Peter Ho

China's ‘Developmental Outsourcing’: A critical examination of Chinese global ‘land grabs’ discourse

This paper examines Chinas overseas land-based investments in agriculture. Our hypothesis is that – despite extensive media, NGO and scholarly attention to Chinasglobal resource-seeking activities – the discourse on Chinese ‘land grabs’ is insufficiently informed by the available data. Moreover, we argue that Chinas overseas land-based investments are part of what can be termed ‘developmental outsourcing’. Different from a conventional interpretation of outsourcing, this concept refers to global off-shoring in which the state plays a key role in planning, intervention and regulation. This paper does not aim to provide definitive answers, yet intends to scrutinize the data and re-examine the ‘land grabbing’ discourse. This will be done by studying land-based investments in terms of incidence, size and geographical dispersion over 1949-2011. Where relevant and possible, other variables such as the investor, data source, investment type andoutcome will be discussed. Lastly, we will also discuss the data quality and reliability.

The Clash over State and Collective Property : The Making of the Rangeland Law

Along with growing attention to the environment over the 1980s and 1990s, rangeland protection and management have surfaced on the political agenda of the central leadership. However, current rangeland policy has been beset with problems of implementation, and desertification and rangeland degradation are reported to have increased at an alarming rate. The main pillar of rangeland policy in China is the 1985 Rangeland Law. This paper deals in detail with the formulation and rationale of the law, the state institutions involved in its making, their clashes of interests, as well as central-provincial relations. It shows that the most critical issue and inherent contradiction of the law concerns land tenure and the distinction between state and collective property.

Institutions in Transition

Studying institutional change regardless of whether it is focused on transitional or developing economies, may prove most fruitful when focused on its structuring of the means of production—land, labour, and capital. This book does exactly that: it singles out land as an object of study and places it in the context of one of the world’s largest and most populous countries undergoing institutional reform, the People’s Republic of China. The book argues that private property protected by law, the principle of ‘getting-the-prices-right’, and the emergence of effectively functioning markets can not be imposed, but are the outcome of a society’s historical development and institutional fabric. In other words, the creation of institutions that are trusted and perceived as ‘credible’ in the eyes of social actors hinges in part on choice and timing in relation to the constellation of socio-economic and political parameters. It is demonstrated that disregarding these might result in the establishment of ‘empty institutions’ that have little effect on social actors’ actions, and can even cause rising inequality, bad land stewardship, and social conflict. The book concludes that the key to understanding China’s successes in rural reforms lies in the state’s hands-off approach and upholding an intentional institutional ambiguity that allowed for local, credible institutions to arise.

Perspectives of Time and Change: Rethinking Embedded Environmental Activism in China

Chinas burgeoning civil society has often been characterized as state-led or corporatist. However, these concepts fail to capture the current dynamics of Chinese social activism, as they cannot account for two of its critical features. First, the fact that the nature of Chinese state—society relations is not a matter of the former dictating the latter, but rather a kind of “negotiated symbiosis.” Second, the semiauthoritarian context necessitates that Chinas social activists develop a diffuse, and informal rather than formal, network of relations. This informal web of relations has yielded undeniable political as well as societal legitimacy. It is against this background that we put forward the concept of “embedded social activism.” Since its initial emergence, environmental activism has resourcefully adapted to, rather than opposed, the political conditions of its era. The hallmark, and in fact, the success of Chinas reforms lie in their strategy of incremental change. Therefore, we might view embedded environmentalism as a transient phase which is itself changing through time, a transitional feature of a burgeoning civil society in a semiauthoritarian context.

In defense of endogenous, spontaneously ordered development: institutional functionalism and Chinese property rights

Neo-liberal observers have frequently raised the red alert over insecure property rights in developing and emerging economies. Development would be at a crossroads: either institutional structure needs changing or it risks a full-fledged collapse. Yet, instead of focusing on the enigma between economic growth versus ‘perverse’ institutions, this contribution posits a functionalist argument that the persistence of institutions points to their credibility. In other words, once institutions persist they fulfill a function for actors. Chinese institutions have been frequently criticized for lack of security, formality and transparency, yet paradoxically, these apparently ‘perverse’, inefficient institutions have sustained since the late 1970s throughout the entire economic boom. Key to understanding this might be the realization that institutional constellation stems from an endogenous, spontaneously ordered development in which the state is merely one of many actors that ultimately shape institutions into a highly complicated and intertwined whole. The argument is substantiated by reviewing the case of Chinas rural-urban land rights structure with particular reference to its markets, history and rights of ownership and use.

