Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air Pollution 9780691203409, 9780691203393, 9780691203416

Citation preview

gov e r n i ng t h e u r ba n i n ch i na a n d i n di a

P r i nc e t on S t u di e s i n C on t e m p or a r y C h i n a Yu Xie, series editor China’s Urban Champions, Kyle A. Jaros The Contentious Public Sphere, Ya-Wen Lei

Governing the Urban in China and India l a n d gr a b s, slu m cl e a r a nce , a n d t h e wa r on a i r pol lu t ion

xuefei r en

pr i nce­t on u n i v e r sit y pr e ss pr i nce­t on a n d ox for d

Copyright © 2020 by Prince­ton University Press Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to permissions@press​.­princeton​.­edu Published by Prince­ton University Press 41 William Street, Prince­ton, New Jersey 08540 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press​.­princeton​.­edu All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-0-691-20340-9 ISBN (pbk.) 978-0-691-20339-3 ISBN (e-­book) 978-0-691-20341-6 British Library Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available Editorial: Meagan Levinson and Jacqueline Delaney Production Editorial: Brigitte Pelner Production: Erin Suydam Publicity: Kate Hensley (US) and Kathryn Stevens (UK) Copyeditor: Melanie Mallon Jacket Images: (Top) Courtesy of Xuefei Ren; (bottom) courtesy of Alan Lepp This book has been composed in Arno Printed on acid-­free paper ∞ Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca 10 ​9 ​8 ​7 ​6 ​5 ​4 ​3 ​2 ​1

For Alan and Rivka

c on t e n t s

Acknowl­edgments  ​ix List of Figures and ­Tables  ​xi Map of China  ​xii Map of India  ​xiii 1 Introduction

1

2 What Is Urban about Urban China and India?

17

3 Land Grabs and Protests from Wukan to Singur

35

4 Urban Redevelopment in Guangzhou and Mumbai

56

5 Airpocalypse in Beijing and Delhi

91

6 Territorial and Associational Politics in Historical Perspective

118

7 Conclusion

134 Appendix  ​143 Notes  153 References  ​163 Index  ​185

vii

ac k now l ­e d g m e n t s

when i traveled for the first time to India in 2010, I was prepared to be overwhelmed. But colleagues and friends opened their doors for me, and that made all the difference. In Delhi, I met dear friends Partha Mukhopadhyay, a se­nior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, and his wife, Kavita Iyengar, an artist and economist at the Asia Development Bank. They welcomed me into their home, and I’ve stayed with them in Delhi e­ very time since. In Mumbai, Liza Weinstein introduced me to Devika Mahadevan, who kindly hosted me and guided me into the world of Mumbai’s nongovernmental organ­izations (NGOs). In Kolkata, Manashi Ray, a PhD student at Michigan State University at the time (and now a tenured professor of sociology), arranged to have me visit her f­ amily and relatives in the town of Singur. Just outside Kolkata, I was a wide-­eyed passenger in a car driven by Gavin Shatkin, a prolific urban scholar of Southeast Asia, as we toured the city’s periphery, where buffalos roamed among new towns ­under construction. On returning from that first trip to India, I was fortunate to receive a residential fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. During that year-­long fellowship, I had the luxury of time to read extensively on the historiography of local governance in China and India. I presented the initial ideas for this book at the center’s colloquia and received excellent feedback. I want to thank the center’s colleagues and 2011–12 cohort of fellows. The bulk of the fieldwork for the book was conducted between 2013 and 2016, when I made multiple trips to India and China. I would like to thank the ­people who kindly agreed to talk to me in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Singur, Beijing, Guangzhou, and Wukan. They ranged from local officials, developers, residents, and representatives of NGOs to artists, journalists, writers, and environmental scientists. Without their input and insights, I would not have understood the contestations over housing, land, and environmental issues in ­these places. As I dove deeper into the research, I tested out ideas during pre­sen­ta­tions at many conferences and workshops. Many thanks to my gracious hosts: Mary Gallagher and George Steinmetz at the University of Michigan, Deborah ix

x 

ack now l­e d gm e n t s

Davis at Yale University, Yu Xie at Prince­ton University, Tony Orum and ­Tingwei Zhang at the University of Illinois–­Chicago, Saskia Sassen at Columbia University, Dali Yang at the University of Chicago, Youqin Huang at SUNY–­A lbany, Shubhra Guruani at York University (Toronto), Partha Mukhopadhyay at the Centre for Policy Research (Delhi), Yinghong Huang at Jindal Global University (Sonipat), M. Vijayabaskar at the Madras Institute of Development Studies (Chennai), Luiz Cesar de Queiroz Ribeiro at the ­Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Ye Lin at Sun Yat-­Sen University, Fox Hu at Hong Kong Education Institute, and Loraine Kennedy at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. The book would have taken much longer to finish without the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Socie­ties in 2016–17. I was based at the Newberry Library in Chicago, where Bradford Hunt, an urban historian of public housing, warmly hosted me and offered helpful comments on chapter drafts. The final rounds of revisions benefited from a book publication grant from the China Studies Center at the University of Michigan. With the center’s support, I was able in 2018 to or­ga­ nize an intense day-­long workshop at which colleagues critiqued an early manuscript of the book. Special thanks to t­ hose who participated—­Liza Weinstein, Martin Murray, William Hurst, Peter Carroll, Sanjeev Vidyarthi, and Marco Garrido. Lastly, I want to thank my husband, Alan Lepp, who has always been the first reader of every­thing I write. His insistence on clear writing has forced me to sharpen my prose, and his wide-­ranging interest from lit­er­a­ture to street photography reminds me that ­there are so many ways of storytelling, and social science is just one of them. Our baby Rivka was born at the end of this book proj­ect. One day soon, we hope to take her to see the colorful and vibrant cities that are featured in the pages that follow.

f ig u r e s a n d ­t a bl e s

Figures 1.1 Xiancun, Guangzhou 1.2 The airport slum, Mumbai 2.1 Urbanization rates of China and India 3.1 Map of Guangdong province and Wukan 3.2 Wukan harbor with fishing boats 3.3 Wukan village council building 3.4 Lin Zuluan, the newly elected village leader 3.5 Map of West Bengal and Singur 3.6 Railroads connecting Singur to Kolkata 3.7 Market streets, Singur 4.1 Map of Xiancun in Pearl River Newtown 4.2 A street lined with stores, Xiancun 4.3 Redeveloped Liede village, 2013 4.4 A mi­grant pulling a cart, with W ­hotel in the background 4.5 Ongoing de­mo­li­tions at Xiancun 4.6 The international terminal of the Mumbai airport 4.7 Map of Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport and surrounding slums 4.8 Slum residents overlooking the airport runways 4.9 Streets inside the airport slum

2 6 21 40 41 44 45 50 51 51 62 64 66 73 74 78 79 80 81

Tables

5.1 The features of the Target Responsibility System for air pollution control in Beijing 5.2 The top twenty most polluted cities in the world xi

100 115

HEILONGJIANG

JILIN ER

XINJIANG

INN

GANSU NINGXIA

QINGHAI

N

MO

SHAANXI

Tianjin

JIA

HENAN HUBEI

SICHUAN Chengdu

LIAONING

Beijing

HEBEI SHANXI G DON SHAN

Xi’an XIZANG

IA

L GO

Wuhan

HUNAN GUIZHOU YUNNAN

0

Map of China

Shanghai

ZHEJIANG

FUJIAN

Quanzhou

GUANGXI GUANGDONG Shantou Guangzhou Shenzhen Hong Kong Macau HAINAN

Miles 125 250 375 500

SU

ANHUI

JIANGXI

Chongqing

NG

TAIWAN

JAMMU AND KASHMIR HIMACHAL PRADESH PUNJAB

UTTARAKHAND HARYANA

Delhi

RAJASTHAN

BIHAR

Varanasi

Allahabad

CH

HA TT ISG

AR

MADHYA PRADESH

Ahmedabad

MAHARASHTRA Mumbai

TELANG

ANA

Hyderabad

KA

RA AP

A

ODISHA

SH

TAMIL NADU

260

390

Miles 520

Map of India

AR OB A M A N A ND N I C

Chennai

ALA

KER

130

MIZORAM

R

Bangalore

0

TRIPURA

NAGALAND MANIPUR

AND

K ATA

AN

WEST BENGAL

ASSAM MEGHALAYA

DE

DH

RN

GOA

H

JHARKHAND

GUJARAT

AL CH NA H ARU ADES PR

SIKKIM

UTTAR PRADESH

gov e r n i ng t h e u r ba n i n ch i na a n d i n di a

1 Introduction

i trudged through dirt lanes muddied by rain on my way back to Xiancun— an urban village sitting right in the ­middle of Guangzhou’s central business district. It was late December of 2016, and I wanted to snap photos of the place at night. Urban villages, called chengzhongcun in Chinese, are hybrid informal settlements blending urban locations with rural collective land owner­ship. Originally ­these ­were agricultural villages, some even dating back centuries to China’s imperial era. In the 1980s, many villages began to lose farmland to rampant urban construction led by developers in conjunction with the city government. To make a living, villa­gers started “growing apartments” on their remaining land and renting out rooms to mi­grant workers. More than three hundred such urban villages have appeared in Guangzhou, the largest city in the Pearl River Delta in south China. Almost half of the city’s inhabitants (six million out of thirteen million) live on t­ hese pockets of rural land engulfed by urban development.1 Sandwiched between sleek skyscrapers, Xiancun is a world apart from the formal city that surrounds it. The city outside is complete with state-­of-­the-­art subways, new BRT (bus rapid transit) lines, and high-­rise residential towers catering to the growing ­middle class. Xiancun, by contrast, is a maze of dark, narrow alleyways, with entangled electric wires blocking the sky, mounds of garbage strewn everywhere, and apartment buildings packed together so tightly that residents of adjacent buildings can shake hands with one another through their win­dows—­hence their nickname “hand-­shake buildings.” Urban villages still fall u­ nder the category of rural land owner­ship, which renders them extraterritorial entities in the city, and thus not subject to city planning and zoning regulations. Correspondingly, ­these places do not benefit much from the city’s infrastructure funds, which explains the prevalence of haphazard construction and lack of basic ser­vices (figure 1.1). Although urban villages are highly transient communities, each village has its own daily rhythms. In Xiancun, the busiest hours are eve­nings, when mi­ grant tenants stream back from their work. At that time the local market is 1

2  Ch a p te r 1

figure 1.1. Xiancun, Guangzhou

bustling. Vegetable and meat vendors hawk their products with chants and hollers of bargain prices. Narrow alleys slither ahead, lit up with businesses of all kinds—­groceries, hole-­in-­the-­wall restaurants, hairdressers, and electronics shops plugging pirated DVDs and cellphone cards. Some workers perch on the sidewalks of the alleys to enjoy their dinner. One shop owner brings outside a small TV, tuning in to a soap opera about the anti-­Japanese war—an always popu­lar genre in China—­and soon a crowd of male residents huddles around to watch; the TV also attracts onlookers atop a mound across the alley, a dozen or so of them sitting single file, like birds on a wire. In contrast to the sanitized, generic apartment buildings towering above, the urban villages—­their sounds, smells, colors, and residents themselves—­give a ­human touch to the endlessly expanding metropolis. Nobody lives ­here for long, but every­body is welcome. The grocery around which p­ eople gather to watch TV is meaningfully named “settling point” (luojiaodian). And the con­ ve­nience store next door is called “having a home” (youjia), signaling that this is a temporary settling place for mi­g rants from all corners of the country.

In trodu ct ion  

3

Xiancun stands out among Guangzhou’s urban villages for its decades-­long strug­gle with the municipal government over redevelopment. B ­ ecause of the village’s prime location, the municipal government and developers eye the valuable land for property development. Negotiations with villa­gers, which began in the early 2000s, have been interrupted by corruption scandals involving village chiefs and municipal officials, numerous villa­gers’ protests, and crisscrossing lawsuits filed by both villa­gers and vari­ous branches of the municipal government. Soon a­ fter I started researching Xiancun in 2013, a succession of scandals ensued: several se­nior city officials ­were prosecuted on corruption charges arising out of their involvement with the redevelopment; the village head embezzled a large sum of funds and emigrated to Australia; and other se­nior village leaders ­were sentenced to several years in prison. Negotiations between developers and villa­gers have progressed slowly and in piecemeal fashion. Most families had already signed contracts with the developer and moved out by 2018. As soon as a f­ amily agreed to accept compensation and leave, the developer would send in de­mo­li­tion crews and knock down their building. Xiancun is only a few hundred yards away from the city’s new luxury ­hotel, the W, but it resembled a war zone ­under siege, with half-­gutted buildings missing a ceiling or a wall, and de­mo­li­tion debris dumped everywhere. The holdout families, called “nail households”—in reference to their stubbornness and to how their buildings protruded from the razed landscape around them—­were negotiating with the developer for higher compensation; while ­doing so, they continued to rent out rooms to mi­grant workers for extra income. On the night when I returned to Xiancun, I captured some good shots of the village against the spectacular backdrop of the city’s futuristic skyline. I did not have to hide my camera, as it was ­after dark and raining, and village security was nowhere to be seen. On prior visits I had been s­ topped by security guards hired by the developer. According to a notice issued by the village council a few years e­ arlier, only p­ eople living in the village could enter the place, and all visitors had to register with village security. But that night, every­ body was busy with their own business, and nobody paid attention to me. I felt relaxed and pleased about my eve­ning return. As I was about to leave, I spotted an army of police assembling at the village’s main entrance. By now, it was already ­after eight ­o’clock, and I wondered what this fuss could be about. I headed t­ oward the group, but before I could approach anyone, the crowd started marching lockstep into the village. Instinctively, I followed them. On closer look, I saw that the group was a hodgepodge of ­people—­some donning city police uniforms, ­others wearing the uniforms of village security officers, but most in ordinary street clothes. They came from several dif­fer­ent units of the local jiedao (translated as “street offices”), China’s neighborhood-­level government bureaucracy that deals

4  Ch a p t e r 1

directly with urban villages. About half of the group w ­ ere female officers, who, I sensed, did not know one another well. Some p­ eople ­were chatting quietly, and o­ thers just marched in silence with a dreadful look on their ­faces, as if ­eager to go home. The group split into a few smaller teams, and I de­cided to trail one of them. Nobody seemed to notice me. We walked on, and the rain started hitting harder. It was not long before I realized that this was some sort of inspection of mi­grant workers who ­were renting rooms in the village. The group’s leader was holding pages of renters’ registration rolls, listing exact locations of buildings, street addresses, and the names of tenants living inside. The group was g­ oing door to door to verify that the ­people on their rec­ords still lived in ­these buildings. They chose to do the inspection in the eve­ning ­because that was when most tenants ­were likely to be home. But the inspection team had no way to enter a building if residents ­didn’t let them in. If they ­were buzzed in, male police officers would proceed first, followed by mostly female officers. For many, it was their first time stepping into ­these dark, crumbling buildings occupied by the city’s underclass. Urban villages are routinely portrayed in the media as dens of crime, drug trafficking, and prostitution, and the f­ aces of the officers tensed as they ventured through the dark stairwells. The group I followed had some luck with one building, as tenants opened the first-­floor gate and let them in. We walked up to the fifth floor and knocked on the door of one apartment. The door opened from inside, and I saw a tiny room packed with six bunk beds and ten men—­ranging in age from their early twenties to their sixties. The officers asked for their IDs, took a picture of each ID, and wrote down their names, hometown, and other basic information. Some tenants looked concerned, but ­others did not even bother to get up from bed, continuing to stare at the screens of their cellphones and other gadgets. The officers uttered warnings about fire h­ azards and eventually left for the next building. The police had no search warrant to enter ­these apartments, and the mi­grant tenants w ­ ere ­under no obligation to show their IDs, but u­ nder China’s deeply entrenched urban-­rural order, mi­grants—to avoid harassment by the police—­almost always show their IDs when asked. ­After two hours, the inspection began to wind down, and by then I had followed the police into several buildings. The group took a break, and I watched a female officer use a walkie-­talkie to communicate with other groups still d­ oing inspections. A ­ fter she finished talking, her eyes landed on me. “Who are you?” she demanded. O ­ thers turned and began to stare at me. Soon I was surrounded by a group of about twenty p­ eople from vari­ous units of the local jiedao. I responded that I was an academic teaching in the United States and was in Guangzhou to research urban villages. She asked for my ID and then said to me, “This is our secret operation—we d­ idn’t even tell the district

In trodu ct ion  

5

and city government. How did you find out?” I replied that I had noticed a big crowd of police and out of curiosity tagged along. She looked angry. She ordered me not to leave and then dialed the local police. A few minutes ­later, a police car with piercing sirens pulled up sharply at the curb next to us. Two police officers popped out. In response to their questions, I again explained that I was ­doing research on urban villages and had stumbled on their operation. They scrutinized my Michigan driver’s license but then ­were not sure what to do with me. Every­body watched and waited. My hands started to sweat, my body tensed, and I could hear my own heartbeat. Then the more se­nior police officer turned to me and said, “This is a secret operation, and we ­don’t want anybody to know about it. You need to delete all pictures you took. Then we can let you go.” I slid my hand into my left pocket and reached for my local phone—an old Samsung of my ­father’s that I used whenever I returned to China—­and handed it to him. In my other pocket was my iPhone with a superior camera, with which I had taken many pictures that night. Examining the Samsung phone, the police officer saw only old ­family photos. Once he assured himself that ­there ­were no pictures from the village, he allowed me to go. Relieved, I scurried t­ oward the closest street, hailed a cab, and bolted. In the taxi’s rearview mirror, I could see the small crowd still congregated at the village entrance, finishing another inspection of this urban village that the municipal government has been trying for nearly two de­cades to remove. That night was the closest encounter I had ever had with the local Chinese police. But for villa­gers and mi­grant tenants, that night prob­ably was no dif­fer­ent from ­others. They are routinely harassed by the local police, simply ­because the value of the land on which their community stands has become too high for an informal settlement of this sort to continue to exist. A door-­to-­door inspection such as the one I encountered in Guangzhou would be unthinkable in Indian cities. At my fieldwork site in Mumbai—­a large slum area outside the city’s international airport (figure 1.2)—­state authorities for years have strug­gled to conduct a survey to find out how many ­people live ­there and for how long. Such information can be used to determine who is eligible for compensation in the case of de­mo­li­tion and redevelopment. At times the state government tried to work with housing rights NGOs (nongovernmental organ­izations) to conduct the survey, and at other times it tried to do it alone or with a private developer. Each time, however, the state government met re­sis­tance: residents would lock out surveyors from their h­ ouses and even or­ga­nize open protests. Despite repeated attempts, the state government never could finish the survey. The ease of raiding an urban village and getting information from residents (in the Chinese case) and the difficulty of ­doing so (in the Indian case) suggest

6  Ch a p te r 1

figure 1.2. The airport slum, Mumbai

a crucial difference in how cities in China and India are governed. China has a set of local territorial institutions and authorities that directly intervene in local affairs, such as the officials and employees of jiedao, who conducted the inspection in Xiancun. India does not have such territorial institutions, and the bureaucracies within the state government are too fragmented at the local level to directly intervene in urban affairs. In other words, China and India have two dif­fer­ent sets of subnational institutions, which have given rise to dif­fer­ent forms of urban governance. As I demonstrate in the rest of the book, urban governance in China exhibits a territorial logic, centered on territorial institutions and authorities such as local governments and officials, and urban governance in India features an associational logic, contingent on alliance building among the state, the private sector, and civil society groups. Drawing on historical-­comparative analyses and ethnographic fieldwork, this book explains how the territorial and associational approaches to governing cities are contested in each case, and how both approaches have produced new forms of in­equality and exclusion.

In t rodu ction  

7

Defamiliarizing the Chinese City China has experienced explosive urban growth since the last quarter of the twentieth c­ entury, and Chinese cities have attracted significant research attention. Over time, an unspoken consensus has emerged in the scholarship on urban China: Chinese cities are unique, exceptional, and therefore do not allow for meaningful comparisons with cities in other countries. Urban villages, for example, have been the subject of a large body of scholarship. But most scholars see ­these villages as uniquely Chinese, the product of China’s relentless urban growth, large-­scale migration, housing shortages, and dual-­ track land market that differentiates state-­owned urban land from collectively owned rural land.2 But my research about cities elsewhere has led me to believe that urban development in China is not as unique and incomparable as experts maintain. The proliferation of urban villages stems from an endemic housing crisis for the urban poor, a prob­lem faced by many cities throughout the world. In cities from India to Brazil, large populations dwell in vari­ous kinds of informal settlements marked by ambiguous land owner­ship, precarious tenure security, and inadequate infrastructure. In Mumbai, for example, 41 ­percent of the city’s population lives in slums (Government of India 2011), and in Rio de Janeiro, 22 ­percent of the city’s residents live in favelas (Hurrell 2011). Like Xiancun, some slums and favelas face g­ reat pressure for their removal, simply ­because the land value has become too high for them to stay. Regarding the Mumbai airport slum that I study, the state government and developers propose to acquire the land and relocate close to half a million slum dwellers so that they can expand the airport as well as build luxury h­ otels, shopping malls, and office parks (Ren 2017a). In Rio de Janeiro, hosting the 2016 Olympics put ­great pressure on the city’s favelas: some ­were razed, while many ­others, especially ­those occupying central locations, face displacement by gentrification (Gaffney 2016). Even in Chicago, where I live, similar stories of urban poverty, housing in­equality, and real estate speculation unfold. A telling example is Cabrini-­Green, Chicago’s best-­known public housing proj­ect, which has dwindled to just a few lines of row h­ ouses surrounded by a sea of new luxury condos (Hunt 2009; Vale 2013; Austin 2018). All ­these instances speak to a similar phenomenon. First, the state and the private sector use vari­ous means to try to evict ­people. Second, residents mobilize and resist, e­ ither to gain better compensation or to fight to stay put. This pattern manifests in many countries, across dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal regimes, economic conditions, and subnational institutions. In this sense, the Chinese urban experience is far from exceptional. ­After three de­cades of studying the

8  Ch a p t e r 1

Chinese city in relative isolation, the field of urban China studies needs to move beyond the area-­studies approach and adopt a comparative perspective. This book is such an undertaking. This book draws on theoretical debates and comparative scholarship in the interdisciplinary field of global urban studies. In global urban studies, cities in the Global South have received increasing research attention, but the predominant theoretical frameworks for interpreting their transformations still derive mostly from cities in North Amer­i­ca and western Eu­rope (Robinson 2006, 2011, 2016; Roy 2009, 2015, 2016; Parnell and Robinson 2012; Schindler 2017). One example is the neoliberalism thesis, which views urban restructuring in the Global North and South as part of a larger pro­cess of market-­ oriented regulatory reforms geared t­ oward capital accumulation (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Harvey 2005). A substantial scholarship, including some works on Chinese cities, takes a revisionist approach, using empirical evidence gathered from cities in the Global South to prove and revise Western-­ based urban theories (Banerjee-­Guha 2002; He and Wu 2009). Yet this revisionist approach cannot fully capture urban social change in the Global South ­because most cities in the developing world did not experience the distinct phases of Fordism and post-­Fordist transition; their transformations, therefore, have to be explained by pro­cesses other than deindustrialization. To decenter urban theory from the West, a comparative urban scholarship has emerged in recent years that is more attuned to historical and geographic differences of urban transformations in dif­fer­ent parts of the world (Ren 2018a). Urban scholars have launched large-­scale comparative proj­ects to examine dif­fer­ent modalities of urban governance and their impact on social in­equality (Bunnell 2015; Hamel and Keil 2015; Sellers et al. 2017; Shatkin 2014, 2017). This book builds on this new comparative urban research by positioning cities in the Global South as key sites for advancing urban theory. The book defamiliarizes the Chinese city by juxtaposing urban development in China with India. India is the only other continent-­sized country experiencing a similar scale of urbanization to China. The number of urban residents in the two countries is now more than one billion and counting. In both countries, large-­scale urbanization has unleashed enormous pressures in sectors vital to daily living, such as housing, urban planning, land use, and the environment. Also, both national governments have positioned urban regions as engines for economic growth. The magnitude of urban challenges and the strategic role of urban regions for the national economy make China and India ideal laboratories to study urban governance and social change in comparative perspective. The book seeks to mine comparative insights while also drawing on history, examining how par­tic­ul­ ar forms of urban governance in China and

In trodu ct ion  

9

India have evolved over time and continue to shape both urban development and citizens’ strug­gles over housing, land, and the environment.

