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Guangdong: collective land ownership and the making of a new middle class

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In Brief

Across China, ongoing industrialisation and urbanisation has led to many local villagers being pushed off their land, sometimes with inadequate compensation.

But in some parts of the country — and especially in the southern province of Guangdong — rural communities retain collective ownership of much of their land when it is converted into urban neighbourhoods or industrial zones.

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In these areas, Mao-era rural collectives have not disappeared. Instead, they have been able to convert themselves into property companies that sometimes generate very sizeable incomes from industrial zones and urban property. Every native villager owns a share in the property company, which is really the old rural collective with a new title.

Rather than being relocated, many Guangdong villagers have retained their homes in the villages’ old residential areas, which have become islands surrounded by office buildings or factories. This scheme for collective retention of land has also been adopted across most of the Pearl River Delta region, the heartland of the world’s export industry, where it benefits millions of native residents. There are currently 139 villages-in-the-city (chengzhongcun) within urban Guangzhou, the provincial capital. Cumulatively, they own about one-fifth of the city’s urban land, including parts of Guangzhou’s new central business district. Villages-in-the-city own an even larger share of Guangdong’s other great city, Shenzhen.

When collective agriculture was abandoned after Mao’s death and fields were allocated to families to farm, the land itself continued to be owned by the former ‘production teams’ of 15 to 50 neighbouring families. Guangdong was the first province to develop its export industry, and in the 1980s the province started urbanising rapidly. The collectives were allowed to develop their own initiatives, and some of them combined at the village level and registered as shareholding companies to create industrial parks and urban property developments. It is not easy to draw a line between a village’s political administration and the so-called company, because the village’s Party secretary is usually the CEO, and village officials make up the board of directors. Much of the profit is distributed as dividends to each villager, with other portions allocated to provide them with a mini-welfare state, including heavily subsidised medical care and nursing homes.

These village collectives/companies are powerful property owners. They run their own fiefdoms with their own police-like security forces and administrations. As a group, they are influential with the local city governments. For example, in a heavily industrialised village in the Pearl River Delta that now contains more than 200 large factories, all land within the village territory is owned by the shareholding company, as are many of the factory buildings. Dividends alone give each family an income higher than the average urban Chinese family. Villagers also hold a monopoly on erecting apartment buildings to rent, and almost every family owns one or more large buildings, and rent flats and dormitory space to the area’s 70,000 factory workers. Almost all of the villagers live today in a high-rise housing estate with two stories of underground parking, a large social club and large swimming pool. Only native villagers are allowed to reside in these luxury apartments, guarded behind high fences by a uniformed security corps.

By contrast, in a neighbourhood along a subway line in Shenzhen, each of a village’s 14 production teams, averaging 50 families apiece, became a separate shareholding property company. Each group of families jointly owns the land where more than 10,000 city residents live, and each provides basic services such as policing, rubbish collection, street lighting and so on. Dividends and rental apartment buildings give all of the native families an upper middle-class income.

Another village-in-the-city, located near the new central business district of Guangzhou, collectively retained a portion of its former fields and built office blocks and hotels. Villagers knocked down their own houses to build cheap five- to eight-story apartment buildings, and rented rooms to tens of thousands of migrant workers. The land underneath remains collectively owned, and the village shareholding company recently knocked down all these apartment buildings to construct a complex containing 22 office, hotel and residential towers, ranging from 35 to 51 stories. When completed, every bit of this property will be collectively owned.

In yet another village-in-the-city — the first in Guangzhou to redevelop in this way — each family was given control of five to six luxury flats, one to live in and the rest to rent out. Everything, though, is the property of the village collective/company, which is constructing massive office towers and an ultra-fancy shopping mall on site. The company has used valuable land to erect four village lineage halls (pictured), made out of traditional brickwork and handcrafted ornamentation, to honour the villagers’ traditions and make a very public assertion that this is all ancestral land.

In all four sites the children of the native families attend excellent schools that are specially reserved for them and that are heavily subsidised by the shareholding companies, which also provide university scholarships. The new generation will thus be equipped to enter urban middle-class professions. While it is not easy for the formerly rural populace to move beyond dependence on dividends and rents into gainful urban careers, the ground is being laid for the future.

Jonathan Unger is Professor at the Department of Political and Social Change, and head of the Contemporary China Centre, the Australian National University.

Him Chung is Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography, Hong Kong Baptist University.

One response to “Guangdong: collective land ownership and the making of a new middle class”

  1. Interesting. Spent time in Kunming, which also has 100+ chengzhongcun. They are all planned to be razed as part of the city’s urban renewal plan. Many have already been demolished. I suppose they never became powerful enough as it sounds like they did in Guangzhou.

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