Mao's War Against Nature? The Environmental Impact of the Grain-First Campaign in China

It is generally assumed that agricultural policies in Maoist China – in particular through mass movements – have led to grave ecological destruction. The movement believed to have had the most catastrophic outcome is the “Grain-first campaign”, which allegedly urged farmers to cultivate as much grain as possible. It is said that in the arid, pastoral areas indiscriminate reclamation led to desertification and a dramatic drop in livestock numbers. However, this article demonstrates that there is a fundamental lack of concordance between textual sources written during the collectivist period versus those of the post-collectivist period. A filtering process is apparent: misrepresentation of the Grain-first movement as lopsidedly geared to grain self-sufficiency instead of integrated development; denial of the concern for environmental protection of certain mass campaigns (e.g. Learn-from-Dazhai and Wushenzhao movements); and the juggling of statistics to support an inaccurate reading of the Maoist era. The article argues that the Grain-first movement has become a powerful tool in directing the “historical gaze” towards an overly negative appraisal of the Maoist period. In turn, this caused a misguided interpretation of the socio-political context in which mass campaigns evolved.

The Wasteland Auction Policy in Northwest China: Solving Environmental Degradation and Rural Poverty?

According to the statistics, China had a total of 108 million ha of undeveloped land or wasteland in 1995. Of this figure, 35.4 million ha is suitable for agriculture and 63.0 million ha is suited for forestry purposes (Zhang and Li, 1997: 1413). Wasteland includes a wide variety of land resources scattered over the whole nation. It varies from forested hills and mountains in the subtropical region of Yunnan province to the dry steppe and pockets of desert in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region. According to the definitions of the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, this undeveloped land can be divided into wasteland, waste mountains, sandy waste and waste gullies (huangdi, huangshan, huangtan and huanggou). The term ‘wasteland’, however, is misleading as a great portion of this land is in use by peasants for animal grazing, small-scale forestry and the exploitation of forest by-products, such as Matsutake mushrooms, medicinal herbs and animals. The direct use of wasteland generally yields low economic returns, while its ecology is often fragile. For this reason, the Chinese state has for long sought means to develop wasteland either for purposes of rural poverty alleviation, soil and water conservation, and even defence.

Sustainability in rangeland systems: introduction of fuzzy multi objective decision making.

It is widely recognized that approaching sustainability in rangeland management needs to take many criteria into consideration which unavoidably calls for the application of multi-criteria decision making approach. Bearing conflicting objectives in mind, which are mainly conservation and utilization, we have introduced fuzzy multi-objectives decision making as a suitable approach when sustainability in rangeland management is a goal. While some extensions of the approach are discussed, interactive fuzzy multi objective linear programming, and a framework including three stages are presented to make it more applicable. The proposed approach in this paper comprises three important advantages for decision makers to apply: first, it is a useful tool to involve trade-offs analysis between the conflicting objectives; second, it challenges to uncertainty of any decision in sustainable rangeland management; and third, it considers existing alternatives under given constraints by developing new alternatives for all possible situations.

Empty institutions, non-credibility and pastoralism: China’s grazing ban, mining and ethnicity

When institutional function is disregarded in property rights reforms, there may be two outcomes. One, the new institution grows detached from actors’ praxis and evolves into an ‘empty institution’, allowing those governing to enforce without enforcing, while those governed can continue what they did. Two, the institution evolves into a ‘non-credible’ institution, which may collapse or change due to rising conflict. The concepts are applied to China’s Grazing Ban, a profound measure to regulate the nation’s largest land resource: grassland. A survey and interviews in 11 villages in Northwest China demonstrate that most herders feel that a ban is not appropriate for conservation. Over half perceive negative ecological change, while there are complaints over adverse income effects. More than one-third admit to illegal (night-time) grazing, leading to conflicts between enforcers and herders. The ban’s lack of credibility may be attributed to its disregard of the function of land for social welfare. Through an institutional analysis of grassland reforms, it is demonstrated that the states reasons to keep imposing the ban are as much driven by ecological conservation as by the need to ascertain control over a vast frontier endowed with mineral reserves and inhabited by ethnic minorities.

An endogenous theory of property rights: opening the black box of institutions

From a neo-liberal paradigm, secure, formal and private property rights are crucial to foster sustained development. From this follows that institutions that fail to respond to shifting socio-economic opportunities are pushed to new arrangements. The enigma is posed by developments on the ground. Why would the removal of authoritarian institutions during the Arab Spring or Iraq war not increase market efficiency but rather cause the reverse, while China and India, despite persisting insecure, informal and common institutions, featured sustained growth? This collection posits that understanding these paradoxes requires a refocusing from form to function, detached from normative assumptions about institutional appearance. In so doing, three things are accomplished. First, starting from case studies on land, it is ascertained that the argument can be meaningfully extended to labor, capital and beyond. Second, the argument validates the ‘credibility thesis’ – that is, once institutions persist, they fulfill a function. Third, the collection studies ‘development, broadly construed’, by including the modes of production and beyond, the rural and urban, the developed and developing. This is why it reviews property rights from China to India, and from Mexico to Malaysia, covering issues such as customary rights, mining and pastoralism, but also state-owned banks, trade unions and notaries.