Urban Governance in China and India Two views on urban governance in China and India predominate ­today. The first is the state-­capacity perspective, which contrasts the power­ful local state in China with the fragmented local state in India and posits that the difference between a strong and a weak local state largely distinguishes urban governance in the two countries.3 The second view is the regime-­type perspective, which traces the key difference in urban governance between China and India to their po­liti­cal systems. This view assumes that the dif­fer­ent capacities of the local state result from China’s authoritarian and India’s demo­cratic regimes. Urban policymaking in China is fast but not accountable to citizens, as power is concentrated in local governments whose leaders are appointed from above rather than elected by constituencies. Urban policymaking in India is slow and contested, ­because of the checks and balances that come with democracy. Undoubtedly, both state capacity and po­liti­cal regimes can powerfully shape urban governance, but they offer only a partial view of how differently urban policies are made, implemented, and contested in China and India. The state-­capacity and regime-­type perspectives also leave a range of other social phenomena and pro­cesses unexplained. For example, both China and India, notwithstanding their dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal regimes and state capacity, experience endemic corruption, high levels of in­equality, widespread land grabbing, and social protests (Sun and Johnston 2009; Shue and Thornton 2017; Duara and Perry 2018). How China and India govern their cities requires a more sophisticated diagnosis than simplified dichotomies of strong versus weak state or democracy versus authoritarianism. This book pre­sents a new thesis to complement the state-­capacity and regime-­type perspectives. My central argument is that urban governance in China is territorial in nature, while that in India is associational. Territorial forms of governance in China are anchored in territorial institutions, such as the hukou system, rural collective land owner­ship, and the cadre evaluation system for promoting local officials. All t­ hese institutions enable territorial forms of governing b­ ecause they distribute rights, benefits, resources, and responsibilities according to territorial jurisdictions. By contrast, associational forms of governance depend on not territorial institutions but a dense web of networks and alliances—in constant formation and mutation—­among the state, the private sector, and civil society groups. Postreform China inherited from previous eras a set of territorially based subnational institutions. One inherited territorial institution is hukou—­the

10  Ch a p t e r 1

residency system that defines citizens’ access to social welfare by where they are officially registered as a resident. The hukou system, a paradigmatic example of Chinese territorial institutions, divides the national population into urban and rural segments, with dif­fer­ent sets of social and economic rights. Another inherited territorial institution is rural collective land owner­ship. ­Under the current setup, Chinese peasants have l­ egal rights of land owner­ship that enable them to engage in re­sis­tance against land taking based on territorial claims. In addition, postreform China has in­ven­ted a set of new territorial institutions, such as the cadre evaluation system, u­ nder which local Chinese officials are incentivized through territorial promotion criteria to boost economic growth in the areas they govern. The most dramatic example of a territorial innovation to spearhead urban development is the central government’s special economic zone (SEZ) policy. This policy has created a new megacity in China—­Shenzhen, a territory carved out from existing regional administrations and endowed with enormous decision-­making authority to experiment with deregulatory reforms (O’Donnell, Wong, and Bach 2017). Together, ­these territorial institutions turn Chinese cities into relatively autonomous po­liti­cal economic units, where the local state coordinates economic development and provides social welfare for residents. I refer to this mode of governance anchored in subnational territorial authorities and institutions as “territorial politics,” and I argue that it has led to an uneven distribution of rights and benefits across localities.4 Postliberalization India, by contrast, lacks power­ful territorial institutions and authorities at the local level, and its urban governance exhibits an associational logic contingent on alliance building. India has no territorial institutions that resemble China’s hukou, collective land owner­ship, or cadre evaluation system. Access to social welfare does not depend on where a citizen is officially registered; the lack of l­ egal land owner­ship makes Indian peasants vulnerable in cases of land acquisition; and the ­careers of local officials are influenced by many other ­factors besides economic per­for­mance within their jurisdictions. Moreover, India’s SEZs (of which t­ here are hundreds) operate very differently from ­those in China ( Jenkins, Kennedy, and Mukhopadhyay 2014), as many are schemes for property development rather than autonomous po­liti­cal economic units endowed with wide-­ranging decision-­making authority. Instead of being driven by territorial institutions, the execution of policies and proj­ects in Indian cities depends on alliance building among actors from the state, the private sector, and civil society. Urban programs—­ranging from slum clearance and infrastructure provision to environmental protection—­can succeed, fail, or be radically modified by key stakeholders through alliance building. To capture this coalition-­based mode of governance characteristic of Indian cities, I use the term “associational politics.”

In trodu ct ion  

11

Territorial and associational forms of governing can be found in both countries. In China, one can find examples of associational types of mobilization and governing, as when protesters reach out to the media to aid their cause, or when the state seeks support from NGOs to quell environmental protests before they get out of control. Conversely, in India, one can find manifestations of territorial forms of governing—­for instance, state authorities exert territorial control by announcing urban development plans and by allowing SEZs. My broader argument, however, is that the territorial approach is more consequential in China, and the associational approach is more prevalent in India. The dif­fer­ent central-­local relations in the two countries are critical for understanding the territorial logic in urban governance in China and its lack in India. China and India are almost opposites when it comes to central-­local government relations. If China is one of the world’s most decentralized countries in terms of fiscal policies and distribution of administrative power, then India is one of the least (Bardhan and Mookherjee 2006). Take, for instance, the quin­tes­sen­tial urban ­matters of housing, land use, and infrastructure provision. Municipal governments in China can make most decisions without seeking approval from the provincial and central governments. In India, by contrast, urban affairs fall ­under the domain of state governments, with municipal governments wielding ­limited power and shouldering fewer responsibilities. The dif­fer­ent scales at which power, authority, and resources are delegated are perhaps the biggest ­factor shaping how cities are governed in the two countries. In China, one of the major institutional changes during the market reform era has been the devolution of both power and responsibilities from the central ministries and provincial governments to municipal authorities. China’s single-­party system has facilitated this pro­cess through its control of local officials (Landry 2008; Chung 2016).5 Municipal governments have unchecked power to launch new policies involving land, housing, and infrastructure sectors, and decision-­making power is often concentrated in the hands of mayors and party secretaries, who can make quick policy decisions without having to consult the public. But with g­ reat power comes heavy responsibility. From healthcare and education to infrastructure and affordable housing, the provision of social welfare and services—­w hich in other countries typically is shared among central, state, and local governments—­falls almost entirely in China on local governments. Chinese cities thus have become relatively autonomous po­liti­cal economic units, with city officials acting as entrepreneurs to drum up investment, enhance revenue, and provide social welfare and ser­ vices to residents. In India municipal governments lack real power, and this can be traced to both historical and con­temporary sources. The British introduced municipal

12  Ch a p t e r 1

councils in the late colonial era to better manage social tensions and to help generate revenue, but they did not devolve substantial power to municipal councils, which ­were dominated by Indians. Instead, the British retained decision-­making power within the provincial state governments that they controlled. A ­ fter in­de­pen­dence, elite politicians in the national government continued to resist devolving power to the local level, as many distrusted local politicians and bureaucrats; in the eyes of the elite, a less decentralized India was a more demo­cratic one (Khilnani 1999). A ­ fter 1990, the seventy-­third and seventy-­fourth constitutional amendments mandated the empowerment of local governments; however, the transfer of power from state governments to municipalities did not go smoothly, and the hand of regional state governments is still ubiquitously vis­i­ble in urban affairs (Weinstein, Sami, and Shatkin, 2014). The ruling parties in state governments typically do not want to relinquish power to municipal governments, especially if the latter are controlled by a dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal party. Moreover, as politicians in state governments have their constituencies in the rural sector, many of them are more interested in rolling out agricultural subsidies to court the rural vote rather than devising urban policies and tackling urban social prob­lems (Varshney 1998). Taking this situation together with the weak revenue base of Indian cities, local territorial authorities lack both power and resources, which has given rise to associational forms of governance. As no single institution or authority is in charge, to get ­things done, one has to build alliances and co­ali­ tions to garner support and minimize re­sis­tance. Some argue that the absence of strong municipal institutions has turned Indian cities into “driver-­less engines” for economic growth (Mukhopadhyay 2018).

The Study This book focuses on three of the most controversial and contested urban policy fields—­land acquisition, slum clearance, and air pollution control—to examine how differently China and India govern their cities. Land acquisition has become widespread as China and India urbanize. It is no exaggeration to say that the urban question in China and India t­ oday centers on the land question—­namely, who has the rights to land, and ­under what conditions can the state and the private sector take it away? In the housing sector, both countries face a severe housing shortage for the urban poor, and as a result, informal settlements have proliferated in large cities. The redevelopment of informal settlements offers a prime example to comparatively study urban governance and citizens’ strug­gle for their rights to housing. Urban growth in China and India is also resource intensive and has caused unpre­ce­dented levels of environmental damage. One of the most urgent environmental issues facing the

In t rodu ction  

13

two countries t­ oday is air pollution. Local and central governments in both countries have recently stepped up their efforts to curb air pollution by introducing a wide range of policy experiments and legislation. To study land acquisition, I chose a high-­profile land protest from each country. The Chinese case is the Wukan protest in Guangdong province that erupted in 2012, one of the few protests in the country that succeeded in blocking the land deal ­because of the quite extraordinary mobilization efforts of local villa­gers. Although the partial success of the protests makes it an outlier among Chinese land protests, the Wukan case nevertheless offers critical insights into contested land acquisitions in China. Wukan highlights, for instance, the country’s aggressive urban expansion, rapid loss of farmland, corruption of village officials, and repression by municipal authorities. The comparative case in India is the Singur protest, which broke out in 2006 in the state of West Bengal. As in Wukan, farmers took to the streets when they learned that their land was being acquired by the state government to enable a private com­pany to build a car factory. Villa­gers quickly mobilized, and the Singur protest triggered the eventual end of the Communist Party’s three-­ decade rule in West Bengal. The Singur protest spotlights the highly politicized nature of land acquisitions in India, characterized by strong intervention from po­liti­cal parties. For the redevelopment of informal settlements, I chose Guangzhou and Mumbai as fieldwork sites. Both cities have substantial populations that live in informal settlements, and more importantly, both have pioneered their country’s policy experiments with privately sponsored redevelopment of urban villages and slums. A ­ fter visiting several ongoing redevelopment proj­ ects in both cities, I selected Xiancun (an urban village) in Guangzhou and the airport slum (a large cluster of slums adjacent to the international airport) in Mumbai. Their coveted locations—­Xiancun sits at the center of Guangzhou’s central business district, and the airport slum abuts Mumbai’s international airport—­sealed their fate for redevelopment. In both cases, the strug­gle against eviction and de­mo­li­tion has lasted for nearly two de­cades, and they represent the most contested redevelopment proj­ects in each city, offering rich ethnographic material with which to examine the politics of slum clearance. On air pollution control, Beijing and Delhi stand out as excellent cases for comparison. Each city is the key site for major policy actions on air pollution control in its country. In Beijing, since 2009, when the U.S. embassy started publicizing real-­time air quality data, the city government has committed substantial financial resources and enacted extensive legislation ­toward reducing air pollution. In Delhi, activists have been filing public interest lawsuits urging the government to take action to improve air quality and protect public health. The tales of Beijing and Delhi spotlight the dilemma faced by t­ hese two

14  Ch a p te r 1

developing countries, caught between the imperatives of economic growth and environmental protection. Together, ­these two cities provide dynamic sites to study the contested politics of environmental governance. The book is primarily based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2013 and 2016, with follow-up visits to China and India in 2018 and 2019. During the fieldwork, I interviewed key stakeholders for each case. For land acquisition, I interviewed key participants in the Wukan and Singur protests. To research slum clearance, I interviewed local residents, developers, government officials, and representatives of housing rights NGOs in Guangzhou and Mumbai. And for the clean air campaigns, I interviewed researchers at major environmental think tanks, heads of environmental NGOs, scientists leading large nationally funded research proj­ects on air quality and public health, and prolific bloggers, journalists, and activists who write about air pollution. The fieldwork interviews are complemented by other sources, including historical censuses, policy documents, court files, urban master plans, environmental legislation, NGO reports, and documentary films.

Overview The main section of the book is or­ga­nized thematically into five chapters. Following this introduction, in chapter 2, I scrutinize the meanings and consequences of urban versus rural classifications for residents and localities in the two countries. Currently, China adopts a rather broad definition of urban localities—­based entirely on administrative status. By contrast, India has been using a rather strict urban definition—­based on administrative status, population size, density, and nonagricultural employment. In China, the benefits of gaining urban status are substantial—­for both residents and localities. By comparison, in India, the benefits of urban classification are uncertain, and residents ­either demand or resist being classified as urban depending on what they ­will gain or lose. ­These differences manifest the presence of strong territorial institutions in Chinese cities and their lack in Indian cities, which give rise to dif­fer­ent forms of governance. In chapter 3, I examine territorial and associational forms of governance through the case of land acquisition and citizens’ protests. In China, rural protesters at Wukan targeted the bottom-­level village authorities and made strong claims of land owner­ship. In the Indian case, by contrast, rural protesters at Singur targeted the regional state government, and the success of their re­sis­ tance depended not on land owner­ship claims but on the intervention of po­ liti­cal parties. Rural collective land owner­ship lent a strong territorial logic to residents’ mobilization in Wukan, and the involvement of po­liti­cal parties marked the associational character of the mobilizations in Singur.

In trodu ct ion  

15

Chapter 4 compares urban village and slum redevelopment in Guangzhou and Mumbai. In Guangzhou, the redevelopment of urban villages has displaced mi­grant tenants who lack local hukou and has enriched villager-­ landlords who have hukou and are also members of the incorporated village companies. In Mumbai, the eligibility of slum residents for compensation is de­cided according to when the residents settled in the slum, with an arbitrary cutoff date, which can be negotiated through mobilization efforts by residents and housing NGOs. How the two cities deploy dif­fer­ent forms of exclusion—­ the use of hukou and membership in village companies in Guangzhou, and a negotiable cutoff date in Mumbai—­exemplifies territorial and associational forms of governance at work. The differences between territorial and associational forms of governance are even more apparent in the case of air pollution control, which I examine in chapter 5. Beijing’s clean air campaign is led by the municipal government, which applies a territorial strategy of holding local officials responsible for reducing pollution within their jurisdictions. By comparison, Delhi’s clean air campaign has been spearheaded by environmental NGOs, which strategically mobilize the Indian Supreme Court to prod the Delhi government into action. In the long run, however, neither approach w ­ ill be effective in tackling the prob­lem of air pollution. ­W hether blue skies can return to Beijing and Delhi depends on a combination of f­ actors, including, for example, strong government intervention, private-­sector compliance, market incentives, and citizen participation beyond the urban ­middle class and NGOs. Chapter 6 excavates the historical conditions that led to such divergent forms of governance in the two countries. It traces early territorial forms of local governance—­such as the role of the Confucian gentry in managing local affairs—­back to imperial China in the thirteenth ­century and tracks them up to 1911. The chapter then identifies continuities and ruptures in territorial institutions throughout the republican, socialist, and postreform eras. Turning next to the Indian experience, the chapter follows the trajectory of associational forms of governance in India throughout the precolonial, British, and postin­de­pen­dence eras, spotlighting how communities have resorted to alliance building to navigate conflicts arising from caste, religious, and ethnic divides. The postin­de­pen­dence era is the crucial period for the consolidation of the territorial form of local governance in China and the associational form of local governance in India. The concluding chapter discusses the consequences of the territorial and associational forms of governing cities. Neither approach has been able to deliver just and equitable urban growth. In China, territorial forms of governance have created not only a deep cleavage between urban and rural areas, but also unpre­ce­dented levels of disparity across cities and towns throughout the

16  Ch a p te r 1

country. In India, associational politics has also produced inequalities, but the disparities stem from the exclusion of citizens from par­tic­u­lar alliances and partnerships. To lessen the strains of large-­scale urbanization and uneven development, the two countries should move forward by adopting a model that can empower municipal-­level urban authorities yet preserve space for demo­ cratic deliberation. China needs to scale back the power of municipal authorities, lessen the responsibilities of local governments, and subject local officials to greater public accountability. India needs to empower municipal institutions and put them in charge of urban policy making.

2 What Is Urban about Urban China and India?

the media t­ oday is inundated with staggering statistics on the scale of urbanization in China and India. The global management consulting firm McKinsey and Com­pany estimates that China’s urban population w ­ ill top 1 billion by 2025, and India’s urban population w ­ ill reach 590 million by 2030 (Woetzel et al. 2009; Sankhe et al. 2010). ­These comparative projections of urban growth are misleading, however, b­ ecause they overlook the dif­fer­ent criteria that China and India use to define what is urban. India has been using the same definition since 1961, classifying places as urban in the census if they have a municipal status or if they meet a set of demographic thresholds. China, by contrast, has changed its urban definition for e­ very census since 1951. Its current definition, based on a combination of municipal status and built environment features, is so broad that it classifies a vast number of places ­under rural administration and the residents living in t­ hese places as urban. Beyond the census, China and India have used dif­fer­ent criteria to designate places as municipalities: localities that qualify as municipalities in China might be treated as rural villages in India, and vice versa. In short, although China and India are frequently compared based on urban population growth, l­ittle is known about the dif­fer­ent ways in which the two countries define what is urban. Even less understood are how efforts to classify the urban in both countries are driven by sociopo­liti­cal concerns. This chapter examines the politics of urban classification and municipal designation in China and India over the twentieth c­ entury. In both countries, the urban category m ­ atters a g­ reat deal ­because it benefits certain residents and localities while disadvantaging ­others. In India, for example, the municipal designation is associated not only with dif­fer­ent taxation rates for businesses, but also with government subsidies and development schemes. Small towns may petition for or resist municipal designation, depending on the benefits 17

18  Ch a p t e r 2

and costs linked to the change in their administrative status. In China, the stakes of municipal designation are even higher. In the postreform era, as more revenue and resources are devolved to municipal governments, local governments can gain more power, revenue, and resources if they change their administrative status from rural to urban. Residents can also benefit from changing their hukou from rural to urban: they can gain access to better social welfare, infrastructure, and ser­vices. The dif­fer­ent ways in which China and India define what is urban reflect the dif­fer­ent power of local territorial institutions in the two countries.

The Urban Age in China and India I regard the growth of cities as an evil t­ hing, unfortunate for mankind and the world, unfortunate for ­England and certainly unfortunate for India. The British have exploited India through its cities. The latter have exploited villages. The blood of the villages is the cement with which the edifice of the cities is built. —­M a h at m a G a n dh i, “Back to t h e V i l l age”

The Chinese revolution must be centered in the countryside; the ultimate goal of the revolution is to seize the cities where the enemies are headquartered. —­M ao Z e dong, “T h e F i r e of t h e Sta r s”

Mahatma Gandhi and Mao Zedong—­the two men who led their countries to in­de­pen­dence—­seemingly had ­little in common. One was known for nonviolent re­sis­tance and the other for military strategy, mass mobilization, and divisive po­liti­cal campaigns. But on the topic of cities, Gandhi and Mao shared a strikingly similar sense of resentment, viewing them as sites of colonial and cap­i­tal­ist exploitation that drained the resources of the countryside. In Mao’s case, ­after the Communists’ defeat in the 1920s by Chiang Kai-­Shek’s Nationalist Party, which had strongholds in large cities, he believed that the Chinese revolution had to be relaunched from the countryside ­behind support from peasants. Following Mao’s call for “surrounding cities with the countryside,” the Red Army set up headquarters in rural areas and eventually seized cities and defeated the Nationalists. Similarly, Gandhi strongly favored villages over cities as strategic sites for national in­de­pen­ dence. In a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi wrote that if India was to attain true freedom, then “­people ­w ill have to live in villages, not in towns, in huts, not in palaces” (Narayan 1968). Gandhi saw India’s cities as products of colonial rule and their wealth as having been accumulated at the expense of villages. Both Mao and Gandhi led experiments to revive the countryside

W h at I s Ur ba n?  19

and empower villages. Mao initiated land reforms to redistribute land to peasants, while Gandhi advocated self-­rule of villages and envisioned e­ very village as “a republic with full powers,” “self-­sustained and capable of managing its affairs, even to the extent of defending itself against the w ­ hole world” (Gandhi 1947, 86). The antiurban sentiment of Mao and Gandhi significantly ­shaped development policies in the early years of in­de­pen­dence in both countries.1 Contrary to the rural utopias i­magined by Mao and Gandhi, China and India since the last quarter of the twentieth ­century have entered a phase of accelerated urban transformation. Antiurban bias has all but dis­appeared among the leadership in both countries. In the 1980s Deng Xiaoping, the chief architect of China’s market reform, ordered the creation of a series of SEZs— de facto urban industrial clusters designed to lure foreign investment with cheap land and ­labor. ­Under ­later administrations, the Chinese central government deliberately funneled investment to large cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou, the cores of China’s three mega-­urban regions, which over the last three de­cades have grown exponentially. The pro-­urban agenda has continued ­under the administration of Xi Jinping (2012–­pre­sent), who announced a New Urbanization Plan in 2013 with bold programs of investment in infrastructure in urban regions. This plan also ambitiously aimed to raise China’s urbanization rate from 53 ­percent in 2013 to 60 ­percent by 2020 (State Council 2013). Similarly, India has actively promoted economic development by repositioning urban regions as engines for growth. In Manmohan Singh’s campaign to become prime minister in 2004, he vowed to devote resources to turn Mumbai into a global city like Shanghai. Once reelected as the prime minister, Singh’s administration launched the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission—­a well-­funded central government scheme to improve infrastructure and strengthen urban governance of India’s largest cities. The pro-­ urban development strategy has continued ­under the administration of Narendra Modi, who in 2015 announced a massive spending plan to build one hundred midsized smart cities and rejuvenate five hundred o­ thers across India.2 China and India, once predominantly agrarian socie­ties, have fi­nally entered their urban age. Large metropolitan centers continue to draw newcomers, and medium and small cities are growing at a fast pace too, driven by both migration and in-­situ urbanization.3 This urban turn has triggered a dazzling array of conceptual efforts in urban studies to delineate what is urban, as well as empirical endeavors to mea­sure the extent of urbanization.

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Conceptualizing and Mea­sur­ing the Urban The field of urban studies has been preoccupied with the question of what is urban since the early twentieth c­ entury. Sociologists of the Chicago School first viewed the urban simply as cities, which they defined as large, dense, and heterogeneous h­ uman settlements. This city-­based understanding was l­ater replaced by a culture-­based one, with the notion of urbanism understood as ways of life that set apart urbanites from rural folks (Wirth 1931). Marxist urban scholars viewed the urban as a key site of capital accumulation and class strug­gle; for them, the urban question was about collective consumption and gaining access to essential amenities for social reproduction (Castells 1977). Economic geographers reverted to the city-­centered understanding, viewing the urban as a specific scale of agglomeration of economic activities, driven by division of l­abor and endowed with par­tic­u­lar institutional arrangements (Storper and Scott 2016). More recently, some scholars have again sought to refute the city-­centered approach through a theory that understands the urban as a planetary pro­cess instead of as a settlement type (Brenner 2013). Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s notion of an urbanized society (Lefebvre [1968] 2003), some argue that urbanization has extended far beyond cities and into remote hinterlands—­even invading the w ­ hole planet (Brenner and Schmid 2015).4 Urban scholars have also been trying to empirically mea­sure the extent of urbanization. Social scientists often turn to national censuses to gauge the degree of urbanization. For example, both China and India conduct a decennial census, which divides the national population into urban and rural. According to ­these national censuses, urbanization rates in China and India between the 1950s and 1990s ­were about the same level—­both below 30 ­percent. But ­after 1990, the urbanization rate in China accelerated faster than that in India. Since 2000, the gap between the two countries in urbanization rates has widened even further (figure 2.1). ­These census figures suggest that China is more urbanized than India: urban dwellers composed 59 ­percent of China’s population (839 million) and 33 ­percent of India’s population (447 million) in 2018. But any comparison between t­ hese urbanization rates is marred by the dif­fer­ent criteria that both countries use in their censuses to specify urban areas and enumerate urban population. If China’s urban definition ­were applied to India, or vice versa, a dif­fer­ent picture would emerge over the extent of urbanization in each country.5 Geospatial scientists use land use change to mea­sure the extent of urbanization. They claim that the scope of urbanization can be better captured by spatial analyses of satellite images showing land use change than population censuses or administrative bound­aries (Seto et al. 2011). NASA, for example, has released striking satellite images of rapid land use change in China, showing how

W h at I s Ur ba n?  21 70%

China

60% 50% 40%

India

30% 20% 10% 0%

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2012

2016

2018

figure 2.1. Urbanization rates of China and India

the former agricultural corridors between cities have quickly been filled by construction since the early 1990s (NASA 2007, 2010). A research team based at New York University and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy has published a series of atlases of urban expansion, using remote sensing data in combination with population density (Angel et al. 2012, 2016).6 But even in remote sensing studies using satellite data, estimations of the extent of urbanization vary widely ­because urban land is defined differently by geospatial scientists, according to vari­ous thresholds for infrastructure development, electrification, and impervious surface. Scholars have compared six global urban extent maps produced by dif­fer­ent research groups in Eu­rope and the United States and found ­great variation in estimations of certain countries’ urbanization level. For example, the estimated extent of urban land for India from GRUMP (the Global Rural-­Urban Mapping Proj­ect) is 204,676 square kilo­meters, while that from VMAP0 (Vector Map Level 0), another mapping proj­ect, is a paltry 8,160 square kilo­meters (Potere et al. 2009). ­These efforts to conceptualize and quantify the urban in social and geospatial science help us better understand the nature and scope of the urbanization pro­cess. But trying to delineate the urban for its own sake distracts us from addressing a far more impor­tant question: How does being classified as urban or rural affect residents and localities? This chapter examines this question in the context of China and India. As the following analy­sis shows, the ways in which each country defines the urban illuminates how the urban classification ­matters. The definition of urban has changed far more slowly in the Indian census than in the Chinese census. The “stale” urban definition in India and

22  Ch a p te r 2

the “dynamic” definition in China, I argue, have to be viewed in relation to each country’s central-­local relations and po­liti­cal economy of municipal designation. China has broadened its urban definition in the market reform era to allow more local places to be designated as municipalities and to empower local governments. India has maintained its urban definition ­because of widespread re­sis­tance against municipal designation from both state governments and local communities.

