts for only

20% of their income. Their major income lies in the three to four story apartments

built upon their residential land. Every household has rental property.

The community has to use all of its annual revenue of 10 million at the village

level for public services to maintain order and sanitation. This is important not only

for the quality of villager’s daily life but also for the whole community’s rental

business. There is a police station that sits right next to the office of the residents’

committee (Figure 2). This institution was created as part of the municipal

government’s 2007 campaign to set up 500 community police branches to improve

public order—a policy to fight against Dongguan’s notoriously high crime rate. In

Huangcun, the branch was in fact established by renaming the informal police force

that the village had already fielded to police itself. And it continues to be financed by

the residential committee at a cost of 1.5 million per year: “not a penny from the

municipal government!” the village leaders contended. In fact, the district government

imposes on the residential committee a mandate to collect a “public security fee” at a

rate of 30 yuan per person for both native villagers and tenants. Tenants pay the fees

when they apply for a temporary resident permit, which is required for renting an

mixed and fuzzy ownership structure. In 2002, as the village was transformed into an urban residential committee and its collective property was supposed to be clearly audited and securitized, Hongyuan company returned 230 million yuan of assets to the village-level shareholding organization. After that property stripping, Hongyuan became a real private shareholding company. 23 The net income is 10.76 million in 2008 and 10.03 million in 2009.

23

apartment. But the residents committee finds it difficult to collect the fees from their

fellow villagers, as many simply refuse to pay. When this happens, the village

collective tends to quietly supplement the fees so as to save the trouble of collecting

them. All collected fees, however, are submitted to the district government. “They

(the district government) transfer a tiny little bit back to the village when they are in a

good mood. But this has not happened for three years!” In addition to supporting the

police force, the residents’ committee also hired 110 property managers to take care of

their rental spaces.24 However, village leaders complained that they have very little

enforceable power to carry out this “management.” For example, it is crucial to keep

track of the number of people that reside in each apartment. But neither managers nor

private security guards have the right to enter a household to ascertain the conditions

inside. In short, the community has invested heavily, but they still find it difficult to

maintain its own safety in the context of rapid urbanization.

Various public goods, large and small, are necessary for the improvement of the

community environment, ranging from fire fighting equipment, to street lighting, and

a newly built garbage disposal station, which cost 1 million yuan. The residents’

committee also hired 60 sanitation workers at a cost of some 700,000 yuan annually.

What bothers the villagers most is not so much the cost itself, but discrepancies

between responsibility and power. For example, the village used to charge tenants a

garbage fee at 3 yuan per person monthly, but the municipal government has banned

this practice. When Dongguan launched a campaign to make the city eligible for

designation as a “Sanitary City” (weisheng chengshi) under a newly promulgated

national standard, the municipal government forced the community to exchange all

their existing garbage bins for new models, which cost thousands each. “The higher-

ups send orders, and we pay for them” (shangmian xia tiaozi, women huaqian).

In sum, the village continues to be self-financing even in an urbanized context.

Spatially, they are right in the center of the city. But in terms of public resource

24 Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Dongguan all have local regulations regarding the employment of managers for rental property. For example, Dongguan’s guideline stipulates that every 100-150 rental units (or 200-250 tenants) need to have one manager, according to Dongguan Municipality Rental Property Managers Recruitment and Management Rules (Dongguanshi chuzuwu guanliyuan zhaopin luyung ji guanlibanfa), 2009.

24

distribution, they are significantly marginalized. The villagers have struggled to cope

with the dramatic transformations wrought by the urban environment, and used their

own resources to manage and finance a swollen community of strangers. Even though

they have been nominally turned into urban neighborhoods, they have not been

treated as such by the municipal government. They are excluded from public

financing and related resource allocation. And, more importantly, they are excluded

from the decision-making and rule-setting processes that govern how public resources

are distributed and how this system may change in the future. From this perspective,

neither native villagers nor migrant tenants have been entitled to full citizenship. They

are in this specific sense “alien nationals” (Wu, 2010) in their own cities.

Conclusion

It is clear that rural-urban dualism of public goods provision has not been

resolved in the process of urbanization. Because urban villages continue to follow the

rural track of management, finance and public goods provision, they are

institutionally marginalized by the urban system. The urbanized villages have to be

self-financed after their farmland is taken away by the cities. They have to find a way

to sustain growing communities, while continuing to bear the stigma of being

backward, overly dependent on the villages’ collective economy, and incapable of

assimilating themselves in the modern urban sector. In contrast with the common

sense that incorporation into an urban jurisdiction will bring about rising fiscal

investment, in China, it is the rural villages that are financing the growth of cities.

Maoist urban-rural divide has transformed into a new center- peripheral relation that

persists serious inequality in state resource allocation.

Nor does the story end here. After three decades of aggressive urban expansion,

the central government has been putting increasing emphasis on the protection of

agricultural lands. It has become more and more difficult to convert rural land at a low

cost to support urban demands. This is the context in which the villages-in-the-city

have reemerged into the spotlight—as a very important land resource for a new wave

25

of urban reconstruction. New mechanisms need to be created to facilitate the

redevelopment of urbanized villages, involving complicated issues of compensation,

changes in land ownership, and the preservation or demolition of the collectives—as

demonstrated by the promulgation of aforementioned 2009 policy to redevelop the

“three olds.” These questions go beyond the amount of compensation or how the

cities are going to accommodate the floating population after all the urban villages

have been bulldozed. A deeper quandary is how public resources can be allocated and

how adequate public services can be created and equally delivered to the urban

dwellers, regardless of their hukou status.

From the perspective of citizenship, this paper demonstrates how urban

villagers are denied rights to public resource allocation due to their rural or semi-rural

stigma. Both native villagers and migrant tenants are not entitled to full citizenship.

Migrant workers have supplied the cities’ labor demand, and native villagers help

accommodate this labor force. They contribute to the city’s growth, but receive little

or no public support. The scope and nature of the urban village phenomenon, in this

sense, tells us that China’s urbanization is a process of asymmetrical integration.

Because the “right to the cities” refers not only to the right to stay in the cities, but

also the right to shape the process of urbanization (Lefebvre, 1996; Harvey, 2003), the

transformation of urban villages relates not only to issues of resource distribution, but

also to questions of transparency, participatory democracy, and how “differential

citizenship” might be eliminated.

26

Table 1 Population of Pearl River Delta’s Three Largest Cities

de juri hukou population* de facto population** Guangzhou 7,917,646

12,700,800

Shenzhen 2,414,500 10,357,938

Dongguan 1,787,300

8,220,237

*Population by the end of 2009 from 2010 Yearbooks**Ordinary population (changzhu renkou) from 2010 Population Census

27

Figure 1 Huangcun Village in Nancheng District, Dongguan City

Figure 2 The self-financed police station in Huangcun Village

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