Defining the Urban in India Compared to many other countries, India’s urban definition in its census has been relatively strict. The current definition comes from the 1961 census, and it identifies two types of places as urban. The first is statutory towns, referring to places with a municipal status. The second is census towns, including places without a municipal status but having a population of more than five thousand, a population density of more than four hundred persons per square kilo­ meter, and at least 75 ­percent of the local male ­labor force employed in nonagricultural jobs. This gendered employment requirement tightens India’s urban definition, as it disqualifies many fast-­growing small towns where local economy and occupations no longer center on agriculture. India’s urban definition was not always strictly applied, since the classification of places as urban or rural was often left to the discretion of local census superintendents, at least throughout the colonial era. From the late nineteenth ­century, when the first census was taken, to the mid-­twentieth ­century, many small places ­were constantly shuffled between the two categories of urban and rural.

Cachet of Urbanity: Counting the Urban in the Colonial Census Census taking in the Indian subcontinent can be traced back to the Mughal period, but enumeration and classification of population groups did not become a dominant concern u­ ntil the late colonial era, around 1870. ­Until that point, the British colonial census was concerned mostly with revenue and taxation. The launch of the All-­India Census in 1872 elevated caste as a central issue (Cohn 1987). The colonial census amplified group differences, and caste—­already a complicated social classification system in the Indian imagination—­was further refracted by the British in the census taking (Appadurai 1993). Classification and enumeration of the locals into dif­fer­ent castes played a crucial role in the colonial administration, helping to justify policy actions and discipline the population, which the British wished to control (Said 1978; Appadurai 1993). The urban classification also preoccupied the colonial officials involved with the All-­India Census. The census officials debated w ­ hether to classify

W h at I s Ur ba n?  23

small places as villages (i.e., rural) or towns (i.e., urban). In the 1872 census, “urban” was simply defined as having a population of five thousand or above; in the next census, of 1881, the definition was expanded to include places that did not meet this population threshold but nevertheless had unspecified “urban characteristics” as adjudged by local officers (see appendix, ­table 1). The 1881 census defined towns as places with “a collection of numerous dwellings near each other within a ­limited area, having shops which provide a continual open market for the supply of goods, especially of manufactured goods” (Mitra and Sachdev 1980, xi)—­a description so broad that it could easily encompass a vast number of small settlements. The classification of places as urban or rural continued to be left to district officers. For example, among the 227 towns enumerated in the 1881 census, 43 of them did not meet the population threshold but ­were counted as towns b­ ecause local officers thought they had sufficient urban characteristics. In addition, more than 300 settlements exceeding the population threshold ­were classified as rural villages, which district officers deemed to lack the requisite urban characteristics (Mitra and Sachdev 1980). In some states, district officers consulted the locals on ­whether they would like to be classified as urban or rural in the census; but in other states, district officers de­cided on their own. The next Indian censuses, between 1891 and 1951, continued to allow local officials to make discretionary determinations about classification of places. The urban category continued to be applied fluidly, including or excluding small settlements without explanation. The 1891 census expanded the definition of urban to include administrative status, and incorporated municipalities ­were deemed to be urban regardless of their population size. For the census between 1901 and 1951, civil lines and cantonments w ­ ere automatically identified as urban as well.7 For nonmunicipal places, the old criterion of “urban characteristics” continued to apply, and a provincial superintendent might decide to treat a place as urban for the purpose of the census if he saw it as “bearing the cachet of urbanity” (Mitra and Sachdev 1980, xv). Some local officers, associating urban with modernity and pro­gress, ­were ­eager to count small places as urban. In ­those states with high urbanization rates, such as Mysore, Bombay, and United Provinces, many small settlements with fewer than five thousand inhabitants w ­ ere classified as urban. The urbanity of t­ hese small towns was often elusive; a census superintendent from Bengal commented in 1933 that “many of the non-­industrial towns . . . ​differ but l­ittle in their conditions from large villages, except in the provision . . . ​of an infrequent lamppost” (Mitra and Sachdev 1980, xv). Beginning with the 1961 census, the Indian census bureau introduced the concept of “census towns” so that urbanizing small towns without municipal status could be classified as urban. To obtain this classification, a census town

24  Ch a p te r 2

had to have a certain population size (more than five thousand), density (more than four hundred persons per square kilo­meter) and proportion of nonfarm male ­labor (more than 75 ­percent). The 2001 census counted 1,362 census towns comprising 7.4 ­percent of India’s urban population. The 2011 census increased t­ hose figures to 3,894 census towns comprising 15 ­percent of India’s urban population (Pradhan 2013). Some view the surge in the number of census towns as a reflection of in-­situ urbanization unfolding in the country, and they argue that India’s urbanization w ­ ill continue to be driven more by in-­situ urbanization than by rural-­to-­urban migration (Denis, Mukhopadhyay, and Zerah 2012; Roy and Pradhan 2018). But other skeptical observers attribute the increase to “census activism”: they regard t­ hese reclassifications as the census bureau’s effort to manipulate the country’s urbanization rate so that it better aligns with the image of an emerging superpower (Kundu 2011). ­These varying interpretations notwithstanding, India’s definition of urban is widely viewed as inadequate to capture the large number of fast-­ growing small towns across the country. The requirement of 75 ­percent nonfarm male l­abor is the most problematic aspect of the definition. If the requirement of 75 ­percent nonfarm male ­labor ­were dropped, then India’s urbanization rate could easily rise to 50 ­percent or more (it was mea­sured at 32 ­percent in the 2011 census; Denis, Mukhopadhyay, and Zerah 2012). But to date, ­there is no indication that the definition for urban ­w ill be modified anytime soon.

The Contested Politics of Municipal Designation The bureaucratic inertia in adjusting the archaic urban definition can be explained by the contested politics of municipal designation in India. Granting municipal status to rural places has been a slow and contentious pro­cess, and in the last two de­cades, only a tiny number of places have been elevated to the status of municipality. ­Because most small settlements ­will likely remain ­under rural administration, the Indian government has ­little incentive to change the urban definition used in the census. The slow pace of municipal designation can be explained by both the inertia of state governments and contestations from local communities. ­Under India’s federalist structure, the authority to grant municipal status is vested in the state governments, and some state governments have made it especially difficult for urbanizing small towns to qualify as municipalities. Some Indian states have been reluctant to designate rural places governed by village councils (gram panchayats) as municipalities; ­these states fear that granting municipal status would imply some degree of power sharing with the newly established municipalities (Weinstein, Sami, and Shatkin 2014).

W h at I s Ur ba n?  25

The slow pro­gress of municipal designation can also be explained by contestations from local communities. Not all residents in urbanizing small towns share the aspiration of having their place classified as a municipality. Several key issues, such as provision of infrastructure and business taxes, divided local residents on the issue of municipal designation; in general, ­those employed in the commercial and ser­vice sectors ­were more likely to ­favor an urban administrative status, and ­those employed in the traditional farming sectors tended to oppose it (Mukhopadhyay et al. 2016). Municipal designation generally affords local residents certain benefits, especially regarding infrastructure and the provision of ser­vices. As a settlement reaches a certain size, it requires systematic efforts in urban planning, investment in infrastructure, and provision of ser­vices. Village councils, which do not generate their own revenue and therefore mostly depend on government subsidies, lack the capacity and resources to meet the challenges wrought by increased population. Th ­ ese issues are more readily handled by municipal governments, which have the power to tax and generate revenue for infrastructure and the provision of ser­vices, such as paved roads, ­water and electricity, and sanitation. For this reason, municipal status is sought by residents in many urbanizing small towns (Mukhopadhyay 2017). On the other hand, residents are also concerned about the costs associated with becoming a municipality. In general, municipal designation implies higher tax rates for businesses, stricter building regulations, and the loss of certain state aid programs targeting rural areas (Bhagat 2005). Some residents strongly resent paying higher taxes, while ­others are willing to pay but only ­under the condition that by paying higher taxes they can enjoy better ser­vices. Some residents find municipal building regulations cumbersome, as one can build rather freely in a village and its surroundings. ­Others are concerned with losing access to some central government schemes that provide unemployment insurance and housing construction subsidies for the rural poor, such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and Indira Awas Yojana. International organ­izations such as the World Bank, whose development programs ­until the 1970s almost exclusively targeted rural areas in India, have also played a role in discouraging localities from obtaining urban status. As only rural areas w ­ ere eligible for t­ hese sources of funding, some rural ­house­holds feared the loss of benefits that would result from any municipal designation (Mukhopadhyay et al. 2016). Communities are sometimes split between citizen groups who advocate for municipal designation and ­those who oppose it. In the small town of Boisar, on the outskirts of Mumbai, the local citizen forum has been pressing the state government of Maharashtra to change its administrative status from rural to municipal (Jenkins, Gadgil, and Yousaf 2012). But the state government

26  Ch a p t e r 2

has not approved the residents’ petition, ­because turning Boisar into a municipality would mean some loss of power for the state government. Further opposition comes from local groups with an interest in keeping the place ­under village administration. Business o­ wners, for example, do not have to pay tax ­under rural administration. The o­ wners of polluting factories tend to oppose the stricter environmental regulations that accompany municipal designation. Village leaders tend to oppose municipal designation as well, b­ ecause u­ nder rural administration, they do not need approval from upper-­level authorities to execute proj­ects such as digging a well, paving a road, or building a school. The calculation of the benefits and costs of municipal designation is strongly conditioned by local configurations of social class and po­liti­cal alliances. Residents from dif­fer­ent castes, classes, and sociopo­liti­cal backgrounds carefully compare the costs and benefits to arrive at their own conclusion about ­whether they ­will be better off becoming urban or staying rural (Mukhopadhyay et al. 2016). In general, municipal designation is favored by wealthier families and the upper castes—­who do not depend on the central government’s aid programs and can afford to pay higher taxes—­and opposed by poorer families, the lower castes, and minorities, who often rely on state aid and are less able to pay taxes. Po­liti­cal patronage also m ­ atters, as municipal designation can change existing constituencies for local politicians, who thus support or oppose the change in administrative status depending on ­whether it ­w ill serve their interests (Mukhopadhyay et al. 2016). The pro­cess of municipal designation is strongly influenced by party politics. As the state-­level ruling party changes, the policy ­toward municipal designation can change sharply. In 2004 the state of Tamil Nadu reclassified 566 towns into villages, and 385 of them refused, stating that the current municipal setup was more suitable for governing local affairs—­for instance, by providing tax revenue to fund infrastructure and ser­vices. Despite the opposition, the state government pushed its decisions through. Two years ­later the ruling party of Tamil Nadu changed, and the new government reclassified the villages as towns. This time, 28 places wanted to retain village status, but their entreaties ­were ignored by the new administration (Denis, Mukhopadhyay, and Zerah 2012). The steadfastness of the urban definition used in the Indian census reflects the entrenched politics of municipal designation. Municipal designation of small towns is contested from above by state governments and from below by residents and power brokers. The census bureau has l­ittle incentive to revise its urban definition, as even the most urbanized small towns are unlikely in the foreseeable ­future to be declared municipalities by their state governments. Roughly 15 ­percent of India’s population ­today lives in census towns—­cities without city governments—­and providing infrastructure and ser­vices in ­these

W h at I s Ur ba n?  27

places pre­sents a major challenge for India. The absence of municipal governments in urbanized small towns also suggests that urban governance in India does not pivot around territorial institutions such as local governments.

Shrink and Expand: China’s Elastic Urban Category Perhaps in no country more than China has the urban classification been so politicized, contested, and frequently adjusted. The demarcation of urban versus rural is a territorial-­political instrument for the state to govern the population, and it has profoundly s­ haped the lives of individuals and the fortunes of localities. In the socialist era, one of the top priorities for the new government was to guarantee grain supply for urban centers where industrial production was based. The new leadership deliberately shrunk the urban category to exclude most of the national population, which was classified as rural and thus not entitled to grain supply. In the market reform era, the central government has relaxed the urban classification criteria and substantially expanded the urban category to promote city-­centered development. Both strategies—­ shrinkage and expansion—­aimed to promote industrialization and economic growth in certain regions of the country at the expense of ­others.

Shrinking the Urban: 1949–1977 The Chinese government made ­great effort during the socialist years to divide the national population into urban and rural sectors. In a document issued in 1955, the State Council explic­itly stated that “urban and rural residents have dif­fer­ent economic conditions and lifestyles, and therefore, the government should treat them differently, and urban and rural population should be counted separately” (State Council 1955b, 54). The imperative of demarcating the urban from the rural was tied to food security. Preoccupied with balancing agricultural production with industrial growth, the government believed that its legitimacy depended on its ability to guarantee grain supply to urban industrial workers. The government extracted grain from agricultural producers and supplied it to urban h­ ouse­holds. Grain rationing was strictly enforced, based on a person’s age and occupation, and it was closely monitored through the hukou system—­only ­those with urban hukou had access to rationed grain (Ma and Cui 1987). Food security had preoccupied China’s leaders since 1949, and as Kirkby (1985) rightfully noted, “the division of the population into ‘agricultural’ and ‘non-­agricultural’ has been of greater practical issue than any abstract definition of urban and rural” (59). Urban areas included two types of places—­cities (shi) and towns (zhen). The urban population enumerated in the 1950s census included the entire

28  Ch a p te r 2

resident population of cities and towns, regardless of their occupation and hukou status. Cities ­were administrative seats of provinces and had a minimum population of one hundred thousand. Towns w ­ ere administrative seats of counties and had a minimum population of two thousand, at least 50 ­percent of which had to be employed in nonagricultural sectors. Although the central government specified the population and employment thresholds for designating cities and towns, it also made many exceptions to extend the urban designation to places with strategic economic, logistic, or cultural functions.8 ­These included manufacturing and mining towns, transportation and logistics hubs, inner-­ring suburbs, places of higher education, workers’ residential areas, resorts, and recreational destinations.9 ­These places served the vari­ous needs of state industrialization proj­ects, and by extending the privileged urban status to ­these places, the state gained the loyalty of the local populations. From t­ hese early years of socialism, the stakes of urban classification w ­ ere high. In addition to rationed grain supply, residents of cities and towns ­were entitled to a range of social welfare, such as ­free education, health care, and public housing. An urban job in a state-­owned enterprise was described as an “iron rice bowl” (tiefanwan)—­meaning food security. ­Because of the perks that came with urban jobs and city living, China experienced a massive wave of rural-­to-­urban migration in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This coincided with the ­Great Leap Forward (1958–62), when cities competed with one another to enhance their industrial production capacity. A hiring boom in factories across urban centers lured millions from the countryside. Between 1956 and 1960, China’s urban population spiked by 388 million, of which more than two-­thirds was driven by migration (Li 1999).10 The incentives to gain urban status w ­ ere high not only for individuals, but also for localities. Municipal designation could allow a place to expand its jurisdiction and establish control over the surrounding regions. For example, in a small mining town located in a primarily agricultural region in north China, the town sought administrative upgrading to ensure a regular source of grain; the workforce could no longer be supported through informal arrangements with nearby rural villages for food supply. ­After becoming a municipality, the town could be incorporated into the state’s regional planning system for food purchases, and it could also directly extract agricultural land from the surrounding county to secure its food supply. Thus, municipal designation could bring numerous advantages to the town, including more land for construction, food supply, and raw materials for light manufacturing (Kirkby 1985). The late 1950s saw a wave of municipal designations as formerly rural places secured the privileged municipal status. Many cities also annexed their surrounding counties for resources. For example, Jingdezhen—­a well-­known manufacturing town in Jiangxi province—­appropriated more than 2,500 square kilo­meters

W h at I s Ur ba n?  29

of land u­ nder its jurisdiction to secure l­abor and suppliers for its porcelain industry (Kirkby 1985). The urban boom in the late 1950s did not last long, however. The G ­ reat Leap Forward led to a devastating famine, during which tens of millions died from starvation. The central government could no longer provide foodstuffs and social welfare to the swelling urban population. Therefore, the central government downsized the urban population, ­stopped rural-­to-­urban migration, and sent the mi­grants in cities back to their rural hometowns (Yang 2013). The first attempts to downsize the urban population took place in 1961 and 1962. The central government sent more than twenty million urban residents back to the countryside within ­those two years (Luo 2003). This was the largest-­scale forced migration in the history of the P ­ eople’s Republic of China (PRC). In 1963, the central government issued a new directive to formalize the procedure to downsize the urban population. In a document that translates to “Directive for adjusting city/town designation and shrinking suburban areas of cities,” the government stated that the level of urbanization needed to be kept in check and should not exceed the capacity of agricultural production, so that the urban population could be fed (State Council 1963). It trumpeted its successes with downsizing: Over more than two years of adjustment, ­great accomplishments have been made in reducing the urban population, and the number of cities and towns has decreased significantly. By the end of June 1963 the urban population had decreased by 16 million, and the number of cities decreased from 208 in 1961 to 179 by June 1963. The number of towns decreased from 4,429 at the end of 1961 to 4,219 by June 1963. However, judging from the level of agricultural production and the practical needs of industrial development, the proportion of urban population in the national total is still too high, the number of cities and towns is still too ­great, and the peripheral areas of cities are still too large. This current situation is not desirable for national economic development and must be changed. (State Council 1963, n.p.; my translation) The State Council suggested further mea­sures to downsize the urban population. First, it ordered that certain cities be administratively downgraded into counties or towns.11 As a result of this administrative change, more than two million ­people ­were automatically reclassified from urban to rural (Li 1999). Second, it ordered city governments to separate peripheral areas—­called jiaoqu in Chinese—­from their jurisdictions. Jiaoqu in the socialist de­cades referred to agricultural areas that supplied grain and vegetables to urban residents (Ren 2017b). According to the State Council, jiaoqu should be l­imited to areas that ­were necessary for urban construction and for supplying

30  Ch a p t e r 2

foodstuffs to cities. Other­w ise, they should be separated from cities and merged with nearby rural counties.12 Third, the central government tightened the criteria for designating towns with higher demographic thresholds (see appendix, ­table 3).13 Town designations ­were revoked for forest stations, state farms, mining and oil fields, and places ­under the administration of ­People’s Communes. And once ­these places lost the status of towns, their residents ­were reclassified from urban to rural. Anticipating re­sis­tance against such a massive scale of administrative downgrading, the State Council instructed local officials to ­handle the conflicts arising from the adjustment and to maintain social order (State Council 1963). In the 1960s, the term “urban population” gained a new meaning by being linked to hukou. Unlike the census of the 1950s, which counted the entire population of cities and towns as urban, the 1964 census ­limited the urban population to the nonagricultural hukou holders in cities and towns (see appendix, ­table 2). Only for this narrowly defined nonagricultural hukou population would the state be responsible for providing food and social welfare. Agricultural hukou holders, even t­ hose who resided in cities and towns, ­were not counted as urban and not entitled to rationed grain allocation and social welfare. Two years l­ ater, China entered the frantic de­cade of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), a period when the urban-­rural divide was enshrined with the hukou system. Population movement s­ topped, and the urban population decreased. Between 14 and 17 million urban youths ­were sent to the countryside to be “reeducated,” and their hukou registration was transferred to the countryside where they labored. The hukou system, the single most impor­tant institution dividing the Chinese population into urban and rural, became firmly installed in the 1960s. Designed to differentiate, discriminate, and exclude, hukou is a crucial territorial institution in the socialist proj­ect of demarcating the urban.

Expanding the Urban: 1978–­Pre­sent In the market reform era, the central government began to reposition urban areas as engines of economic growth. The country’s leadership viewed socialist policies aimed at downsizing the urban sector as a m ­ istake, and reversed the shrinkage-­based policies to actively expand urban areas and population. The State Council first lowered the nonagricultural population requirement for town designation, a mea­sure that boosted the number of towns.14 Within the first six months in 1984, the central and provincial governments allowed more than two thousand places to be reclassified as towns (i.e., urban; State Council 1984, 1986; Orleans and Burnham 1984). The central government also changed the requirement for city designation to allow more places to be reclassified as

W h at I s Ur ba n?  31

cities. In 1986, the State Council approved three recommendations from the Ministry of Civil Affairs to increase the number of cities and devolve more power to city governments. First, it recommended promoting towns into cities if they functioned as regional economic hubs—­a criterion only vaguely specified—­and if they met certain requirements for nonagricultural population (more than sixty thousand) and annual GDP (at least 200 million yuan).15 Nonagricultural population was no longer defined by hukou but based on occupational status. In other words, rural hukou holders could count as part of the urban population if they held nonagricultural jobs. Second, rural counties could be promoted to county-­level cities if they met certain thresholds for population size, nonagricultural ­labor, and annual GDP. Third, to devolve more power to municipalities, the central government encouraged cities to “lead” their surrounding counties with annexation. Th ­ ese mea­sures enabled municipalities to control more developable land and enhance their revenue. Among t­ hese three mea­sures, the conversion of rural counties to county-­ level cities appealed most to local authorities.16 ­Under China’s administrative hierarchy, counties and county-­level cities have the same rank but differ in decision-­making power and authority: the local governments of county-­level cities have more authority than county governments. The State Council adjusted city designation criteria in 1993 to elevate certain counties to county-­ level cities (State Council 1993). It first divided all counties into three categories based on their population density, and for each category it introduced eight mea­sures to allow counties of vari­ous demographic and socioeconomic profiles to be reclassified as county-­level cities (appendix, t­ able 4).17 ­Under the more flexible criteria, a large number of counties became county-­level cities, and local governments instantly gained more power, authority, and resources through administrative reclassification. The census bureau soon adjusted the urban definition to allow more places to be counted as urban. In the fifth census, which was taken in 2000, the urban definition was based on administrative status (i.e., places ­under the jurisdiction of city and town governments) and population density (i.e., 1,500 persons per square kilo­meter; National Bureau of Statistics 1999). Places without municipal status that nevertheless met the population density threshold could be counted as urban (Chan 2009). The National Bureau of Statistics further modified the definition in the 2010 census by dropping the population density requirement and adopting an even more flexible criterion—­physical features—to define what is urban (National Bureau of Statistics 2006a, 2006b). The 2010 census defines urban areas to include places ­under the jurisdiction of residents’ committees (juweihui) and street offices (jiedao) of cities and towns, as well as any other places connected to such urban areas by “public infrastructure.” What constitutes “public infrastructure” is unspecified; it can

32  Ch a p te r 2

include commercial and residential buildings, roads, railways, and even utility networks. The National Bureau of Statistics described this hybrid definition as using administrative rank as the basis, resident and village committees as units, and a­ ctual built-up areas and connectivity as evidence (National Bureau of Statistics 2006b). ­Under the expanded urban definition, the 2010 census counted about 50 ­percent of China’s population as urban. China has frequently modified its municipal designation criteria and urban definition in the census to suit par­tic­u­lar development agendas at dif­fer­ent times. The trajectory of policy change can be summarized as ­going from shrinkage in the socialist era to expansion in the market reform era. A transition occurred in the early 1980s, when many localities petitioned to become municipalities. The volatile changes in the par­ameters of the urban category reflect China’s changing priorities for economic development over time. Throughout the seven-­decade history of the PRC, the urban-­rural demarcation has had far-­reaching consequences in structuring the lives of residents and the fortunes of places.

Conclusion The ways in which China and India define what is urban, and why this m ­ atters, reflects three themes. The first concerns the rights enshrined with a status of being urban or rural. In China, the primary concern over urban-­rural demarcation has always been about dividing the population into two segments with dif­fer­ent socioeconomic rights—by affording more privilege to urban residents only. During the socialist era, the urban-­rural demarcation was primarily driven by the imperative of ensuring food security for urban industrial workers in the context of a still fragile economy. By imposing a narrow definition of what is urban, the central government classified the majority of the population as rural, so it did not have to provide social welfare for them. In the postreform era, rural mi­grants have moved to cities for jobs but are deprived of the social and economic rights and benefits enjoyed by urban residents. B ­ ecause of their hukou status, they are made into second-­class citizens in their own country. For individuals, having an urban hukou has always meant more privilege and benefits, except in a few cases, such as collective land owner­ship (see next chapter) and the “one child policy” (not strictly enforced in rural areas). In India, the classification of urban versus rural has never been about dividing the population into two classes of citizens, even though significant gaps exist between the two sectors in living standards and the quality of infrastructure. The second theme relates to the power of urban versus rural governments. Unlike India, municipal governments in China are power­ful territorial institutions; the incentive for rural villages and counties to become cities is much

W h at I s Ur ba n?  33

stronger in China than rural governments in India. Municipal governments in China have more power, authority, and resources to promote local economic growth. The biggest perk for becoming a municipality is generating revenue from land leasing. Responding to the demand by localities to be recognized as municipalities, the Chinese central government has relaxed its municipal designation criteria and created hundreds of new cities since the 1980s. The story in India is dif­fer­ent: few urbanized settlements in India have been given municipal status by their state governments. Among the 2,774 census towns newly identified in the 2010 census, only 147 have been given municipal status, and the rest remain ­under rural administration (World Bank 2013). The differences reflect the discrepancy in the power of municipal governments in the two countries: municipal governments in China have much more authority and resources at their disposal than their Indian counter­parts, and therefore the aspiration ­toward a municipal status is far stronger in China than in India. The third theme relates to contestation over municipal designation. Municipal designation has been highly contested in both countries but in dif­fer­ent ways. In India, municipal designation is resisted by state governments, which are often reluctant to relinquish power by granting municipal status to urbanizing small towns. It is also contested by local communities, as residents and power brokers engage in delicate calculations of the benefits and costs associated with municipal designation. The pro­gress of municipal designation varies from region to region. Tamil Nadu, for example, has promoted many census towns to municipalities in the hopes of becoming India’s most urbanized state, and thereby attracting more investment (Bhagat 2005). By contrast, in Kerala and West Bengal, where rural councils are relatively empowered, most census towns remain u­ nder rural administration (Denis, Mukhopadhyay, and Zerah 2012). China’s unitary system, u­ nder single-­party rule, pre­sents dif­fer­ent circumstances. Municipal designation is an administrative ­matter de­cided from above, and residents have ­little say about changes in the administrative status of their localities. The “winners” in municipal designation are the newly established municipalities, as well as cities that have expanded their territorial jurisdictions by annexing surrounding counties. The “losers” are formerly rural places that have been annexed by nearby cities, such as counties, townships, and villages. The local governments of ­these places have been stripped of their powers, and the residents ­there stand to lose land and livelihood. What is urban has been subject to intense debate in the field of urban studies. A meaningful discussion has to examine what difference the urban category makes in the lives of p­ eople and their localities. In both China and India, the urban-­r ural demarcation is an instrument used by the state to govern populations and territories. For China, the biggest challenge ahead is how to take better care of the “­people without rights,” that is, the mi­grants—­the

34  Ch a p t e r 2

roughly 15 ­percent of China’s population that resides in urban areas without urban hukou. India, in turn, has to face the issue of “cities without governments,” that is, the two thousand-­plus census towns that are urbanized but have no municipal governments, in which 15 ­percent of India’s population lives. China needs to step up its hukou reform and lower the barrier to obtaining urban hukou for mi­grants, and India needs to grant more power to urbanized small towns and turn them into better-­functioning cities with empowered municipal authorities.

3 Land Grabs and Protests from Wukan to Singur

china and india once ­were two of the largest agrarian economies in the world. But as the two countries urbanize, tens of millions of peasants have lost their land to development proj­ects undertaken by state and private actors. By 2011, about 50 to 55 million Chinese peasants had lost land once contracted to them by the socialist state, and the number of landless farmers has been increasing e­ very year by three million (Chinese Acad­emy of Social Sciences 2011; He 2011; Xiong 2013). In India, land acquisition and dispossession has taken place on a similar scale. Since in­de­pen­dence in 1947, close to fifty million acres of land has been acquired for industrialization, mining, and infrastructural proj­ects, affecting between 50 and 60 million ­people (Chakravorty 2013; Fernandes 2018). Despite the dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal regimes and land owner­ship structures, local governments in both countries have been proactively acquiring land from peasants to attract investment and promote economic growth. Land acquisition has surged, especially in recent years, as local governments compete with one another to obtain more land to build new towns, IT parks, and SEZs (Cartier 2001; Banerjee-­Guha 2008; Kennedy 2013). The widespread land acquisition and displacement of farmers has become one of the most contentious issues in con­temporary Chinese and Indian society. In both countries, anti-­land-­acquisition protests have erupted in recent years. In China, more than 60 ­percent of the petitions (xinfang) filed by rural residents in 2011 concerned land acquisition and inadequate compensation (Liu 2013; Heurlin 2016).1 In India, re­sis­tance against land acquisition has dominated news headlines, and po­liti­cal parties often exploit the issue of land acquisition to win elections (Chakravorty 2013; Doshi and Ranganathan 2017). In both countries, land-­taking cases have led to brutal attacks by the police against peasants. In 2005, in the Chinese village of Dongzhou in Guangdong province, villa­ gers protested land taking by the local government to build a power plant. The police responded by opening fire on the demonstrators, killing twelve. Two 35

36  Ch a p te r 3

years l­ ater, in Nandigram in West Bengal, police fired on local peasants protesting a land acquisition deal initiated by the state government to attract Indonesian investment to build a chemical plant. During the clash, fourteen villa­gers ­were shot. The escalating conflicts over land acquisition have forced the national governments in both countries to intervene and formulate policies to ease tensions. India replaced the colonial 1894 Land Acquisition Act with a new Land Acquisition Act in 2013, aiming—at least on paper—to better protect the interests of peasants (Sarkar 2011; Desai 2011; Ghatak and Ghosh 2011). Similarly, the Chinese central government, preoccupied with the prospect of social unrest, food insecurity, and loss of arable land, revised its Land Administration Law in 2019 to improve compensation standards (Wang et al. 2017). The new Land Administration Law sought to restrain the power and authority previously granted to local governments and to forbid illegal land expropriation for development zones (Xu and Yeh 2009; Lin 2009; Ren 2013). This chapter examines how the local state partakes in land acquisition in China and India and how rural protesters resist by engaging with dif­fer­ent levels of the state. In both countries, the subnational state has gained tremendous power to acquire land (Nair 2018). In China, the power and authority to acquire land has scaled down to municipal and village governments, which use land leasing to secure revenue and to promote property-­led economic development. In India, the power and authority over land acquisition rests with regional state governments, and the imperative of attracting investment has incentivized them to wield it more frequently. I examine two high-­profile anti-­land-­acquisition protests—­the Wukan protest that erupted in Guangdong province in 2011–12 and the Singur protest that broke out in West Bengal in 2006–8. In both situations, the subnational governments attempted to acquire land from peasants to attract investment; villa­gers fought back, demonstrating in large numbers, and eventually blocked the land deals. In Wukan, the village council spearheaded the taking of the land, while in Singur, the state government initiated the land acquisition. In both cases the protests ­were sparked by the perceived unfair nature of the acquisitions, insufficiently justified and inadequately compensated. The Wukan protest is still unfolding: several protest leaders w ­ ere arrested in 2016, and villa­gers have been demanding their release. The Singur protest fi­nally drew to a close ­after a de­cade of strug­gles, as the Supreme Court of India ruled in 2016 that the disputed land should be returned to the resisting villa­gers. The Wukan and Singur protests encapsulate many of the key challenges facing Chinese and Indian socie­ties, including urbanization, industrialization, encroachment on farmland, and land tenure security. The comparative analy­sis highlights two distinct modes of mobilization against land taking. In China, the bottom rungs of local officialdom participate

L a n d G r a b s a n d P rote st s  37

most actively in land grabs, and rural protesters respond with territorial claims, centered on their collective owner­ship of rural land. The protests in Wukan ­were confined geo­graph­i­cally to the village of Wukan and its immediate surroundings. The land owner­ship claims and cellular forms of mobilization demonstrate a territorial approach to organ­izing protests. By comparison, the predominant form of mobilization in India is associational: the key actors in land acquisition are provincial state governments and their affiliated development agencies, and protesters target state governments by engaging in associational forms of mobilization through ad hoc alliances with po­liti­cal parties and NGOs beyond the affected villages. In Singur, the protesters readily accepted the leadership of the Trinamool Congress Party (TMC), and land acquisition became a platform for interparty competition, between TMC and the Communist Party of India-­Marxist (CPI-­M). The territorial and associational forms of mobilization are explained by the dif­fer­ent scales at which the local state partakes in land acquisition. Land taking by municipal and village-­level authorities in China, and by regional state governments in India, has produced dif­fer­ent spatiality and dynamics of re­sis­tance.

A Brief History of Land Acquisition in China The Chinese peasantry’s relationship to land followed an uneven path throughout the twentieth ­century, with the state redistributing land to peasants in some periods and taking it away in ­others. The Communist Party redistributed land to peasants through land reforms from the 1920s to the 1950s and acquired it back from peasants for industrialization and modernization proj­ects in the postin­de­pen­dence de­cades from the 1960s. Land acquisition and widespread protests in the market reform era have to be understood as the latest strug­gles in this long history of land conflicts. From the 1920s to the 1950s, the Chinese Communist Party led progressive land reforms to redistribute land among poor peasants. The Communist Revolution led by Mao Zedong succeeded largely b­ ecause of the support from the poorest part of the peasantry. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Communist Party leadership set up revolutionary bases in the southern provinces, where it experimented with land reforms to redistribute land to the poor and gain their support. Mao conducted a series of rural surveys in a dozen villages to better understand class relations and patterns of landholding. In a 1930 survey he conducted in Xingguo county in Jiangxi province, for example, Mao learned that the local landlords and rich farmers made up only 6 ­percent of the population but owned 80 ­percent of the land, while marginal farmers composed 60 ­percent of the population but owned only 5 ­percent of the land (Mao 1949). Based on similar findings from other villages, Mao concluded that the

38  Ch a p te r 3

dominant relationship in rural China was that between landlords, on the one side, and marginal farmers and landless tenants, on the other. This exploitative relationship was perpetuated through high taxes and debt. In 1927, a Communist Party leader, Peng Pai, established a Soviet government and passed the first land reform legislation in the Hailufeng revolutionary base in Guangdong province, the same region where de­cades ­later the Wukan protest would take place. Through land legislation in this period, the Communist Party declared its intent to confiscate all land and redistribute it to peasants according to ­house­hold size. The progressive land reforms continued a­ fter the founding of the ­People’s Republic of China, and by the late 1950s, China’s land-­owning class was completely wiped out. In the socialist de­cades, the once-­redistributed land was taken back by the state in the form of collectivization. In the 1960s and 1970s, rural families no longer cultivated their own plots but instead w ­ ere grouped into production teams, brigades, and P ­ eople’s Communes. As food supply was centralized and rationed, rural ­house­holds ­were not allowed to keep what they produced. Not ­until the dawn of market reform in 1978 did the country’s leadership begin to tackle the prob­lem of deincentivization wrought by collectivization. In the early 1980s, the central government a­ dopted piecemeal experiments with the h­ ouse­hold responsibility system, which had been introduced in Anhui and other southern provinces in previous years. The h­ ouse­hold responsibility system allowed rural families to retain a major portion of their produce for their own use or sell it at the market ­after fulfilling the government quota.2 The system raised incentives for agricultural production and strengthened farmers’ tenure security. Since the early 1990s, the state again has taken back rural land from peasants for development proj­ects. This new round of land acquisition takes two forms. First, municipal governments acquire land from surrounding rural counties as cities expand outward. The owner­ship of land changes from rural to urban, and the affected ­house­holds change their hukou status from rural to urban as well. The second form of land taking is land leasing by village councils to private investors—­village councils can lease out their collective land to investors for a fee. U ­ nder the collective owner­ship of rural land, village councils—­headed by a Communist Party secretary and a small group of council members—­make most decisions regarding land leasing, often without consulting villa­gers. Outside investors need to negotiate only with village councils, and usually just the party secretary. ­Every year, many land disputes erupt across China ­because of undisclosed land deals between village councils and outside investors. Village councils often pocket most compensation funds, leaving only a meager amount ­behind for villa­gers for the loss of their collective land. The new round of land taking by the state since 1990 has led to a strong backlash from rural ­house­holds, who consider the amount of compensation

L a n d G r a b s a n d P rote st s  39

unfair. Land prices have risen substantially in recent years, but the compensation proposed often does not approach market value. According to China’s former Land Administration Law (effective from 1999 to 2019), the compensation should cover the value of the dispossessed land as well as the price of damaged crops and relocation expenses, but the land value w ­ ill be assessed according to the land’s original use. Evaluating rural land based on its agricultural uses, however, does not account for market value, which can be many times higher than the typical compensation.3 In addition to unfair compensation, the widespread protests over land grabs are also driven by the precarious conditions rural mi­grants face while living in cities. Blocked from obtaining an urban hukou in the cities where they work, they see their share of collective land back home as a social safety net to fall back on in times of economic hardship. For rural mi­grants, their land back home is a commodity with rising market value but also a psychological anchor and a form of social insurance. Contrast this with the view of city governments and village councils, for whom land is simply an asset with which to enhance revenue and make a profit. The protests against land taking in China thus take place in the larger context of urbanization and the heightened value of rural land—­both commercial and symbolic—­for dif­fer­ent stakeholders.

Wukan Uprising: Territorial Forms of Claims Making What happened in Wukan is a classic example of rural land taking by the local state. Wukan is a village u­ nder the jurisdiction of Lufeng municipality in the prosperous Guangdong province (figure 3.1). Geo­graph­i­cally, it is located between China’s two earliest SEZs—­Shenzhen and Shantou—­and Hong Kong is just eighty-­five kilo­meters away, across the sea. Lufeng municipality only came into being in 1995, when the former Lufeng county became a county-­ level city. Wukan is a fishing village with more than four hundred years of history, dating back to the Qing period (Gazetteer 1966). As of 2011, Wukan had 2,146 families and a registered population of 11,689 residents. Wukan was periodically flooded during the typhoon season, and farming has never been the main source of livelihood for villa­gers. In the socialist era, the government tried to convince local fishers and salt farmers to become agricultural laborers, but with ­little success; the land near the seashore was not fertile, and locals preferred fishing over farming (Gazetteer 1966). T ­ oday Wukan still has a small fishing fleet of more than one hundred boats, but fishing has been mostly outsourced to mi­grant laborers from other provinces (figure 3.2). The village government has leased out land to set up vari­ous factories, none of which has been particularly successful. As a result, many young ­people from the village have left to look for work in large cities.

40  Ch a p te r 3

Beijing







  



Shanghai

    Chongqing



 

Guangdong Wukan

Guangzhou

Area of detail

0

75

Miles 150 225 300

Shanwei Wukan Lufeng 0

3

6

9

Miles 12

figure 3.1. Map of Guangdong province and Wukan

L a n d G r a b s a n d P rote st s  41

figure 3.2. Wukan harbor with fishing boats

When I arrived in Wukan in the summer of 2014, I saw mostly w ­ omen, c­ hildren, and el­derly ­people gathering in front of ­temples and shops. ­Later I learned that nearly half the residents had left for cities and towns in the Pearl River Delta, such as Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Guangzhou. Throughout the region, Wukan villa­gers have opened more than three hundred boutiques—­ almost e­ very town in the Pearl River Delta has boutiques owned by p­ eople from Wukan. Wukan has become the region’s “number one village”—­the principal destination for remittance money that flows in steadily from villa­gers working outside (Huang and Lin 2008). The wealth brought by mi­grants was vis­i­ble across the village’s landscape. Bordering the edge of the village are three-­to five-­story villas, each equipped with magnificent cast-­iron gates. Most families have spacious living quarters, typically a two-­or three-­story courtyard residence. The roads are paved, and the homes have r­ unning w ­ ater, flush toilets, and electricity. One villa­ger informed me that the cost of living had gone up in recent years: a comfortable lifestyle would require about 7,000 yuan per month (about 1,200 US dollars) to cover expenses such as cable TV and cellphones.4

42  Ch a p te r 3

I also quickly learned that nobody in the village still cultivated land. Given its relative wealth, Wukan seems an unlikely site for strife and dissent. Yet, it was not subsistence logic that drove ­people to protest but rather the frequent land grabs by local governments that depleted the village’s landholdings. Lufeng municipality, like ­every other city in the country, has aggressively promoted land leasing and property development. In 1993, the government—­ then of Lufeng county—­set up the Donghai Development Zone to attract investment. Over the next two de­cades, this development zone would acquire more than one million square meters of land from Wukan village (Zeng 2013).5 The first acquisition took place in 1993, when the Lufeng county government bought 582,600 square meters of land from Wukan at the price of 11.5 yuan (about 2 USD) per square meter, far below the market price at the time. The second acquisition took place in 1999, when Lufeng city purchased about 254,720 square meters of land from Wukan village. And a third acquisition took place two years l­ ater, when 159,200 square meters of land was sold to the Donghai Development Zone at the same fixed price of 11.5 yuan per square meter of land, even though by then, the land prices had shot up. In 2010, Lufeng city acquired land again from Wukan village to build a g­ rand boulevard—­Donghai Ave­nue. The ten-­kilometer long six-­lane road starts from downtown Lufeng and leads all the way to the doorstep of Wukan village. Villa­gers ­were compensated 500 yuan (about 80 USD) per person for the land acquired to build the road. The new boulevard is now lined on one side by a cluster of ­grand government office buildings, including the offices of the municipal government, the tax bureau, the court, and the police department, as well as an entire building assigned to the Bureau of Housing and Urban-­Rural Planning and Construction—­a city government branch in charge of housing and land use planning. On the other side of the boulevard are large tracts of fenced-­off land, recently rezoned as the Lufeng Industrial Park in the city’s master plan of 2014–20. Since the early 1990s the village council has been continuously leasing out land to outside investors.6 In 1992, the village council set up the Wukan Industrial Development Corporation and agreed to develop eight hundred thousand square meters of land with an investor from Hong Kong, Chen Wenqing. Chen, a Wukan native who left for Hong Kong in the 1970s to expand his business, returned in the 1980s and has become an influential figure in the local development scene, sitting on the boards of a dozen civic organ­izations in the city of Lufeng. Over the next two de­cades, the village leased out land to Wukan Industrial Development Corporation to develop several joint-­venture proj­ects—­a textile factory, a seafood-­processing plant, and a power plant. None of t­ hese village enterprises, however, has been particularly successful. Thus, since the early 1990s, Wukan has lost most of its landholdings to the Lufeng municipal

L a n d G r a b s a n d P rote st s  43

government and joint-­venture factories set up by the village council, and it is squeezed between the rapidly expanding Lufeng city and the Wukan port. The first major confrontation between villa­gers and authorities took place on September 21, 2011. More than four thousand residents gathered outside the village council building on learning that the village council had de­cided to lease one of the last pieces of collectively owned land—­a village pig farm—to Chen Wenqing to build a housing complex. The lease was scheduled to run from 1995 ­until 2010. Even though some villa­gers wanted to use the land to build ­houses, the village council on its own extended the lease for another few years (Zeng 2013). Villa­gers of Wukan had been mobilizing for years to get their land back prior to the protests. In 2009 a group of villa­gers had petitioned dif­fer­ent government authorities without success. The villa­gers then de­cided to change tactics and mobilize the w ­ hole village in the form of street demonstrations. A few activists created a discussion forum on the internet; o­ thers disseminated flyers listing land-­leasing deals negotiated by the village council. The villa­gers mobilized quickly using the existing clan networks (He and Xue 2014). Wukan has a total of seventy-­eight clans, the largest belonging to the Xue, Sun, and Chen families, whose members run into the thousands. The protests began with the villa­gers blocking the government building, the officials fleeing, and an interim council being elected to negotiate with the Lufeng city government (figure 3.3). For the election of the interim council, each clan was asked to nominate 1–5 representatives, depending on the clan’s size. A total of 133 representatives ultimately w ­ ere nominated, and 13 of t­ hese nominees w ­ ere chosen to form the temporary village council. Lin Zuluan, a well-­respected village elder in his late sixties, was picked to lead the temporary council. The temporary council demanded that the village land be returned and that the villa­gers be allowed to elect new village leadership. Over the next two months, the Lufeng city government met with protest leaders and promised to investigate the ­matter, but it took no action. The Lufeng city government’s inaction angered the villa­gers and sparked another large-­scale demonstration. For their second protest, the villa­gers chose a symbolic date—­November 21, 2011. Exactly eighty-­four years ­earlier, in 1927, the first Soviet government was established in Lufeng region by communist leader Peng Pai, who had launched progressive land reforms to redistribute land to poor farmers. Villa­gers chose this date to signal their support for the Communist Party and their desire to recover their land and depose the corrupt local officials. Several thousand ­people marched to the Lufeng city government building about a mile away, bearing banners that read “overthrow corrupt officials” and “return our land” (Lee and Leong 2017). On December 9, the Lufeng city government declared the temporary council to be illegal and arrested several council members. Two days l­ater, a protest leader who

44  Ch a p te r 3

figure 3.3. Wukan village council building

had been arrested, Xue Jinbo, died in police custody with signs of torture on his body. Xue’s death incited the protest movement: a mass funeral on December 12 drew almost the entire village—­some six thousand ­people. Meanwhile, armed police barricaded the two main roads leading out of the village. Dozens of foreign journalists, however, managed to sneak into the village with the help of locals. The journalists—­from the BBC, Guardian, Telegraph, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other media from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia—­managed to file reports and chronicle the development of protests and negotiations (Chen 2012; Lie 2014; Hess 2014). The media coverage quickly escalated the Wukan protest into a global media event and put g­ reat pressure on the Guangdong provincial government. Fi­nally, on December 20, 2011, Zhu Mingguo, the deputy party secretary of the Guangdong provincial government, agreed to meet with the protest leaders and negotiate a settlement. The provincial government set up a working team to investigate past land sales, deposed the former village officials, and allowed the village to carry out an election. The village elder Lin Zuluan was elected by majority vote as the village’s party secretary (figure 3.4). The intervention

L a n d G r a b s a n d P rote st s  45

figure 3.4. Lin Zuluan, the newly elected village leader of Wukan

by the Guangdong provincial government was widely regarded by villa­gers as a victory for their mobilization effort. Throughout the protests, the Wukan villa­gers targeted government authorities at the local level differently from t­ hose at the central or provincial level. They accused the village council of being corrupt and confronted the Lufeng city government over its collaboration on land deals with the village council. At the same time, the villa­gers solicited intervention from the Guangdong provincial government and openly declared support for both the central government and the Communist Party. This strategy of condemning local authorities and seeking support from upper-­level governments is commonly observed in protests across China (O’Brien and Li 2006; Cai 2010; Cui et al. 2015; Dong and Kubler 2018). This strategy reflects the disparate agendas and priorities of governments operating at dif­fer­ent levels of the country’s po­liti­cal hierarchy. The central government, for instance, is preoccupied with maintaining social stability, but local authorities are more concerned with revenue generation and GDP growth through land development.

46  Ch a p te r 3

The mobilization in Wukan was markedly cellular in nature, as the villa­gers or­ga­nized their protests mostly in the village and its immediate surroundings. The villa­gers congregated inside the village and in front of the Lufeng municipal government building a mile away. Lacking interest in mobilizing more broadly, the movement’s leaders spurned protesters from other localities who had lost land and flocked to Wukan in hopes of gaining support and building a broader alliance.7 As explained by Zhang Jianxing, a young protest leader and videographer who posted video clips of the street protests on the internet, “we just want our land back, and we are not democracy fighters.”8 The Wukan protest is still unfolding, and not all the disputed land has been returned. To have the land returned is a daunting task: the newly elected village council would have to investigate ­every land-­leasing deal signed off by the previous government, and it would have to work closely with the Lufeng city government and Guangzhou provincial government to get the land back. The former party secretary of Guangdong province who sympathized with the Wukan protesters, Wang Yang, has since been transferred to the central government to serve as vice premier. His replacement, Hu Chunhua, was much less tolerant t­ oward villa­gers’ demands for the return of their land. From 2014 to 2016, Hu ordered several crackdowns in Wukan. A few protest leaders ­were arrested, including two ­people I interviewed—­the young videographer Zhang Jianxing and the newly elected village head, Lin Zuluan. Lin was sentenced to thirty-­seven months in prison in September 2016 on “corruption charges.” He was shown on local TV confessing that he had received kickbacks for village infrastructural proj­ects. Many Wukan villa­gers saw the confessions as forced, and they stormed into the streets demanding his release. During one police raid, a major clash ensued, and more than a hundred villa­gers ­were arrested. Guangdong provincial party secretary Hu Chunhua ­later visited Wukan village and, in a nod to the crackdown, stated that the village had “strengthened the building of the party’s grass-­roots organ­ization and made pro­gress in resolving the land disputes according to the law” (Yan 2017). L ­ ater that year Hu was promoted to membership on the politburo and named vice premier. What drove Wukan villa­gers to protest was not subsistence logic but repeated land acquisitions that diminished the village’s landholdings. With the rapid expansion of nearby Lufeng city and the village’s shrinking landholdings, the younger generation of villa­gers became more aware of their rights to collective land. Their agricultural hukou status gave villa­gers legitimacy to claim owner­ship over the communal land, even though few can tell precisely how many acres the village once owned, or how much has been leased out.9 This territorial logic of claims making can be clearly observed in the framing and the target of the protest movement. The protesters asserted their collective owner­ship over village land and targeted the local territorial

L a n d G r a b s a n d P rote st s  47

authorities of the village council and the Lufeng city government. The territorial forms of claims making and mobilization are of less importance in land disputes in India.

Land Giving and Taking in India Unlike China, where land taking is carried out by municipal and village governments, land acquisition in India is largely undertaken by regional state governments. In the early 1990s, the seventy-­third and seventy-­fourth constitutional amendments called for devolution of decision-­making power from state to local governments, but state governments in India have steadfastly held their ground and refused to relinquish authority or share resources with lower-­level governments. Lower-­level governments such as municipalities and village councils have been unable to exert even minimal influence in decisions involving land acquisition. ­Because decisions regarding land acquisition continue to be made by state governments, state governments have remained the key target of anti-­land-­acquisition protests (Levien 2012, 2013, 2018; Balakrishnan 2019).10 This is the case even for private proj­ects, which have been facilitated by state governments on behalf of corporations. If state governments cannot justify their actions and provide satisfactory compensation, anti-­land-­ acquisition protests are likely to ensue. As in China, the relationship between the state and peasants in India has historically been complicated, with the state redistributing land to peasants in some periods and taking it back in o­ thers. ­After in­de­pen­dence—­roughly between the late 1940s and the early 1970s—­India initiated land reforms to improve peasants’ livelihood. Th ­ ese reforms aimed to abolish intermediaries such as zamindars (tax collectors), improve tenants’ rights, and redistribute ceiling-­plus land (the extra land exceeding the maximum amount allowed by state governments) from large landowners to small and marginal farmers. The reforms succeeded in abolishing intermediaries but ­were less successful in redistributing ceiling-­plus land. In many states, large landholders found ways to keep control over land, such as by displacing tenants, and ­little cultivable land (less than 5 ­percent) was transferred to small and marginal farmers (Roy 2014). The exceptions ­were West Bengal and Kerala, two states that w ­ ere led by Leftist parties. In West Bengal, the rights of tenants ­were guaranteed l­egal protection, and in Kerala, tenancy was completely outlawed. The state of West Bengal, a stronghold of Leftist parties, has had more success than other states in improving tenancy rights and redistributing ceiling-­ plus land. In the 1950s, the state government passed legislation to protect the rights of sharecroppers and to redistribute land from large landholders to small and marginal farmers.11 Despite the re­sis­tance from large landowners, the state

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government redistributed a significant amount of ceiling-­plus land by the end of the 1960s. Beginning in the mid-1970s, more policy attention was devoted to protecting the rights of sharecroppers who cultivated land that was not their own (bargadars). The Left Front government came to power in 1977 and took several mea­sures to implement existing legislation to redistribute ceiling-­plus land and to protect heritable cultivating rights among sharecroppers. The most notable program was Operation Barga, which made government officials rec­ ord the names of sharecroppers to ensure them greater tenure security and to extend protection against land grabs and evictions (Roy 2014).12 Operation Barga helped the Left Front government gain support from tenants, and the Left Front government ruled the state for more than three de­cades, from 1977 to 2011. ­After a series of progressive land reforms led by Leftist parties, the structure of landholding ­today in West Bengal is extremely fragmented, with marginal farmers, small farmers, and sharecroppers making up the majority of the farming population. While the Indian state redistributed land during the land reforms, it also invoked the colonial Land Acquisition Act (LAA) of 1894 to take land away for industrialization and modernization proj­ects in the postin­de­pen­dence era. ­Under the LAA, land may be acquired by the state for a public purpose, and state governments can set a compensation rate based on rec­ords of previous transactions. The 1894 LAA was not often used during colonial times, b­ ecause the colonial regime was not a developmental state. But in the postin­de­pen­ dence era, state governments liberally used the law, construing almost all state proj­ects and all private proj­ects as advancing the public interest (Chakravorty 2013). Land acquisition deals, backed by the colonial-­era law, led to widespread re­sis­tance from farmers. ­After years of heated public debate over land acquisition, the Indian parliament in 2013 fi­nally replaced the 120-­year-­old colonial law with a new LAA. The new law offers more generous compensation for landowners—­four times the market price for land acquired in rural areas and double the market price for land in urban areas. It requires 70 ­percent consent from landowners when the private sector is involved in a land acquisition deal. It also recognizes for the first time the rights of landless ­people whose livelihood ­will be affected by land acquisition: the law offers them a rehabilitation and resettlement package of twenty years’ income plus other immediate benefits (Nielsen 2010, 2011; Chakravorty 2013). But the new LAA has been criticized by many. The po­liti­cal Left saw it as a vehicle to transfer land to the private sector without sufficient compensation to the most vulnerable populations. The po­liti­cal Right criticized it for giving too much to the affected rural h­ ouse­holds and therefore impeding development, ­because the high costs for land compensation would

L a n d G r a b s a n d P rote st s  49

intimidate investors. The Modi government tried to expedite the land acquisition pro­cess by eliminating the 70 ­percent consent requirement but encountered re­sis­tance from the Congress Party (Najar 2015). ­W hether the new LAA can offer the intended protection to farmers w ­ ill ultimately depend on state-­level land acquisition policies. Several state governments have enacted legislation to fast-­track the pro­cess of acquisition. Some states have eliminated the need for a public hearing, a social impact assessment, and consent from potential land losers (Kohli and Gupta 2016). Some states have also reduced the amount of compensation below the level mandated by the national law, and ­others have ordered unused acquired land to be put into land banks instead of returned to the original users.

Singur Protest: Po­liti­cal Parties and Associational Forms of Mobilization The anti-­land-­acquisition protest in Singur is one of the most significant events in the history of peasant re­sis­tance in postliberalization India. Just like the Wukan uprising, which broke out in a region with a long history of land reforms led by the Communist Party, the Singur protest arose in West Bengal, a state marked by progressive land reforms led by Leftist parties. The Leftist parties in India generally oppose neoliberal policies, but the Left Front government in West Bengal pursued entrepreneurial policies to attract investment. As early as 1994, the Left Front government formulated investor-­friendly policies to attract factories to the state. In 2006, Left Front won its seventh term in the state-­level elections partly on the basis of a campaign promise to industrialize West Bengal (Banerjee 2006). It proposed acquiring 100,000 acres of land for this mission (Roy 2014). The state government touted its flagship proj­ect as the acquisition of 997 acres of land in Singur for Tata Motors to set up a factory. Tata Motors had competing offers from other states, and West Bengal’s winning proposal offered major concessions, such as low-­ interest loans, tax waivers, and most impor­tant, a prized location near Kolkata (Chandra 2008). Singur is a well-­developed market town in the Hooghly District of West Bengal (figure 3.5). Less than an hour’s drive from Kolkata, it is well connected to many other small towns and nearby villages by rail and expressways (figure 3.6). In 1981, Singur was declared a census town, which means that the place is densely populated and highly urbanized, and most of its resident population no longer engages in agriculture. Statistics show that, by 2011, close to 90 ­percent of its population worked in nonagricultural occupations (Samanta 2014). The landscape reflects urbanization of this small town. The

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Delhi WEST BENGAL

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Miles 40

figure 3.5. Map of West Bengal and Singur

main market streets are lined with stores and small workshops of light industries (figure 3.7). This other­wise unremarkable market town became the center of media attention in 2006, when the state government chose a tract of fertile agricultural land in Singur for the Tata Motors factory. The land acquisition, if carried out, would affect five villages sitting at the edge of Singur.13 ­These villages ­were populated mostly by small farmers (about 50 ­percent of the total population), sharecroppers, and other landless ­people of lower castes (about 25–30 ­percent) (Banerjee 2006; Roy 2007). The 997 acres of land to be acquired belonged to 13,491 landowners. The details of the deal ­were immediately controversial. While the compensation offered by the state government approximated the market price of the land acquired, 75 ­percent of the compensation money would go to landowners and only 25 ­percent to sharecroppers. This conflicted with the West Bengal Land Reforms Act as amended by the Congress Party in 1971, which entitled registered sharecroppers to 75 ­percent of the produce of the land they cultivated, and landowners only to 25 ­percent. Not surprisingly, the sharecroppers rejected the 25 ­percent offer as unacceptable (Banerjee 2006; Roy 2014). Many absentee landowners accepted the government’s offer right away, though a few

figure 3.6. Railroads connecting Singur to Kolkata

figure 3.7. Market streets, Singur

52  Ch a p t e r 3

landowners refused the offer in the expectation that the value of the land would soon rise (Ghatak et al. 2013). Most of the “unwilling farmers” who refused to take the compensation w ­ ere sharecroppers and marginal farmers whose livelihood depended on the small plot of land they owned or tilled (Ghosh 2012). Lacking education and skills, many residents in the affected villages did not expect to benefit from the Tata enterprise.14 The land acquisition also would affect mi­grant laborers who made a living by providing ser­ vices to farmers, and who did not stand to receive any compensation. Sharecroppers, marginal and small farmers, and mi­grant laborers viewed the land acquisition as a reversal of the past land reforms aimed to improve tenancy rights; they stood to lose the most from the deal, and so they made up the majority of the opposition movement in Singur. ­After the state government announced its land acquisition plans, Singur peasants or­ga­nized immediately. They formed the Committee to Save Farm Land and selected two leaders for the committee, with one from the TMC party. TMC has extensive organ­ization networks throughout Singur. In July 2006, the committee or­ga­nized a mass rally with TMC leader Mamata Banerjee, asking the Left Front government not to take land from the unwilling farmers. But ­there is no fundamental ideological difference over land acquisition among po­liti­cal parties in India. TMC is not much dif­fer­ent from the Left Front government in terms of its approach to industrialization and attracting investment. When local TMC representative Rabindranath Bhattacharya was asked about his view on land acquisition, he replied: “It is true that the state of West Bengal is not in good financial shape, and we would welcome industries to invest ­here. But investors and industries should negotiate with farmers directly and offer them competitive prices for their land. It is not the job of the state to intervene and take land from farmers. That’s what the last government did.”15 ­Under TMC’s leadership, the protest quickly grew more militant. In response to the state government’s order, local residents blocked highways and railroads. ­Women also joined in the rallies (Roy 2012), wielding brooms and sticks to close off the village and shut out officials from the government and Tata Motors (Roy 2014). The government in turn fenced off the land. Clashes between farmers and state police ensued; some farmers w ­ ere arrested, and the rest ­were dispersed with tear gas. In 2007, a­ fter all other strategies of contention had failed, protesters petitioned the Calcutta High Court. The high court dismissed the petitions and ruled that the land acquisition by the state government did not violate the “public interest” clause in the Land Acquisition Act (Nielsen 2011). “Bringing into existence a factory of this kind,” the court stated, “would be a purpose beneficial to the public even though it is a private venture” (Calcutta High Court 2008, 11). The decision was unsurprising. High courts in India have

L a n d G r a b s a n d P rote st s  53

consistently upheld land acquisition deals, generally letting state governments decide ­whether a proj­ect serves a public purpose. ­After the land was fenced off and vari­ous ­legal and extralegal means of contention failed, the TMC party, led by Mamata Banerjee, continued to agitate in Kolkata. The unwilling farmers started a hunger strike, but in December 2006 Banerjee started fasting in Kolkata, so that the media attention quickly shifted from the Singur protesters to her. The re­sis­tance continued, and the ruling CPI-­M lost support b­ ecause of its stance on land acquisition issues. In 2008 the CPI-­M lost the village-­level elections. In October 2008, Tata Motors announced that it would give up its factory proj­ect in Singur and relocate to Gujarat. Gujarat was known for its business-­friendly policies ­under then chief minister Narendra Modi.16 By presenting itself as profarmer and by ­running on an anti-­land-­acquisition platform, TMC won the state election in 2011, ending the more than three-­ decade rule of the Left Front government in West Bengal. Upon taking office, Mamata Banerjee passed the Singur Land Rehabilitation and Development Act (the Singur Act) in November 2011 and vowed to return about four hundred acres of land to ­those who had refused to accept compensation (West Bengal Assembly 2011). The disputed land would be tied up in ­legal ­battles for another five years. Tata Motors appealed to the Calcutta High Court in 2011, questioning the legality of the Singur Act (West Bengal Assembly 2011, 3). Tata Motors asserted that the land is “already vested in the state government as a result of proceedings taken u­ nder the Land Acquisition Act, 1894,” and therefore, the disputed land cannot be divested from the state government and returned to the landowners (Calcutta High Court 2012, 4). In 2012, the Calcutta High Court struck down the Singur Act as unconstitutional, and the case was transferred to the Supreme Court. In August 2016, the Supreme Court reversed the high court’s decision, and in a 204-­page opinion letter, it ruled that the disputed land should be returned to the farmers. The two judges on the panel, however, disagreed over ­whether the Singur factory, if built, would serve a public purpose. One wrote that the land acquisition for Tata Motors was “disguised as acquisition of land for ‘public purpose’ in order to circumvent compliance with the mandatory provisions of the Land Acquisition Act.” The other maintained, however, that the land acquisition and the building of a car factory would “ultimately benefit the p­ eople and the very purpose of industrialization” (Supreme Court of India 2016, 92, 113). Despite their differences, the two judges agreed to return the idle land to Singur farmers. The Singur movement exhibits one striking feature that is shared by many anti-­land-­acquisition movements in con­temporary India: the intervention of po­liti­cal parties.17 From the beginning of the mobilization, the Singur

54  Ch a p t e r 3

protesters accepted the leadership of the TMC Party, which agitated at multiple sites across the state—­Singur, Nandigram, and Kolkata—­and eventually won the state assembly election. Strong interparty competition between the CPI-­M and the TMC decisively ­shaped the trajectory of the Singur protest. The protest, orchestrated by TMC, exhibited an associational form of mobilization, as resisting farmers built ad hoc alliances with po­liti­cal parties and NGOs, and together they agitated from both within and outside the affected villages in Singur.

Conclusion: Comparing Land Protests in China and India China and India offer fertile grounds for comparative analyses on the politics of land acquisition. The land acquisition u­ nder way in China, for instance, is far more aggressive than that in India, driven by several ­factors. First, the Chinese economy is more dependent on manufacturing and export pro­cessing than the Indian economy, and the demand for manufacturing land is much higher. Second, u­ nder the current cadre evaluation system, local officials in China are incentivized to lure investment by setting up development zones, which often require large tracts of rural land. Third, the power imbalance between municipal and village governments in China disadvantages villages, which always have to concede when nearby cities want to acquire their land. And fi­nally, public land owner­ship in China has made large-­scale land taking by the state much easier than in India. The Wukan and Singur protests epitomize the widespread land grabs unfolding in China and India ­today, and they share common traits. First, the protesters in both Wukan and Singur opposed land acquisition through a similar set of subaltern strategies, such as demonstrations, roadblocks, and petitions to government authorities. Second, in both cases, local courts proved unhelpful for the protesters to get their land back (Fu 2014; Nielsen 2015). It was only when the Supreme Court of India intervened in 2016, a de­cade ­after the initial protest broke out in Singur, that the disputed land was fi­nally returned to the resisting farmers. The Wukan protesters did not even bother to file a formal case with the local court, dependent as it is on the government and unlikely to rule in ­favor of the protesters. The key differences between the two protests concern land owner­ship and the intervention by dif­fer­ent levels of the subnational state in land acquisition. ­These have resulted in dif­fer­ent logics of mobilization. In Wukan, it was the village council and the nearby municipal government that took land from villa­gers without fair compensation, and t­ hese actions by territorial authorities sparked primarily territorial forms of mobilization. Although the Wukan protest also

L a n d G r a b s a n d P rote st s  55

involved associational forms of mobilization, such as the villa­gers’ attempt to reach out to the media and self-­organization via ­family and clan networks, it targeted the local territorial authority of the village council, and the protests ­were confined to the village and its immediate surroundings. The Wukan protesters’ two major demands ­were to have the village land returned and to conduct an election to choose new leadership. They did not build alliances with activists from other localities, did not see themselves as the sort of democracy fighters often portrayed in the foreign media, and even expressed suspicion about the vari­ous prodemocracy groups that arrived in the village offering advice. Overall, collective land owner­ship empowered the protesters in their claims making. In contrast, in Singur, it was the state government led by the CPI-­M party that initiated the land acquisition on behalf of investors, and the state government became the target of the protests. The local territorial authorities, such as the village council, did not play any significant role in the land acquisition deal or the protests.18 The protests w ­ ere not centered on land owner­ship or other forms of territorial claims but displayed an associational logic of mobilization. The farmers who w ­ ere unwilling to give up their land readily accepted the guidance and leadership of the TMC Party; for TMC, the primary goal was to win the state-­level election by using Singur as a campaign platform. The mobilization unfolded in localities beyond Singur, and resisting farmers actively sought leadership from po­liti­cal parties and built alliances with civil society groups across the country. Land acquisition ­will continue to shape rural politics in the coming years in both countries. In China, u­ nder the decentralized system, local authorities directly oversee land acquisition, and the ­battle over land ­will continue to be fought locally between land takers and land “losers.” U ­ nless local governments offer fair compensation, land acquisition is likely to lead to more social unrest. In India, land acquisition falls within the authority of state governments, and contestation over land acquisition ­will always be intertwined with state and even national politics. Associational strategies of mobilization and strong intervention by po­liti­cal parties, as observed in the Singur protests, ­will be replayed in many other localities across India. In both countries, rapid urban expansion ­will continue to displace more rural ­house­holds, whom the government somehow w ­ ill have to accommodate. Policy makers in both countries ­will have to consider fair compensation, as well as other options, such as reemployment training, adequate social safety nets for the landless, and, more importantly, the option to let farmers retain their owner­ship and co-­benefit from land and property development.

4 Urban Redevelopment in Guangzhou and Mumbai

real estate developer Shah is sitting in his doctor’s office overlooking Mumbai’s skyline. He has been hard at work on a new luxury-­building proj­ect in the city’s Santa Cruz section, a proj­ect he calls “Confidence Shanghai.” Shah turns to his doctor, Nayak, and says, “You should have come with me, Nayak. Roads as far as the eye can see, skyscrapers, every­thing clean, beautiful. Th ­ ose Chinese have all the willpower in the world. And ­here we ­haven’t had ten minutes of willpower since In­de­pen­dence.” The doctor moves ­toward the win­ dow and replies, “The experience of Shanghai to a middle-­aged Indian businessman is what the experience of sex is to a teenager. You ­can’t keep comparing us to the Chinese.” Shah turns to the doctor and asks, “How e­ lse w ­ ill we improve? Look at the trains in this city. Look at the roads. The law and the courts. Nothing works, nothing moves; it takes ten years to build a bridge.” In Mumbai, no building proj­ect gets completed without a fight. Shah starts cursing. “The nature of this stupid, stupid city.” What he would have built by now if he w ­ ere in Shanghai—­hospitals, airports, thirteen-­story shopping malls (Adiga 2011, 63–64, 225)! The above scene comes from Aravind Adiga’s 2011 novel Last Man in Tower, which tells the story of a Mumbai-­based developer, Shah, trying to demolish an old residential building and build a luxury apartment complex. All residents have agreed to move, except one old schoolteacher, who refuses Shah’s generous offer not out of a desire for more money, but ­because he does not want to move anywhere e­ lse. Shah is agitated by the delay caused by the old man, and he dreams about what he could do if he ­were in Shanghai. China’s allure can be felt throughout Adiga’s book. For Mumbai’s businesspeople and politicians, China often seems to be the opposite of India—­a place where ­things can be built quickly b­ ecause strong-­w illed local governments steamroll any re­sis­tance from ordinary citizens. Shah has built his ­career on slum redevelopment, and he recalls how times have changed in Mumbai since 56

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the lawless 1980s and 1990s: “In the old days, if a builder had a prob­lem, that prob­lem would end up in pieces in the wet concrete. It became part of the building it had tried to obstruct. A bit of calcium was good for the foundation.” But ­those days are long gone. His proj­ect cannot move forward ­until the last resident signs the contract. If a single resident ­were to go to court, the de­mo­ li­tion would be held up for years while the judge tried to make a decision. Shah, furious, thinks, “Why does that old teacher keep saying no to it? In China, you know what they would have done to a man like him by now?” (Adiga 2011, 321, 337). But what Shah, the fictional character, and perhaps many real-­life Mumbai developers do not know is that the era of tabula rasa–­style de­mo­li­tions and urban renewal in Chinese cities is over.1 Redevelopment in China ­today is as contested as in India. Forced de­mo­li­tions are forbidden ­under a central government policy enacted in 2011, and approval from a majority of local residents is now needed before redevelopment can take place (State Council 2011). Many cities have gone further and now require that at least 80 ­percent of affected residents consent to redevelopment (Ren 2014).2 While an 80 ­percent figure seems high, in fact a proj­ect cannot start ­until the last resident agrees to move, just as in Adiga’s novel. Residents across the country resist redevelopment proj­ects that do not offer fair compensation (Ren 2011, 2013; Shin 2013; Tomba 2017). As a result, local governments have had to scale back their roles; city officials, concerned about their po­liti­cal c­ areers, now proceed more cautiously than before. And developers no longer can get away with offers of unfair compensation and resettlement packages in peripheral locations. ­Today they must compensate residents at market rate for their property or, if pos­si­ble, offer in-­situ resettlement. ­After two de­cades of large-­scale de­mo­li­tions and displacement, urban redevelopment in China has entered a new era, with contestations resembling ­those seen in Indian cities. This chapter examines the contested pro­cess of urban village and slum redevelopment in Guangzhou and Mumbai. Urban villages and slums in both cities deserve special attention b­ ecause they h­ ouse a massive number of ­people—at least ten million p­ eople between the two cities.3 More importantly, many urban villages and slums occupy prime locations, and they have become predictable targets for speculative land and property development. In both cities, the dominant approach has been to seek private capital to remove urban villages and slums, and private developers l­ ater are rewarded with freedup land to build market-­rate housing. The first of the two case studies is Xiancun, an urban village situated right in the m ­ iddle of Guangzhou’s central business district. The plan to redevelop Xiancun took shape in the early 2000s, as part of Guangzhou’s ambitious program to reclaim land from urban villages. But for nearly two de­cades the proj­ect has stalled, as villa­gers, developers, and

58  Ch a p t e r 4

the city government clash with one another over compensation. ­Today, a few village buildings still stand at the city center, and Xiancun has become the central business district’s last remaining urban village. The second case study is Mumbai’s airport slum, a large stretch of settlements encircling the city’s international airport. Current plans envision that the state agency in charge of slum redevelopment ­will contract with a private developer to resettle eligible slum dwellers and use the cleared land to expand the airport and develop nearby commercial properties. But as in the case of Xiancun, the airport slum redevelopment proj­ect has been held up for almost a de­cade ­because of conflicts over eligibility for compensation. Many residents stand not to qualify for compensation if the official criteria for slum rehabilitation ­were applied, and neither the government nor the privatized Airport Authority is willing to cover the cost of resettling noneligible residents. The comparative analy­sis focuses on who is included and who excluded in the pro­cess of redevelopment. Where that line gets drawn depends, in Guangzhou, on territorial institutions and, in Mumbai, on associational politics. In Guangzhou, territorial institutions such as hukou, village companies, and rural collective land owner­ship divide the urban village population into groups with dif­fer­ent entitlements and rights. In Mumbai, the boundary of inclusion and exclusion is much fuzzier, being negotiated through the associational politics of alliance building among residents, housing rights NGOs, developers, po­ liti­cal parties, and state bureaucracies. In both cities, the current model of redevelopment led by the private sector has exacerbated property speculation and housing in­equality.

Guangzhou: Urban Village Removal and Market-­Led Redevelopment Chinese urban villages are agricultural villages that have been engulfed by urban construction. As villages lost cultivable land, villa­gers began to construct apartment buildings on the remaining land to make a living from rental income (Chung 2010). B ­ ecause of their affordable rent, urban villages attract mi­grants looking for cheap housing, and over time they become densely populated working-­class neighborhoods of mostly mi­grant workers. Urban villages are often described in the scholarly lit­er­a­ture as informal settlements built on ambiguous claims of land owner­ship and lacking regulation by the state (Liu et al. 2010; He et al. 2010). But the land owner­ship in fact is clear—it is collectively owned rural land—­and as for state regulation, urban villages are governed by multiple state bureaucracies, such as village councils, incorporated village companies, street offices (jiedao), and district governments. The informality of urban villages derives not from unclear land

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owner­ship or lack of state regulation, but mostly from illegal construction. ­Because some villa­gers have built on land not designated for residential use, they cannot acquire permits for land use and construction—­the documents required to prove property owner­ship. Some have built higher than the permissible three stories, and the additional levels are therefore treated as illegal. But the boundary between l­ egal and illegal construction is porous and shifting. The Guangzhou city government, for instance, has allowed developers at times to pay compensation for certain illegal buildings facing de­mo­li­tion (Guangzhou Urban Renewal Bureau 2016). Urban villages in China are often compared to informal settlements in other parts of the Global South, such as slums in India and favelas in Brazil. But such comparisons require a caveat: most urban villages have much better infrastructure than slums and favelas, and infrastructure is not a site of contestation in Chinese urban villages. In most urban villages, local governments provide almost universal coverage of w ­ ater and electricity; sanitation, street lighting, and road repair inside urban villages are provided by village committees, often through private contractors; and tele­vi­sion and internet ser­vices are provided by the major TV networks and telecom companies. Residents of urban villages regularly subscribe to ­these ser­vices just like every­body ­else. The concerns of ­these residents thus differ markedly from residents of informal settlements in India and most of the developing world, who have to fight for ­these basic ser­ vices (Roy 2005; Auerbach 2016; Auerbach et al. 2018; Davis 2018).

Guangzhou’s Approach to Removing Urban Villages The dominant approach to redeveloping urban villages in Guangzhou is removal and new construction by enlisting private capital.4 The removal-­based policy has been driven largely by the city’s revenue structure, centered on land-­ based financing. Guangzhou, like most city governments in China, depends heavi­ly on land leasing to generate revenue. Revenue from land leasing in Guangzhou in 2015 reached 90 billion yuan (about 14 billion USD), or 35 ­percent of that year’s municipal revenue (Zhang 2016). But the model of land-­based financing has become increasingly unsustainable, as most urban land parcels have already been leased out (Ren, Wei, and Wang 2011). Of the 2,740 square kilo­meters of land approved by the State Council for construction, the city had already used up 2,700 square kilo­meters by 2015.5 The lack of transferrable urban land prompted the city government to reexamine existing land use patterns to squeeze out more developable land. The city government identified 138 urban villages occupying more than 200 square kilo­meters of land, all of which it proposed to redevelop by 2020 (Guangzhou Urban Renewal Bureau 2009).

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Guangzhou has many urban villages b­ ecause of how the city expanded outward in the 1990s. Unlike other cities that simply demolished entire villages without regard to compensation, the Guangzhou city government feared the consequences of such unilateral action. The city government acquired the agricultural land belonging to villages, but left intact residential land (zhaijidi) and villa­gers’ ­houses standing on it. In addition, the city also let villages retain some land (called “self-­reserved land,” or ziliudi) to generate revenue. The locals built multistory apartment buildings and rented out rooms to mi­grants on the residential land and on the “self-­reserved land” (Wong 2015). In 2009, the city government of Guangzhou announced its policy on urban village redevelopment. Labeled the sanjiu program (meaning “three types of old places”), the policy targeted three types of neighborhoods, including urban villages (Guangzhou City Government 2009). The city government explic­itly encouraged private developers to partake in urban village redevelopment. Developers taking charge of de­mo­li­tion, compensation, and resettlement could in return be given the right to develop the land on the sites of cleared urban villages. Of the land-­leasing fees paid by developers, 60 ­percent was to go to village companies, and the rest would be split between the city and district governments at the ratio of 8 to 2. As for compensation, property ­owners in urban villages would be offered ­either monetary compensation or in-­situ resettlement housing. Most chose resettlement housing b­ ecause of the rising housing prices in Guangzhou. Urban villages are challenging for the city government to redevelop b­ ecause the local communities are highly or­ga­nized.6 Most urban villages in southern China are close-­knit communities tethered by dense f­ amily and clan networks, and they have been incorporated as shareholding village companies, which manage the collective assets on the villa­gers’ behalf. Such village companies stand to get a big slice of compensation, by negotiating hard with developers and the city government. Urban village redevelopment also requires substantial capital investment. Many urban villages have developed a thriving rental economy through the construction of apartment buildings, and ­these buildings, if demolished, would have to be compensated at the market rate. B ­ ecause of t­ hese challenges, the ­actual pro­gress of redevelopment has been far slower than the city government anticipated. According to the original schedule, 52 out of 138 urban villages should have completed redevelopment by 2015; by that year, however, only three places—­Liede, Linhe, and Pazhou—­had been redeveloped, and the rest remained intact, b­ ecause of ­either lack of interest from developers or re­sis­tance from local villa­gers. The city government announced a new policy in 2016 to quicken the pace of urban village redevelopment (Guangzhou Urban Renewal Bureau 2016). This time the government introduced land banking (zhengshou chubei) as a

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pos­si­ble model of redevelopment. ­Under this model, the government would acquire land from urban villages, convert the land to state-­owned urban land, and lease it out to investors through open bidding and auctions.7 Land banking has been carried out in other cities, but w ­ hether it can be done in Guangzhou remains to be seen. The 2016 policy also offered major concessions, such as recognizing illegal construction built before June 30, 2007, and allowing some flexibility regarding land owner­ship conversion: for the land on which resettlement housing is built, villages can retain collective land owner­ship. Despite the policy revisions between 2009 and 2016, the winners and losers in urban village redevelopment in Guangzhou remain the same. The city government, developers, and urban villages (including both village companies and individual villa­gers) are poised to divide the windfall profit. Mi­grant tenants are excluded, evicted, and removed to other urban villages on the urban periphery, where they have to rent all over again (Wong, Tang, and Liu 2018).

Developer-­Led Redevelopment In China, real estate developers include both private firms and state companies. Private developers emerged in the 1980s with the deregulation of the land market; at the time many engaged in land speculation rather than construction. When housing privatization flourished in the 1990s, private developers replaced the public sector as the main providers of housing. ­Today private developers dominate the property market, but some state companies remain active in real estate development. Both private developers and state companies can bid on urban village redevelopment proj­ects, and whom to choose is entirely the decision of the village leadership. Poly Group, a state com­pany with strong ties to the central government, has secured almost all the contracts for urban village redevelopment in Guangzhou. In an interview, a se­nior man­ag­er at Poly commented that urban villages ­were the last parcels of land available in the city that could guarantee wide profit margins.8 ­Because of Guangzhou’s rising housing prices, developers can pocket windfall profits ­after paying for compensation and resettlement. The more central the location, the bigger the profit to be made, and the more attractive urban villages become for developers.

Redeveloping Xiancun Many urban villages in the Pearl River Delta in south China, including Xiancun, have a long history dating back to the imperial era. Xiancun’s history reaches back to the Song dynasty in the thirteenth c­ entury. In the seventeenth c­ entury, during the Ming dynasty, it gained its name—­which translates as “the village of the Xian clan”—in honor of the Xian ­family’s newfound prosperity. Over time,

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Xiancun

Xiancun Elementary School

Liede Rd

Pearl River New City Plaza

Xiancun Rd

West Huangpu Rd

Youjia Supermarket

Fanyangxuan

Jinsui Rd

Ping An Poly Bank Whisper Garden W Hotel

0

250

500

750 1,000 Feet

figure 4.1. Map of Xiancun in Pearl River Newtown

other families moved in, and most villa­gers ­today belong to three major clans: the Xian, Liang, and Lu families. Each clan has its own ancestral hall in the village, where it keeps a rec­ord of the f­ amily genealogy. Before 1949, ­these major clans owned the majority of the village’s land.9 As in many other southern villages, lineage ties and collective landholding reinforced the village as a territorial entity with strict bound­aries (Faure and Siu 1990; Hsing 2010). Beginning in the 1980s, Xiancun lost most of its land to the city government, and ­today Xiancun has been reduced to one city block (figure 4.1). But the locals call Xiancun a “diamond village” ­because it sits on extremely valuable land. It is located in Tianhe District, a district set up by the city in 1985 in its plan to develop a central business district—­called Pearl River Newtown. ­Because of its central location next to sleek ­hotels and office towers, the village attracted a large number of mi­grant tenants. At its peak around 2007, Xiancun had about seven thousand local residents and more than thirty thousand mi­grant tenants.10

Land Expropriation in the 1980s and 1990s Xiancun lost its land to the city government as early as the 1980s. At that time, Guangzhou started to expand eastward, encroaching on the territory of Xiancun and several other villages. The city government acquired large tracts of

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land to build Pearl River Newtown. First, in 1985, the city acquired 1,207 mu of land, about half of Xiancun’s total landholdings, to build a sports stadium. As compensation, the city government offered the villa­gers 10 million yuan, and another 27 million yuan in subsidies of vari­ous kinds. The compensation rate at that time was about three to six times the average annual yield from agricultural production; a de­cade ­later, such a rate would have seemed unconscionable given Xiancun’s prime location. The village council siphoned off most of the compensation funds earmarked for the villa­gers, who never learned what happened to most of the money. Several years l­ ater, in 1992, Xiancun lost more land to another wave of urban expansion. To build Pearl River Newtown, the city government acquired 6.6 square kilo­meters of land from Xiancun and four other villages.11 The city government initially wanted to relocate all five villages’ residents, but the high compensation costs forced it to salvage Xiancun and another village (Liede), even if their landholdings w ­ ere significantly reduced. Xiancun lost 978 mu of land to the city government at this time. Xiancun also lost landholdings to vari­ous state enterprises. Between the 1950s and 1990s, small parcels of Xiancun’s land ­were bought by the military, municipal food reserve banks, and also a state-­owned electricity com­pany (Lu 2008). ­After losing all its agricultural land by 1995, the village territory was reduced to the size of a city block, sandwiched between four major streets. The Xiancun Chronicle notes, “From this time forward, the land that generations of villa­gers relied on for their livelihoods has all been acquired” (Lu 2008, 49; my translation). ­After Xiancun lost its cultivable land, its economic base shifted from agriculture to real estate.12 Two real estate ventures became highly successful: one was a pedestrian shopping street built in 1987 on the village’s edge, and the other was a vegetable and meat market built two years l­ ater. The village council collected rental fees from both the pedestrian street’s shop o­ wners and the market’s vendors (Lu 2008). Individual villa­gers also began to construct apartment buildings to rent to mi­grant workers who w ­ ere streaming into Guangzhou, the largest city in south China’s manufacturing ­belt. The demand for cheap housing among mi­grants presented business opportunities for villa­gers in Xiancun. The village council began approving self-­construction proj­ects in 1988, and over the next de­cade private investment poured into construction proj­ects. By the end of the 1990s, villa­gers had invested more than 240 million yuan in the construction of rental apartment buildings (Lu 2008). By 2008, when the village leadership de­cided to redevelop Xiancun, villa­gers had already erected more than two thousand buildings within the village’s narrow bound­aries—­all of 0.7 square mile. Most buildings ­were between four and seven stories high, exceeding the city’s three-­story height limit for urban villages. As residents

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figure 4.2. A street lined with stores, Xiancun

sought to maximize rental profit, buildings ­were packed together tightly, leaving merely a glimmer of space in between. Locals typically occupied the top floors, which had better light exposure, and rented out the lower floors to mi­grants—­the first floors typically served as shop fronts, and the remaining floors as residences.13 ­Because of the central location and relatively low rents, mi­grants swarmed to Xiancun (figure 4.2). Within the single de­cade of the 1990s, Xiancun had become an urban village dependent on rental income from mi­grant tenants.

Ur ba n R e de ve lopm e n t   65

The city government turned a blind eye to the construction boom taking place inside Xiancun and other urban villages. It fined villa­gers for illegal construction, but villa­gers ­didn’t mind paying the fines as long as the cost was exceeded by rental profit. Many villa­gers believed that the fines and their payments reflected the authorities’ tacit acknowl­edgment that their claims to the property had become l­egal. This indeed happened in 2016, when the city government agreed to compensate the illegal construction built before 2007 with a new policy (Guangzhou Urban Renewal Bureau 2016). The fines ­imposed by the city government, paradoxically, prompted more illegal construction.14

The Redevelopment Saga (2000–2020) The city government wanted to remove Xiancun as early as 2000, as it found the village’s presence in the central business district unfit for Guangzhou’s image as a world-­class city. The two-­decade history of redevelopment can be divided into three phases: first, the city government took charge without concern for the villa­gers’ interest in redevelopment; second, the incorporated village com­pany stepped forward to become the developer; and third, the village invited a developer from outside to continue de­mo­li­tions and relocation. Throughout the three phases, a set of territorial institutions—­hukou, rural land owner­ship, and the village com­pany—­have divided the resident population into dif­fer­ent groups with unequal rights and entitlement to compensation. The initial phase of Xiancun’s redevelopment, between 2000 and 2008, got off to a slow start b­ ecause of lack of funding and interest. The city government imposed a redevelopment plan on Xiancun and excluded both private developers and the village com­pany from taking a lead role in the pro­ cess. But the city government did not want to commit any funds and insisted that the village com­pany raise funds through bank loans. The city government also did not want to get involved in de­mo­li­tions and resettlement and delegated t­ hose tasks to the government of Tianhe District, which encompassed Xiancun. The district government, in turn, asked its subordinate street office (jiedao) to persuade villa­gers to relocate. But the street office, lacking the capacity to undertake such a large-­scale redevelopment proj­ect, kicked the ball back, telling the city and district governments that redevelopment would be extremely challenging without substantial government funding (Li 2006). Meanwhile, by the early 2000s, many villa­gers ­were earning a substantial income from rental properties and had no incentive to relocate. The second phase of redevelopment began in 2009, when the city government announced its urban renewal program. Responding to the city

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figure 4.3. Redeveloped Liede village, 2013

government’s call, Xiancun’s village com­pany proposed a plan to self-­develop (zizhu kaifa) Xiancun, and the com­pany became the developer. Xiancun followed the example of Liede, the first urban village in Guangzhou to complete redevelopment (figure 4.3). In Liede, the village com­pany took the initiative to auction land and then used the raised capital to hire builders for de­mo­li­tion and construction (Li et al. 2014). The profit from land leasing went almost entirely to Liede’s village com­pany. Xiancun’s leadership was ­eager to emulate this model. Xiancun’s village com­pany hastily drafted a relocation contract and rushed residents to sign. It promised to construct 4,200 units of in-­situ resettlement housing and 1,000 rental units, which would supply a source of income for residents. It also offered to compensate residents for ­every square meter of their original property. The offer was quite generous, since many families

Ur ba n R e de ve lopm e n t   67

owned at least one building and w ­ ere eligible to be compensated with two to three midsized apartment units worth millions of dollars each. Contracts could be signed as early as April 1, 2010, and the village com­pany dangled a bonus of 10,000 yuan plus three months of transitional fees (a stipend to cover the loss of rental income and moving expenses) for ­those who would sign the relocation agreement right away. But few residents did so, as most distrusted the village com­pany. Some did not believe they would get what they w ­ ere promised, and ­others worried that they would be relocated far away on the city’s periphery. A closer look at the contract confirms the villa­gers’ suspicions. The contract let the village com­pany adjust the redevelopment plan in any way it wanted. For example, article 7 authorized the village com­pany, as the villa­ gers’ representative, to “adjust the resettlement plan and its implementation unilaterally,” and any action of residents to resist or delay the proj­ect would be considered a violation of the contract, on which the village com­pany could cancel residents’ welfare benefits altogether, including their healthcare, pension, and annual dividends from the village com­pany.15 While residents ­were still hesitating over signing the contract, the village com­pany sent in bulldozers and hurried the de­mo­li­tions. As a strategy to drive ­people out, it began tearing down public facilities. De­mo­li­tion crews started dismantling the highly popu­lar local market in August 2010, just three months before the Asian Games. But this strong-­arm approach backfired when residents protested by pouring into the streets. Hundreds of villa­gers clashed with the city police, and about twenty ­people ­were injured (Pomfret 2010). Villa­gers posted videos on social media sites. By April 2011, about 280 families w ­ ere refusing to vacate their buildings (the rest had left, ­either having accepted compensation or relocated ­because of the deteriorating living environment). The resisting families continued to skirmish frequently with the police. In the following months, not a single ­family signed a contract, and the redevelopment plan came to a halt.16 The third and current phase of redevelopment began when the village com­ pany, its finances strained by the proj­ect delay, ceded the proj­ect in late 2011 to an outside developer with deeper pockets, Poly Group. Poly Group was no stranger to Xiancun. A few years e­ arlier Poly Group had built a cluster of high-­ end apartment towers on former village land in which Xiancun’s village com­ pany had a 22 ­percent share.17 A power­ful state com­pany with ties to the central government, Poly Group has built extensively in Guangzhou. It also actively seeks land from other urban villages in the city. As soon as Poly Group took over the proj­ect, it released a new redevelopment plan to villa­gers, showcasing its vision for Xiancun’s ­future—­the w ­ hole village would be demolished and replaced with a forest of high-­rise apartment towers. Poly’s redevelopment plan emphasized the profits to be made from the rise in land value.

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Propaganda posters plastered across the village by the developer contrasted vistas of Xiancun before and a­ fter redevelopment. Xiancun before redevelopment is represented by a ste­reo­typical image of narrow alleyways lined with “hand-­shake buildings,” cluttered with strewn garbage and tangles of electric wires. The post-­redevelopment image features computer-­made graphics of modern high-­rises nestled among open green spaces. According to the information on the posters, the land vacated ­after the de­mo­li­tion of all existing structures would be divided into three zones. Zone A, 7.5 hectares in size, would be used for resettlement housing, including a cluster of thirty-­three-­ story buildings, kindergartens for local c­ hildren, and rebuilt ancestral halls. Zone B, covering 2.6 hectares, would be the site of several newly constructed collective-­rental properties, such as ­hotels and apartment buildings, which would be managed by the village com­pany to supply a continuing source of income for the village.18 Zone C, whose size is unspecified in terms of hectares but occupies about one-­third of the total land area, would be transferred to the developer. On this land, the developer would try to recover its investment through the construction of a cluster of high-­rise towers, including a fifty-­five-­ story landmark building. Poly Group hoped to relocate the remaining residents quickly, but contract negotiations stalled. Many remaining residents, sensing a po­liti­cal change in the air, took a wait-­and-­see approach. Xi Jinping came to power in the central government in 2013 and soon a­ fter launched a nationwide anticorruption campaign. The new administration dispatched special inspection teams to provinces to check on the conduct of local officials. In the campaign’s first months, many high-­ranking officials across the country ­were found guilty and deposed. This sequence of events validated the grievances of Xiancun’s resisting families, who had long complained of corruption among village officials. They demanded that the village officials be punished before negotiations over the redevelopment plan could resume. The anticorruption campaign suspended the Xiancun redevelopment, and several Xiancun and Guangzhou city officials w ­ ere convicted in 2013 and 2014 on corruption charges. Seven se­nior village officials ­were put on trial in July 2013 and sentenced to two to four years in jail each. In December 2013, Guangzhou’s vice mayor, Cao Jianliao, was arrested for taking bribes from developers. Between 1987 and 1995, he had been the party secretary of Shahe Township, where Xiancun is located. Cao had been involved in several urban village redevelopment proj­ects since the 1990s. He was sentenced to life in prison in 2017 for taking bribes worth 80 million yuan (about 12 million USD) between 1991 and 2003 (Sun 2017). Wan Qingliang, the party secretary of Guangzhou and the city’s most power­ful person, was convicted in June 2014 on corruption charges, becoming the highest-­ranking city official deposed during the anticorruption

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campaign. Lu Suigeng, the village head of Xiancun, managed to slip away and emigrate to Australia. Lu, who since 1984 had served as the village com­pany’s party secretary, for years had embezzled large sums from land acquisition fees and received kickbacks from developers worth tens of millions of dollars. Local newspapers ran headlines about the “iron triangle” of urban village redevelopment, a reference to the unbreakable triumvirate of dealmakers comprising city officials, village leaders, and developers (Xin­hua News Agency 2014). In Xiancun, villa­gers celebrated the ousting of corrupt village cadres. A new village council was put in place in 2014, and negotiations resumed between Poly Group and the remaining one hundred or so families.19 Throughout the redevelopment, the city government’s role has evolved from that of a leading actor to an ambivalent facilitator. Most officials whom I interviewed spoke cautiously about urban village redevelopment. Many questioned Guangzhou’s aspiration to complete redevelopment of all 138 urban villages by 2020. One Tianhe District official commented: The prob­lem with urban villages c­ an’t be solved in our generation. It can go away only gradually with urban economic restructuring. In the 1980s and 1990s, urban villages w ­ ere r­ eally bad places, with gambling, prostitution, and drug trafficking. But since the mid-2000s, the economy has picked up, and the situation has improved a lot. The quality of tenants has improved too. Many of them work in the IT sector, and over time, they would naturally demand a better living environment . . . ​so maybe ­there’s no need to touch urban villages right now.20 The city government has refrained from enforcing de­mo­li­tions, as officials fear negative repercussions to their ­careers. One official joked that it would be the end of his c­ areer if a resisting resident jumped off a building to commit suicide. In the aftermath of the anticorruption campaign, this official commented on the changing po­liti­cal climate: ­ oday’s environment is not conducive to brave officials willing to do t­ hings. T Dealing with “nail h­ ouse­holds” is a tricky m ­ atter, and your effort is not appreciated. On the contrary, p­ eople might think y­ ou’re collaborating with developers. Why ­don’t city officials in Guangzhou want to touch urban villages? It has been like this since the 1990s. The situation t­ oday is even more restrictive for de­mo­li­tion and resettlement, as you have to be responsible for consequences. If you dare to touch Yuancun, Shipai, and Xiancun, you get stink all over you. If you want to arrest p­ eople, you w ­ ill get arrested first.21 Compared to cities in the north, local governments in south China generally take a more conciliatory approach to redevelopment. One official of the Tianhe District Urban Renewal Bureau described the large-­scale de­mo­li­tions

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in Beijing as unthinkable in Guangzhou.22 The general attitude among Guangzhou city officials is that redevelopment ­will take as long as it takes, and that villa­gers and developers should sort it out themselves. The city government has thus taken a back seat to the b­ attles waged between developers and urban villages over many issues, the most contentious being that of compensation.

Exclusion through Territorial Institutions The contestations over Xiancun spotlight the changing power relations in urban redevelopment politics. A de­cade ago, developers and local governments cornered the market and reaped huge profits at residents’ expense. Village companies have since joined the fray. ­These power­ful territorial institutions governing urban villages grew out of village governance reforms in the 1990s (Po 2008, 2011). To speed up the pace of urban village redevelopment, the Guangzhou city government launched a series of urban village reforms, including the “four transformations,” proposing to change rural land to state-­ owned urban land, village collectives to shareholding companies, village committees (cunweihui) to residents’ committees (juweihui), and the hukou status of villa­gers from rural to urban (Guangzhou City Government 2002). Among ­these four proposals, the first one—­changing land owner­ship from rural to urban—­met with strong re­sis­tance and was eventually aborted, as villa­gers refused to give up their collective land owner­ship (Andreas and Zhan 2016). The other three proposals w ­ ere slowly and unevenly carried out across the city. The incorporated village companies play an influential role in managing village affairs. As territorial authorities, village companies operate like minigovernments taking charge of internal affairs within urban villages. They run vari­ ous businesses to generate revenue, such as ­hotels, shopping centers, and supermarkets. Some of the most power­ful village companies in Guangzhou have assets totaling more than 1 billion yuan; land is the most valuable asset in their financial portfolios (Lan 2005).23 Village companies also bear responsibility for covering—­from annual revenue—­villa­gers’ health care and education expenses, fire and sanitation ser­vices, and annual dividends to villa­gers.24 The village companies’ orga­nizational structure is often hierarchical and undemo­cratic. Xiancun’s village com­pany is headed by an executive man­ag­er and a governing board. The executive man­ag­er was the former village party secretary Lu Suigeng. Before Lu emigrated to Australia, the governing board members consisted mostly of his f­ amily and relatives. Below Lu and the governing board w ­ ere sixty-­six shareholder representatives who could vote on major decisions, and most of t­ hese representatives ­were handpicked by Lu and simply rubber stamped his decisions. Over the years the village com­pany rented out collective property—­a cinema, a shopping center, and a few

Ur ba n R e de ve lopm e n t   71

h­ otels—at below-­market rates in return for kickbacks, and it has rarely disclosed the details of ­these transactions to villa­gers. When an urban village is incorporated into a shareholding com­pany, villa­ gers become shareholders entitled to receive annual dividends from the com­ pany’s revenue. In 1994 Xiancun’s village com­pany fixed the number of shares for each villa­ger: all male residents between ages sixteen and sixty, and female residents between sixteen and fifty-­five, w ­ ere allocated shares based on their years of l­ abor participation in the village between 1966 and 1994, with a maximum of twenty-­nine shares. Th ­ ese are called “­labor shares” (laodonggu). In addition, ­every villa­ger automatically received five shares, called “capita shares” (rentougu). As a retirement pension, male villa­gers over sixty, and female villa­gers over fifty-­five, received extra shares. The cutoff date was set at December 31, 1994—­newcomers who moved into the village ­after that date ­were not given any shares. The shares cannot be transferred or sold, but they can be bequeathed from parents to ­children. This shareholding system is common in eco­nom­ically developed villages as a way to protect the financial interest of villa­gers, solidify territorial ties, and exclude outsiders (Unger, Chan, and Chung 2014). The system of allocating shares based on se­niority and ­labor participation is not as egalitarian as it appears. In fact, most urban villages in Guangzhou are divided into two classes of shareholders with dif­fer­ent entitlements and rights. The first group, called “community shareholders” (shequ gudong), includes ­people who have never left the village, meaning that their hukou registration has always been rural and based within the village. They can cast votes and hold office, and they receive a greater number of shares due to their uninterrupted ­labor participation in the village. The second group, called “society shareholders” (shehui gudong), are ­those who have moved their hukou outside the village, by taking an urban job or by marrying out. They cannot vote or hold office, and they receive a smaller number of shares ­because of their years of absence. The creation of this group of society shareholders—­and their second-­class status—­stems from the land acquisition pro­cess. As part of the compensation for land acquisition in the 1990s, the city government offered state-­sector jobs and urban hukou to Xiancun’s villa­gers, and many young p­ eople took the offer and secured jobs in vari­ous state-­owned enterprises. But lacking education and skills, ­these young workers ­were assigned the lowest-­paying jobs, and they ­were the first to be laid off when the state-­owned enterprises underwent reforms. Many moved back to Xiancun a­ fter being laid off, but their urban hukou went with them. When the village was incorporated, they became society shareholders and ­were given fewer shares, and they received fewer dividends than the community shareholders who never left and who kept their rural

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hukou.25 Many society shareholders have petitioned the city government for equal treatment, but without success. When Poly Group took over the redevelopment proj­ect in Xiancun in 2011, it tried to move the proj­ect forward by offering the society shareholders equal compensation. But they continued to resist redevelopment, seeing it as an opportunity to regain their rights to vote and to participate in village affairs. The developer has no authority to recover full membership for society shareholders, so it is up to the village com­pany to decide ­whether to restore their voting rights. To date, their demands have not been met. Although most villa­gers are excluded from decision making over redevelopment, they still are much better off materially than mi­grant tenants. Mi­ grants form a truly disadvantaged underclass in urban villages, no ­matter how long they have lived in the community. B ­ ecause of their lack of local hukou and village membership, mi­grants do not enjoy any of the social welfare provided by the village com­pany (Zhang, Zhu, and Nyland 2014). In Xiancun, mi­grant tenants are even barred from using public facilities such as neighborhood parks and community centers.26 Unlike property-­owning villa­gers, who can bring the redevelopment proj­ect to a halt by simply refusing to relocate, mi­grants have no leverage whatsoever in the bargaining pro­cess. B ­ ecause they are only tenants, they can be easily evicted, and eviction is often the first tactic used by the authorities to jumpstart redevelopment. In November 2011, the Tianhe District government issued a notice to mi­grant tenants living in Xiancun, ordering them to leave within fifteen days. Soon ­after, the village com­pany required all residents and visitors to apply for a special ID card that they need to show at security checkpoints upon entering the village. But no ID cards ­were issued to mi­grant tenants. By March 2012, ­after the Chinese New Year—­ when many mi­grants return to their hometown to visit f­ amily—­most of the thirty thousand mi­grant tenants had left Xiancun, many unwillingly. Most mi­grants renting in Xiancun have ­little attachment to the place and view it as simply a temporary settling point. Lao Liu, a sixty-­two-­year-­old vegetable seller from Sichuan province in southwest China, was one such mi­grant. Lao Liu used to rent a room in the nearby Shipai village, but in 2013 he moved to Xiancun ­because the rent ­there had dropped significantly as a result of the pending de­mo­li­tions. His apartment had two rooms, each ten square feet, with almost no natu­ral light—­the only win­dow faced a dark alley. He paid 500 yuan (about 90 USD) a month for rent, much lower than the 800 yuan (120 USD) he paid in Shipai village for a place of about the same size and condition. He used the back room to sleep and the front room to store vegetables. Garlic, ginger, and potatoes ­were piled up on the floor. Pots and dishes ­were scattered all over the back room. Business had been good—on very good days, he could sell more than 1,000 yuan worth of vegetables and make a profit of about

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figure 4.4. A mi­grant pulling a cart, with W ­hotel in the background

200–300 yuan (about 35 to 45 USD). When asked if he was worried about the pending de­mo­li­tion, he shrugged it off and said, “The talk of de­mo­li­tions has been g­ oing on for years and the place is still ­here.”27 Twenty years into redevelopment, a small number of buildings in Xiancun still stand at the center of Guangzhou. The village was fenced up, and government propaganda posters covered the fences. Near the former village land loomed a newly opened W ­hotel (figure 4.4). A small number of mi­grants had trickled back into the village, attracted by its affordable rent and central

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figure 4.5. Ongoing de­mo­li­tions at Xiancun

location. By 2019, a few high-­rise apartment towers, designated as resettlement housing, had been completed, and some villa­gers had moved in. The place was an eerie mix of de­mo­li­tion waste, brand-­new apartment towers, security checkpoints, prostitutes sitting in the open air waiting for clients, and mi­grants living in the dark alleys of the remaining village buildings (figure 4.5).

Mumbai: Slum Rehabilitation with Private Capital Compared to China’s urban villages, which are relatively recent phenomena, slums in India have a longer history. In dif­fer­ent historical periods, the central and local governments in India ­adopted dif­fer­ent policies ­toward slums. In the 1950s and 1960s, the dominant approach was de­mo­li­tion and removal. In the next two de­cades, the focus became government-­led upgrading and ser­vice provision. Slum residents w ­ ere encouraged to upgrade their dwellings, with help from the government and sometimes international organ­izations (O’Hare, Abbott, and Barke 1998; Mukhija 2003; Burra 2005). As government support declined in the 1990s, slum housing policies in Mumbai again shifted, from state-­led upgrading programs to market-­led and land-­centered redevelopment (Sharma 2011; Anand and Rademacher 2011). Mumbai’s current slum rehabilitation policy strikingly resembles Guangzhou’s redevelopment

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program. The state government seeks private developers to remove slums and resettle residents; in return, developers are given some of the cleared land to build market-­rate housing (Bhide 2011). The policy has helped to transfer a large number of land parcels occupied by slums to private developers, but it has not alleviated the city’s housing crisis b­ ecause developers are more interested in making a profit than building for the poor. The state government of Maharashtra (where Mumbai is located) announced the Slum Redevelopment and Rehabilitation Program in 1991. In 1995, the rightwing Shiv Sena Party won the state government election, and it formalized the slum redevelopment program as the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme. Campaigning on a platform of both pop­u­lism and Hindu nationalism, the Shiv Sena Party promised to provide ­free homes to all Mumbai’s slum dwellers. Most of the previous slum housing programs had required a financial contribution from slum dwellers, and the Shiv Sena’s proposal of providing ­free housing gained tremendous support from slum dwellers. In the party’s view, skyrocketing property prices in Mumbai in the 1990s made the proposal feasible: if the slum land in central Mumbai could be opened up to private developers, the party figured, then developers could cover the cost of providing housing for the poor (Weinstein 2014). The Shiv Sena–­led government set up the Slum Rehabilitation Authority to oversee the program. In princi­ple, participation in the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme was to be initiated by residents, who would form a housing society first and then choose a developer for redevelopment. But in practice, developers typically approached slum residents first, using vari­ous tactics to persuade ­people to move. ­Under the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme, the state government actively seeks funding from private developers to redevelop slums and resettle residents. The developers must provide small flats (269 square feet) in multistory buildings to eligible slum dwellers.28 Developers pay for the building maintenance for ten years, and ­after that the residents pay. ­Because of the soaring housing prices in Mumbai, redeveloping slum settlements, especially ­those in central locations, has become a profitable business. As resettlement housing is often poorly constructed with cheap materials, the cost of resettling residents is relatively low, and huge profits can be made by building commercial housing on the cleared land. In-­situ rehabilitation is generally offered to eligible slum dwellers—­those who can prove they had established residency by January 1, 2000. Ex-­situ resettlement is the norm for large infrastructural proj­ects such as metro rails, roads, and airport expansion (Mukhija 2003; Weinstein 2014). Unlike Guangzhou, where profits from redevelopment are intensely fought over by multiple stakeholders, the main winners in Mumbai are private developers. The state and municipal governments endorse slum rehabilitation,

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but government agencies do not directly benefit—in financial terms at least—­from slum redevelopment.29 Slum dwellers do not have any l­egal owner­ship of their homes, and even when they are deemed eligible for compensation, they are entitled to only a 269-­square-­foot apartment in a substandard resettlement housing complex. Developers, by contrast, pocket most of the profits made once land becomes available ­after slum clearance. The amount of capital investment flowing into slum redevelopment in Mumbai has increased substantially since the 1990s. In the 1990s, most slum redevelopment proj­ects w ­ ere relatively modest in scale. Small developers often undertook such proj­ects, sometimes by raising capital via illicit means such as collaborating with crime organ­izations (Weinstein 2008). The state government began to encourage cluster redevelopment around 2005—­demolition of a cluster of slum settlements in a large area. More recently, investment capital has begun to stream into the real estate sector from both domestic and foreign sources, including private equity funds. The flow of “dirty money” from crime organ­izations has been replaced by “clean money” from new investors. Large development companies are interested in slums ­because ­there is so ­little land on which to build in Mumbai. Sometimes smaller firms do the dirty work of relocating residents and demolishing the dwellings, and then sell the land development rights to large firms.30 Mumbai’s Slum Rehabilitation Scheme is not a top-­down policy imposed by the state but the result of compromise and negotiations among actors from the state, the private sector, and civil society. The scheme has to be understood in regard to ­factors specific to Mumbai and India, including central-­ local relations, electoral politics, municipal finance, and mobilization by civil society groups (Ren 2018b). First, the scheme reflects the peculiar power dynamics among the central, state, and municipal governments (Ren and Weinstein 2013). In India, housing policies are the domain of state governments, and the state government of Maharashtra has come to view the thousands of acres of urban land occupied by slum settlements as a golden opportunity for development. The Maharashtra government has therefore initiated slum rehabilitation programs to resettle slum dwellers and make land available for property development (Weinstein and Ren 2009). Compared to the state government, the central government and the Municipal Corporation of Mumbai are less influential in the formulation of slum housing policies. Second, the launch of the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme was heavi­ly influenced by state-­level electoral politics. The Shiv Sena Party proposed the market-­led rehabilitation scheme as a campaign promise, to appeal to both slum voters and the m ­ iddle class. Slum dwellers w ­ ere attracted by the promise of four million units of f­ ree housing, while middle-­class voters—­ who tend to view slums as a nuisance and slum dwellers as encroachers—­were

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pleased by the idea of inviting the private sector to undertake slum redevelopment without government funding (Doshi 2013). Third, the reliance on private capital for slum rehabilitation reflects the fiscal arrangement between the state and municipal governments. The Municipal Corporation of Mumbai lacks a financial base strong enough to undertake slum redevelopment by itself, and the state government since the early 1990s has decreased its financial support for slum upgrading. Using private capital to resettle slum dwellers thus became an optimal solution. Fi­nally, the current Slum Rehabilitation Scheme is a compromise between mainstream development initiatives and housing rights movements in Mumbai. Housing rights groups have scored some victories, such as pushing the residency cutoff date for eligibility from January 1, 1995, to January 1, 2000. In implementation, the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme is complicated by land owner­ship. Mumbai’s slums have developed on land owned by the municipal, state, and central governments.31 Although each Indian state can devise its own policies for slum redevelopment u­ nder the federalist structure, t­ hese policies do not apply to slums sitting on the central government’s land. Central government agencies, such as railway, airport, and port authorities, own large tracts of land in Mumbai, and their landholdings can be traced back to the colonial era (Burra 2005). In Mumbai, slum upgrading programs in the 1970s and 1980s did not apply to slums sitting on the central government’s land. ­Later, ­under redevelopment programs, state and municipal agencies did not provide ser­vices to the communities developed on the central government’s land. They cannot evict slum dwellers, ­because many have settled t­ here before January 1, 2000, and therefore are eligible for compensation (Arputham and Patel 2010). Central government agencies are willing to cooperate with state and municipal authorities for slum rehabilitation only when they are desperate to reclaim their land for operational and security reasons (Burra 2005). The first time that a central government agency agreed to rehabilitate a slum settlement in Mumbai was in the late 1990s, when the Ministry of Railway de­cided to relocate families living right next to train tracks. The Ministry of Railway and the Maharashtra government shared the costs of rehabilitation (Patel, d’Cruze, and Burra 2002). ­After more than two de­cades in operation, the market-­led model of slum rehabilitation, far from improving housing conditions for the poor, has exacerbated housing inequalities in Mumbai. Slums in good locations are targeted for redevelopment by developers, who then build market-­rate housing, luxury ­hotels, and sleek shopping centers to reap a profit. But slums in less desirable locations are often bypassed. While developers are awarded transferable development rights to build commercial housing, residents are resettled in poorly constructed tenements, e­ ither in-­situ or on the cheapest available land on the

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figure 4.6. The international terminal of the Mumbai airport

periphery, without basic amenities (Housing and Land Rights Network 2014). The Slum Rehabilitation Authority does nothing to check the quality of resettlement housing (McQuarrie, Fernandes, and Shepard 2013), which is often so poor that the buildings become vertical slums with worse living conditions than ­those of the original slums. Similar to the case of Guangzhou, Mumbai’s slum housing policy is driven by increasing land value and leads to private gains. By design, improving housing conditions for the poor is not a priority.

Redeveloping the Airport Slum The new terminal of Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in Mumbai flung its doors open for business in early 2014, and the building promptly garnered rave reviews in architectural magazines. Designed by SOM (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill), an architectural firm from the United States, Mumbai’s new airport terminal was rated by the BBC as “one of the world’s most spectacular airports” and praised by a UK-­based blog as “the greatest building in the 21st ­century” (figure 4.6; MacDonald 2015; Mayes 2014). None of ­these

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Vile Parle East

Wes tern ghway Ex press Hi

Western Railw ay

Andheri Marol

Hyatt Regency

Saki Naka

New International Terminal

Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport

Santa Cruz

Vakola

Kalina

0

0.25

0.5

0.75

1

Miles

figure 4.7. Map of the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport and surrounding slums

reviews, however, mentioned the dramatic scene on the other side of the airport fences: the spectacular sprawl of densely populated slum settlements that encircle the airport (figure 4.7).32 ­These slums ­house more than four hundred thousand p­ eople, many of them longtime residents who settled h­ ere half a ­century ago. As part of an ambitious redevelopment plan (modernizing airport facilities and making space for ­hotels and shopping malls) approved by the state government of Maharashtra, they ­will have to be resettled elsewhere. The striking new terminal alongside the slums showcases the im­mense polarization of the built environment in Indian cities. The redevelopment of the airport slum offers a microcosm of urban India in transition, caught between global aspirations to build world-­class cities and local realities of extreme in­equality. The airport slum is one of the largest redevelopment proj­ects in Mumbai, involving the resettlement of almost half a million ­people. The 125 hectares of land on which the slum sits legally belongs to the Airport Authority of India, a central government agency ­under the Ministry of Aviation. Much of the slum is built on low-­lying areas vulnerable to flooding, a condition that had previously discouraged the Airport Authority from constructing any facilities on

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figure 4.8. Slum residents overlooking the airport runways

the land. ­People began to s­ ettle ­here in the 1950s. Some residents live precariously close to airport runways and have to put up with pollution and noise from the air traffic. International flights land and take off ­every two to three minutes, and airplane watching has become a pastime for residents in the hills whose huts overlook the runways (figure 4.8). The thirty-­two slum pockets surrounding the airport are lively communities with markets, shops, schools, and neighborhood organ­izations such as churches, mosques, and NGOs (figure 4.9). With a large population and vari­ous businesses—­from c­ attle raising and light manufacturing to retail and street vendors—­the airport slum pre­ sents huge challenges for government agencies that have been trying to redevelop it. Since 2010, the Airport Authority has been ­eager to remove the slum and expand the airport. The airport has been described by the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA), a key state agency in charge of slum rehabilitation, as “the most constrained airport in the world” (MMRDA 2012). The second busiest airport in India, a­ fter Delhi International Airport, the Mumbai airport h­ andles about twenty-­four million passengers

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figure 4.9. Streets inside the airport slum

per year but has an operating site area of only 678 hectares. According to the MMRDA, the airport is dwarfed in size by other international airports: the site area of Mumbai international airport is about 5 ­percent of Kuala Lumpur airport’s, 17 ­percent of Shanghai Pudong airport’s, and 33 ­percent of the Delhi airport’s (MMRDA 2012). B ­ ecause of the ­limited site area, the two runways of the Mumbai airport had to be built intersecting each other, a constraint that substantially increases pretakeoff and landing times. The Airport Authority has closed one runway to improve efficiency and has been planning to build a parallel runway, but this is unlikely to happen anytime soon ­unless more slum dwellers can be moved. Facing severe space constraints, the Airport Authority collaborated with state-­level development agencies to extend one of the two runways then in operation. Working with the Slum Rehabilitation Authority, the Airport Authority provided funding to resettle 1,850 families for the runway extension (Burra 2005). They worked with a construction com­pany affiliated with the state government, Shivshai Punarvasan Prakalp, to build twenty-­seven rehabilitation buildings in the northwest suburb of Dindoshi. Two prominent NGOs—­NSDF (National Slum Dwellers Federation) and SPARC (Society

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for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers)—­were invited to work with the residents to convince them to relocate, b­ ecause at least 70 ­percent of residents had to give their consent for the proj­ect to proceed. The NGOs also helped conduct a survey to determine slum residents’ eligibility for compensation—­ they would be eligible if they could provide documents to prove that they ­were living in the slum by January 1, 1995. The NGOs collected and verified documents from residents. The planning and negotiation took a de­cade, from 1990 to 2000, ­because the local officials of the Airport Authority had to seek approval from their supervisors in the Ministry of Aviation, and by the time they obtained permission, officials in the state government agencies had changed, so the negotiation pro­cess had to start all over again (CEHAT 2006). The 1,850 families ­were fi­nally resettled between 2000 and 2002, and the runway extension was completed soon ­after. The completion of the runway extension was made pos­si­ble by several ­factors. First, the scale of resettlement was relatively small—­fewer than two thousand families—­and this made the proj­ect somewhat manageable. Second, the urgency of expanding the airport’s capacity compelled the Airport Authority to provide funding and cooperate actively with state-­level agencies and NGOs. Third, the relocation of families was not strongly contested b­ ecause of the weak po­liti­cal leadership of the community being resettled. The resettled families ­were from Rafique Nagar, a predominantly Muslim neighborhood. Loosely or­ga­nized, residents reluctantly agreed to relocate even though they ­were aware that their livelihood would be negatively affected, as the rehabilitation site in Dindoshi is far away from the airport, where most residents had jobs (CEHAT 2006). ­After the runway extension, the Airport Authority collaborated with MMRDA and Slum Rehabilitation Authority a second time in 2008 to construct Sahar Road to connect the international terminal with the western expressway. This proj­ect received funding from the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission launched by the central government, and the Airport Authority and MMRDA split the cost of road construction and the rehabilitation of residents. MMRDA built the first stretch of the road, from the western expressway to the Hyatt ­Hotel, and the Airport Authority built the second stretch, from the Hyatt ­Hotel to the international terminal. Commissioned ­under the Mumbai Urban Infrastructure Proj­ect, the 3.3 kilo­meter road was fi­nally completed in 2014, about the same time when the new international terminal opened. The relocation of residents for the Sahar Road construction was heavi­ly contested. A slum survey conducted by MMRDA counted 1,000 families that had to be resettled. Residents clashed with the surveyors sent by the government, and some ­were arrested by the police (CRH 2012). Based on the cutoff

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date of January 1, 2000, only 700 families w ­ ere eligible for compensation, and they ­were resettled in a housing complex built in Vidyavihar by the Slum Rehabilitation Authority. An NGO, the Committee for the Right to Housing, conducted a study on the resettlement pro­cess and found that the resettlement area in Vidyavihar had no schools and lacked job opportunities as well as basic ser­vices such as ­water supply (CRH 2012). For the noneligible, MMRDA provided temporary accommodations in Goregaon to minimize opposition. ­There w ­ ere also about 200 families from Subhash Nagar, a neighborhood in the airport slum, whose ­houses sat on private land owned by residents, and ­these families w ­ ere given 40 lakh rupees (about 62,000 USD) per room as compensation.33 The Airport Authority worked with state government agencies and NGOs to carry out ­these infrastructural proj­ects that ­were deemed urgent for the modernization of the airport. Re­sis­tance from the community, such as refusal to cooperate with surveys, was constant, since not e­ very f­ amily was eligible for resettlement and compensation. But such re­sis­tance was overcome in t­ hese two pi­lot proj­ects. For the airport runway proj­ect, housing NGOs with extensive networks in the local communities worked as brokers mediating between government agencies and residents, and for the Sahar Road construction, MMRDA used both force and concessions to relocate residents.

Fragile Co­ali­tions The co­ali­tions assembled for the infrastructural proj­ects in the early 2000s, however, fell apart in the main phase of the airport slum redevelopment proj­ect. The scale of the overall airport slum redevelopment is much larger than the previous two proj­ects, as it w ­ ill require resettlement of nearly half a million ­people from thirty-­two slum pockets. This time, neither the Airport Authority nor the state government agencies ­were willing to bear the cost of resettling residents. In addition to the lack of funding, the fragile alliance is further fragmented by the entry of new actors, including a privatized airport com­pany and its contracted developer, which took charge of resettling residents. The direct cause of the airport slum redevelopment proj­ect is the privatization of the airport. In 2006, the Mumbai international airport was privatized when the Ministry of Aviation contracted the management and operation of the airport to GVK, a private infrastructure investment com­pany, which formed the airport com­pany Mumbai International Airport Ltd. (MIAL). As part of the agreement between the ministry and GVK, the land belonging to the Airport Authority was leased to the airport com­pany for thirty years. The airport com­pany drew up a plan to relocate residents currently living on the Airport Authority’s land, intending to use a small portion of the reclaimed

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land to modernize airport facilities, and the rest to build commercial property for profit. In the same year, the airport com­pany contracted a private developer, HDIL (Housing Development and Infrastructure Ltd.), to build resettlement housing and relocate residents. The developer was chosen from a number of competing bidders ­because it had a substantial land bank—­available land on which to construct resettlement housing to accommodate eligible slum dwellers. According to the slum rehabilitation contract signed between the airport com­pany and the developer, the developer was responsible for slum clearance and resettlement housing construction; in return, it would be awarded transferable development rights for both the cleared airport land and land in other parts of Mumbai. The airport redevelopment proj­ect was quickly endorsed by all major state agencies, including MMRDA, Slum Rehabilitation Authority, and the state government of Maharashtra. Th ­ ese agencies signed off on a series of agreements with the airport com­pany. In 2006, the Maharashtra government issued a state support agreement that endorsed the modernization and upgrading of the airport. Soon ­after, MMRDA signed an agreement with the airport com­pany promising its support as well. In addition, the developer obtained permission from Slum Rehabilitation Authority to construct resettlement housing. To undertake a slum redevelopment proj­ect of this scale, however, would require more than just endorsements and signed contracts. First, a survey would have to be conducted to determine how many ­people resided on the Airport Authority’s land, and then government agencies would have to determine how many ­were eligible for compensation. But the vari­ous stakeholders could not agree who was responsible for carry­ing out such a survey. In the past, the state government sought assistance from housing NGOs to help carry out slum surveys, but this time it did not invite any NGOs to participate. As for the residents, many knew that the application of an official cutoff date would disqualify them from resettlement, so they refused to be surveyed and demanded that the government first release details of the redevelopment plan. MMRDA did not want to force the survey—­for instance, by dispatching police officers—­nor did it want to offer concessions. In the end, the state government took a back seat and did not pursue the survey. Thus, the proj­ect stumbled at the first step. Without the survey, the developer could not carry out slum clearance. In 2013 the airport com­pany terminated the contract with the developer for lack of pro­gress. The developer, having invested in the construction of resettlement housing offsite, sued all other parties involved in the proj­ect, including the Airport Authority, the airport com­pany, the state government of Maharashtra, MMRDA, and Slum Rehabilitation Authority. The developer argued that

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support from central and state government agencies was essential for the proj­ ect’s completion, especially the critical nodal agencies of MMRDA and Slum Rehabilitation Authority, and that it received no support whatsoever from any of the state agencies. The Bombay High Court ruled that the state agencies ­were not responsible for proj­ect delays, and that the developer was responsible for any loss incurred from the delay (Bombay High Court 2013). ­After three years of ­legal ­battles, in 2016 the airport com­pany and the developer fi­nally settled the dispute by withdrawing all claims against each other. ­After nearly a de­cade of planning, the airport slum redevelopment proj­ect once again was shelved (Phadnis 2016).

Politics of the Slum Survey Unlike Guangzhou, where surveys in urban villages can be easily conducted by local government agencies, surveys in Mumbai’s slum redevelopment proj­ ects are fraught with challenges. Slum surveys are resisted by residents ineligible for compensation, who see the surveys as the first step of the eviction pro­cess. The survey is a labor-­intensive pro­cess of recording ­every structure, ­family, and business and verifying documents from residents to determine their length of residency. The information from surveys is especially impor­tant during negotiations with developers and state authorities over resettlement. The participation of NGOs is critical b­ ecause they have networks in local communities that government surveyors do not. NGOs also use slum surveys as a strategy to intervene in redevelopment; the survey can extend some protection for residents’ rights to housing simply by documenting that they live ­there. SPARC, the best-­known housing NGO in Mumbai, described its difficult experience of surveying the nearby Dharavi slum in 2007–8 (Patel et al. 2009). SPARC’s representatives noted that even with their extensive networks in Dharavi, the survey was interrupted multiple times by resisting residents. Uninformed about the details of the resettlement plan, residents distrusted the government authorities. Furthermore, po­liti­cal parties interfered with the survey—­most parties opposed the survey to gain support from slum dwellers. The Dharavi redevelopment survey was eventually completed, but it is unclear if it w ­ ill be used to determine eligibility for compensation, which is ultimately up to MMRDA to decide (Patel et al. 2009). The airport redevelopment proj­ect did not advance as far as the Dharavi proj­ect. MMRDA tried to conduct the survey on its own in 2010, without the involvement of any NGOs. Residents refused to cooperate, demanding that the details of the resettlement plan be released first. When government surveyors arrived, some families locked their doors. Jockin Arputham, the

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president of the NSDF, insisted—­for reasons of transparency and fairness—­ that the survey be conducted by an NGO instead of the developer or state agencies. But the state government shut out his organ­ization, even though he had worked in the past with state agencies on slum surveys in the airport slum area. The state government changed course in 2012, however, inviting him to participate on an unofficial basis. But soon afterward the survey was s­ topped by a local politician, who wrote to MMRDA questioning the surveying of private properties on nonairport land.34 The survey was also interrupted several times between 2007 and 2017 for elections. During the Mumbai municipal election in 2016, all po­liti­cal parties except BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) sought to garner votes from slum dwellers by opposing the survey. Fed up with being used by politicians, some residents from the airport slum or­ga­nized in 2016 to boycott the election altogether (TNN 2016).

Eligibility, Exclusion, and Associational Politics The focus of contention over the airport slum redevelopment is eligibility for compensation. If residents can prove that they lived in the community as of January 1, 2000, then they are eligible for a f­ ree apartment through the Slum Rehabilitation Authority. But if the official cutoff date ­were applied, as many as 40 to 50 ­percent of the residents would not be eligible for resettlement housing (CEHAT 2006). Some would be ineligible b­ ecause they cannot furnish the required documents to prove their tenure, and ­others bought their huts ­after 2000. Also, many are renters, and landlords try to prevent tenants from getting any form of compensation. ­There is generally a lot of confusion over eligibility, and the eligible residents are often not informed of their rights.35 The eligibility criteria based on a cutoff date sometimes turn out to be more flexible than they first appear. State agencies and developers can adjust the eligibility criteria to minimize opposition. MMRDA is the authority that determines eligibility, and in the past, it has made concessions over several large-­ scale infrastructural proj­ects by extending the cutoff date or ­doing without one altogether. One example is the Mumbai Urban Transport Proj­ect, which relocated families living next to railway tracks. For this proj­ect, t­ here was no official cutoff date, and all families surveyed ­were offered ­free resettlement housing. Since the cost of resettling slum dwellers is relatively low, in some cases, developers have solicited support even by faking documentation for noneligible residents and fast-­tracking their relocation (Anand and Rademacher 2011). Eligibility is the key issue that prevents the airport slum redevelopment proj­ect from moving ahead. On the one hand, state agencies cannot extend the cutoff date to make more residents eligible ­because so many residents live

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in the airport slum area, but on the other hand, without such concessions, residents w ­ ill continue to resist the proj­ect and refuse to be relocated. W ­ hether the proj­ect can move forward, therefore, depends on ­whether the key stakeholders can form an alliance and navigate the contested ­matter of eligibility. The state government ­will have to make some sort of concession for the airport redevelopment proj­ect to proceed. But how much of a concession is the state government willing to make? And more importantly, who w ­ ill foot the bill to resettle the eligible residents? As the clearance of the airport slum is not a proj­ect that serves the public interest, and the privatized airport com­pany ­w ill pocket huge profits from the land sales, MMRDA is reluctant to offer concessions. Even it does offer some concession, the cost of resettling residents ­will have to be shared with the airport com­pany.

Mumbai’s Housing Rights NGOs The airport slum redevelopment has been closely watched by several Mumbai-­ based housing NGOs. Over the years, Mumbai’s NGOs have made major pro­ gress in claiming slum dwellers’ rights to housing, by empowering the poor with knowledge about their local communities and pragmatically working with whoever is in power (Appadurai 2000, 2001). The major NGOs involved in the airport slum redevelopment include SPARC, NSDF, and the Committee for the Right to Housing. Th ­ ese NGOs have dif­fer­ent ideological backgrounds and take dif­fer­ent approaches to intervene in slum redevelopment (Weinstein 2014). SPARC and NSDF tend to adopt a less confrontational and more pragmatic approach. They have over the years collaborated on multiple redevelopment proj­ects in Mumbai with dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal parties, state government agencies, and international organ­izations such as the World Bank. In their own words, they strive to be “honest brokers between mainstream development and the aspiration of the poor” (Patel and Arputham 2008, 253). SPARC and NSDF’s main princi­ple is inclusion—­that is, consulting residents in the design and implementation of the redevelopment. But inclusion does not mean equality. One example is the aforementioned airport runway extension proj­ect: the community was included and consulted, but residents w ­ ere resettled to a remote place with poor infrastructure and amenities, as that was the only option offered to them. For the airport slum redevelopment proj­ect, NSDF and SPARC warned the state government not to exclude the residents from consultation and offered to help with resettlement. In 2007 Jockin Arputham of NSDF and Sheela Patel of SPARC jointly published a letter, raising concerns over the redevelopment. They questioned how the cleared land would be used, why ­there was no

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public agency to monitor the rehabilitation pro­cess, ­whether all residents needed to be relocated, and what the specific terms of eligibility w ­ ere (Patel and Arputham 2007). Arputham reiterated that residents must be involved in the design and implementation pro­cesses; other­w ise, he warned, residents could quickly be mobilized to stop the proj­ect by blocking roads and airport runways (Patel and Arputham 2007). But such direct confrontations would be a last resort, arising only if the state government and private developers completely excluded residents and community organ­izations from the planning pro­cess. In Mumbai’s intensely charged po­liti­cal environment, complete exclusion of local communities is highly unlikely. In the same letter, Arputham also offered a partnership, whereby the NGOs would facilitate the airport slum redevelopment by helping to survey the slum and verify residents’ eligibility. NSDF and SPARC did not insist on extending eligibility to every­body. When I met him in his office in Dharavi, Arputham commented that not every­body in the airport slum would be eligible for f­ ree resettlement housing, and he suggested that the noneligible be allowed to purchase a resettlement apartment at a subsidized price based on their years of residence in the community.36 Unlike the pragmatic NSDF and SPARC, other NGOs take a more confrontational stance on the issue of slum redevelopment. In an interview, Shweta Damle, the head of Committee for the Right to Housing, asserted that the airport land occupied by slums belonged not to the airport com­pany, but to the ­people living ­there. Damle claimed that families who had lived in the airport slum for generations had a right to stay. Her NGO was actively involved in organ­izing protests to prevent the state government from conducting the slum survey. It formulated a slogan for the protests—­“Hi Jameen aamchya hakkachi, naahi GVK chya Baapaachi” (This land is ours by right, it does not belong to GVK). The demands put forward by the Committee for the Right to Housing are far more radical than the suggestions from SPARC and NSDF. For example, it demanded in-­situ rehabilitation instead of ex-­situ; extension of eligibility to e­ very f­ amily living in the airport slum; bigger resettlement apartments than the standard 269-­square-­foot units, so that large families could be accommodated; and waiving of maintenance fees in resettlement buildings to lower the burden on residents. It is uncertain ­whether the state government agencies and the airport com­pany ­w ill accept any of t­ hese suggestions. The state government’s lack of interest in working with NGOs shows that, for ­every proj­ect, a new alliance has to be assembled from scratch. Eligibility and the terms of compensation ­will continue to be the core issues contested by residents. Large-­scale slum redevelopment proj­ects tend to fail not only ­because of mounting re­sis­tance from residents and NGOs, but also ­because

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of poor coordination among dif­fer­ent agencies in the central, state, and municipal governments and private developers. The issue over who should be included and who excluded for compensation is always negotiated through the associational politics of alliance building among ­these key stakeholders.

Conclusion: Comparing Redevelopment in Guangzhou and Mumbai Both Guangzhou and Mumbai have ­adopted a market-­based approach to redevelop their urban villages and slums, betting on the continued increase of housing prices and land value. But the ground rules for redevelopment differ widely in the two cities. First, redevelopment in Guangzhou and Mumbai varies in terms of the participation of the local state. In Guangzhou, the city government oversees the redevelopment of urban villages, by providing detailed policy guidelines and updating them periodically to adapt to new situations. In Mumbai, no overall state agency oversees slum rehabilitation. The state government, which makes major housing policies, is not well coordinated with other state agencies, the private sector, and civil society groups in the implementation of slum rehabilitation. Second, the two cases differ starkly in terms of compensation, a difference that relates to dif­fer­ent land owner­ship structures. Mumbai’s slum dwellers do not legally own the land they occupy, but urban villa­gers in Guangzhou have collective owner­ship over their land—­a claim that gives them stronger negotiating leverage with developers. Eligible slum dwellers in Mumbai are allocated resettlement housing—­often merely a modest flat in a resettlement building—­without regard for the size of the property held before redevelopment. The opposition to slum redevelopment comes from the eco­nom­ically precarious slum dwellers. In Guangzhou, the opposition comes from property-­ owning and financially secure urban villa­gers. Many families can get two to three midsized apartments in compensation, worth millions of US dollars. The high financial stakes have turned urban villa­gers into “rights defenders,” who confront corrupt village officials and engage in fierce negotiations with developers. The strong re­sis­tance from civil society, in this case, arises from a financially secure propertied class. Third, determinations about who gets compensated for redevelopment depend in Guangzhou on territorial institutions and in Mumbai on associational politics. In the Chinese case, collective land owner­ship ensures that only land-­owning villa­gers are compensated. Village incorporation has turned villa­ gers into shareholders, and village companies are economic and territorial entities with sharp bound­aries of membership. As shown by the case of Xiancun, compensation and entitlement are firmly tied to village membership,

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which is based on hukou and land owner­ship. Villa­gers with local hukou receive annual dividends from the village com­pany, earn income from property rentals, and can make a fortune from resettlement compensation. Among the villa­gers, the allocation of benefits and rights further depends on ­whether one has full membership (for ­those who kept their rural hukou status) or partial membership (for ­those who have changed their hukou status from rural to urban). Unlike villa­gers, mi­grant tenants do not have local hukou, so no m ­ atter how long they have lived in an urban village, they are not eligible for compensation and are offered no protection from eviction. Together, t­ hese territorial institutions have produced two classes of citizens: the “haves” are property ­owners, who are poised to gain their share from redevelopment, and the “have nots” are mi­grant tenants, who are excluded from the pro­cess altogether. By contrast, slum redevelopment in Mumbai entails an associational logic, with the criteria for inclusion and exclusion being constantly negotiated via alliance building among key stakeholders. Unlike urban villages in Guangzhou, slums in Mumbai are not territorial entities with clear bound­aries of membership. Mumbai’s slum dwellers cannot make strong claims b­ ecause they lack l­egal owner­ship over the land. Slum redevelopment in Mumbai largely hinges on unpredictable associational politics. A new alliance of stakeholders has to be assembled for each proj­ect, and prior success does not guarantee smooth alliance building in the ­future, even with the same stakeholders involved. Alliance building for slum redevelopment has proved to be especially precarious and difficult to achieve, ­because of the fragmentation of state power, high degrees of organ­ization in the slums, and the intense interparty competition that characterizes Indian democracy. The two-­decade redevelopment sagas of Xiancun and the airport slum show that removal-­based policies did not solve the housing crisis for the poor. To the contrary, they have only exacerbated housing in­equality. Instead of trying to integrate informal settlements as part of the city, India and China still follow an antagonistic approach and try to get rid of their slums and urban villages. In both cases, the current policies have produced new lines of divisions and exclusion. Slums and urban villages, home to millions of the urban poor, w ­ ill continue to be sites of contestation in citizens’ strug­gle for rights to the city.

5 Airpocalypse in Beijing and Delhi

r apidly urbanizing China and India face tremendous environmental challenges. In both countries environmental law enforcement is weak, noncompliance by industries is prevalent, and the regulatory system is fragmented into overlapping authorities with ill-­defined responsibilities (Alford and Liebman 2001; Rajamani 2007). China has prioritized economic growth over environmental protection during the four de­cades of market reform, and the country t­ oday is experiencing unpre­ce­dented environmental crises, including air, ­water, and soil pollution; desertification; and the loss of biodiversity (Economy 2010). Globally, China is one of the major contributors to the world’s green­house gas emissions, and it is frequently involved in transborder environmental disputes (Wang 2012).1 India f­ aces an equally grave set of environmental concerns, including chronic energy and ­water shortages, insufficient infrastructure for waste management, and high levels of ­water and air pollution. Policy makers and analysts in India have been closely watching the developments in China’s pollution control efforts, and many believe that India should not follow China’s model of first developing the economy and then cleaning up the environment (Mukhopadhyay and Revi 2009; Dubash 2013; Ramesh 2015). But as a country pressed to deliver economic growth to its large population, India too strug­gles to find the right balance between development and environmental protection. Using clean air campaigns unfolding in Beijing and Delhi as examples, this chapter comparatively examines environmental governance in China and India. In 2014, the World Health Organ­ization (WHO) released a report on air quality in more than 1,600 cities worldwide, and Beijing and Delhi ranked among the most polluted (WHO 2014). The two capital cities are regularly beset by toxic smog, and the frequency and intensity of heavy smog days have only increased. Some economists estimate that tens of millions of healthy life years are lost in the two countries ­because of cardiovascular and respiratory disease caused by air pollution (Chen, Ebenstein, et al. 2013). Faced with a public outcry over the foul air, both China and India have recently stepped up 91

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their efforts to improve air quality. In March 2014, Chinese premier Li Keqiang told more than three thousand delegates gathered at the National ­People’s Congress, “We ­w ill resolutely declare war on pollution as we declared war against poverty” (Greenstone 2018). This pronouncement signaled serious commitment from the highest level of the government (Lampton 2014). In 2016, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi launched the country’s first national air quality index, ordering that information be released on real-­time pollution levels in ten pi­lot cities. That same year, Delhi experimented with its first odd-­even scheme to limit the number of cars on the road: cars would be allowed on the roads on alternate days based on w ­ hether their license plate ends with an even or an odd number. In both countries, the government realizes that it is not enough just to develop the economy; the public is demanding government action to improve air quality and protect public health. Scholars working on climate change policies in China and India often argue that environmental policy making in China is mostly state-led, while in India it is market-­led—­with market incentives used to propel industries to improve their energy efficiency (Harrison and Kostka 2014; Gilley 2017). This observation is only partially correct—­though in China the government has been taking the lead, in India market mechanisms have not functioned efficiently except in a few eco­nom­ically advanced states, such as Gujarat, or in certain sectors, such as the regulation of power plants. The differences in environmental governance between China and India lie beyond the ­simple binary of the state versus the market. The environmental governance regimes of China and India exhibit logics of territorial and associational politics similar to t­ hose found in the cases of land acquisition and slum clearance. In China, air pollution control is centered on a territorial approach, which disaggregates national pollution control targets among local governments and holds territorial authorities (such as local officials and heads of state-­owned enterprises) responsible for environmental per­for­mance within their jurisdictions.2 In Beijing, for instance, the specific mechanism of air pollution reduction is the Target Responsibility System, which makes territorial authorities accountable for meeting assigned pollution reduction targets and includes environmental per­for­mance in the evaluation of local officials. The system is widely regarded as a major innovation in China’s climate policies (Qi 2012, 2013). In contrast, in India, air pollution control depends on alliance building among multiple stakeholders. In Delhi, the government plays only a passive role in the city’s clean air campaign: the fight over air pollution is spearheaded not by the government but by environmental NGOs. Environmental NGOs adopt an associational approach, by mobilizing the judiciary to prod the government and industries into action. In the past, Delhi’s environmental NGOs have successfully mobilized the Supreme Court

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through public interest litigation and forced the Delhi government to implement environmental regulations. More recently, they have formulated clean air action plans and made policy recommendations directly to the Delhi government. Both the territorial and associational approaches to fighting air pollution have their limitations. As air pollution knows no borders, holding local officials responsible for pollution only within their own jurisdictions is in­effec­tive. Beijing, for instance, ­w ill have to tackle air pollution through collaboration and coordination with other provinces and cities in the region. So far, however, the coordination between Beijing and the surrounding cities and provinces has been poor, undermining the central government’s ambitious air pollution control agenda. The territorial approach to tackling pollution also leads to huge regional in­equality and raises the question of environmental justice: the more urbanized regions and places with more capable officials often outperform rural, less developed regions and places staffed by less capable officials. In India, NGOs alone cannot save the environment, no m ­ atter how widely they mobilize; the state has to step in and play a more proactive role in policy formulation, funding allocation, and law enforcement. In the long run, neither Beijing’s territorial approach nor Delhi’s associational form of mobilization can solve ­either city’s air crisis. ­W hether blue skies can return to t­ hese megacities ­will depend on coordinated efforts comprising legislation and enforcement by the government, compliance by industries, introduction of market incentives, and active civil society participation beyond environmental NGOs and the urban ­middle class.

Beijing’s War on Air Pollution Beijing’s air pollution has many sources. Geo­graph­i­cally, Beijing is encircled by Hebei province and near Shanxi province—­both provinces rely on heavy industries and host a large number of coal-­powered industrial plants. Coal consumption is a major source of air pollution, and Beijing—­like most Chinese cities in the north—­has always depended on cheap coal for its energy supply. But with the rapid increases in urban population and car owner­ship, vehicular emissions have also become a leading cause of Beijing’s air pollution. Between 1998 and 2013, the city’s population increased by 70 ­percent, energy consumption by 76 ­percent, and the number of motor vehicles by a whopping 303 ­percent (UNEP 2015). As of 2018, Beijing boasted 5.97 million locally registered cars, topping all other Chinese cities. In addition, the city’s already congested roads have to ­handle another 700,000 nonlocally registered cars—­ the equivalent of all cars in Hong Kong (Du 2018). The deterioration of Beijing’s air quality due to increased car owner­ship and rising energy

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consumption has led to public condemnation of the government, as ­people demand more information on air quality and effective government actions to improve the environment. Beijing’s b­ attle over air pollution can be divided into two phases: from the early 1990s to the 2008 Olympics, a period of piecemeal pollution control mea­sures, and from 2009 to the pre­sent, a phase of large-­scale clean air campaigns led by the city government in response to overwhelming public pressure to improve air quality. The turning point was 2009, when the U.S. embassy in Beijing started tweeting real-­time citywide air pollution levels. This information, which had not been available to the public before, significantly raised public awareness about air quality. Soon ­after, the Target Responsibility System, the key enforcement mechanism for air pollution control, was ­adopted, encapsulating many key features of the territorial form of urban governance.

Ad Hoc Government Efforts to Curb Air Pollution: 1990–2008 Beijing’s air pollution control efforts, primarily led by the city government, began in the 1990s when sandstorms started to periodically strike the city. The intensity of sandstorms increased over the years due to deforestation in the northern provinces. ­Under the Beijing Master Plan (1998–2008), the city implemented more than two hundred environmental protection mea­sures. In the initial phase, from 1998 to 2002, the city converted 1,500 coal furnaces to use clean fuel, retired 23,000 old vehicles, reduced emissions from major industrial plants by 30,000 tons, and added 100 square kilo­meters of green coverage. Farmers w ­ ere incentivized by the government to convert less productive farms into green land (Chen, Jin, et al. 2013). One example of the government-­led, ad hoc air pollution control efforts in this period was the blue sky campaign. Beijing launched the campaign in 1997, setting a target number of “blue sky days” per year. A blue sky day is defined as one with an API (air pollution index) value at or below 100. The API is China’s own air quality classification system, based on the levels of NO2, SO2, and PM10 (fine particles with a dia­meter of 10 μm or less) in the air. Based on the value of the API, which ranges from 0 to 500, air quality is banded into five levels—­ranging from level I (excellent) to level V (heavy pollution). The criterion for a blue sky day is an API value of 100 or below, corresponding to level II (good) or level I (excellent). According to the government, level II air quality means that “daily activity ­will not be affected.” But the permissible PM10 level for level II on China’s API correlates with the category of “slightly polluted” on the U.S. air quality index (AQI; Hsu 2012). Also, since China’s API does not mea­sure PM2.5 (fine particles with a dia­meter of 2.5 μm or less that can

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easily penetrate h­ uman lungs), the so-­called blue sky days may well have alarming levels of PM2.5 with serious health consequences (Andrews 2014). The central government began to implement the blue sky campaign across the country in 2000. The Ministry of Environmental Protection started publishing daily API statistics for eighty-­six cities in 2000, and the central government started to use the number of annual blue sky days as a per­for­mance mea­sure by which to evaluate local officials (Chen et al. 2012). Since 2003, any city having 80 ­percent blue sky days in a year can qualify for the National Environmental Protection Model City Award. As blue sky days are self-­ reported by local governments, and the Ministry of Environmental Protection lacks the capacity to verify the accuracy of t­ hese reports, local environmental officials sometimes manipulated API data and overreported the number of blue sky days to vie for the Model City Award (Chen et al. 2012). Although the falsification of pollution data has since declined, ­because of tightened monitoring by the Ministry of Environmental Protection (Zhang 2017), it still recurs from time to time. In 2016, in the city of Xi’an in Shanxi province, a major coal-­mining region, seven officials in a local district environmental protection bureau ­were convicted for falsifying air pollution data by tinkering with air-­ monitoring equipment (Stanway 2016). Blue sky days did not mean much for Beijing’s residents. Unsurprisingly, ­because of the loose criteria used and the city government’s self-­reporting of blue sky days, the increase in the number of blue sky days did not correlate with improved air quality. Air quality continued to worsen, but the city government insisted other­w ise based on the annual number of blue sky days. According to a report released in 2011 by the Beijing Environmental Protection and Monitoring Center, a municipal agency, the number of blue sky days exceeded the official target e­ very year between 2000 and 2010. The government extolled the increasing number of blue sky days as evidence of its achievement in air pollution control, but this was soon challenged by disbelieving local residents. From June 2009 to May 2010, two Beijing residents photographed the sky each day, posted the pictures online, and counted only 180 days with vis­i­ble blue skies, far fewer than the official figure of 285 days. When interviewed by a local newspaper, the two Beijingers expressed skepticism over the significance of blue sky days for ordinary residents (Beijing News 2010). A chart from the Beijing Environmental Protection and Monitoring Center chronicling a steady rise in the number of blue sky days became a target of citizen mockery and eventually was taken down from the center’s website (Dong 2015). The environmental mea­sures taken in preparation for the Beijing Olympics provide another example of the ad hoc character of Beijing’s air pollution control efforts. In 2002, Beijing was chosen as the host city for the 2008 Olympics,

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and as part of its bid, the city vowed to improve air quality by targeting the agricultural, industrial, transport, and energy sectors si­mul­ta­neously (Peng 2010; Beijing City Government 2002). In the years leading up to the Olympics, the city implemented vari­ous mea­sures to reduce pollution sources, such as shutting down the coal-­fired generators at the Capital Steel Com­pany and the Beijing Coking Plant, desulfurizing emissions from major power plants, and renovating furnaces to use clean fuel (see appendix, t­ able 5). In 2008, a stricter emission standard—­Euro III—­was ­adopted for new vehicles.3 Despite ­these mea­sures, the 2008 Olympics only spotlighted Beijing’s poor air quality. Some foreign athletes skipped the Games altogether, and o­ thers arrived at the Beijing International Airport wearing face masks, as if prepared for chemical warfare (Demick 2008). Embarrassed local officials w ­ ere pressured by the central government to stage a “blue sky” Olympics at any cost. The city government sought to expedite m ­ atters by opting for drastic but temporary mea­sures. Three weeks before the start of the Games, the city government ordered a two-­month shutdown of major industrial plants in the outer districts. With support from the central government, it also shut down industrial plants in nearby Hebei province. The city government also ordered half of all vehicles off the road on any given day with the odd-­even scheme. The city’s air quality improved significantly during the Games, but soon thereafter, industrial plants resumed production and cars returned to the roads. By 2009, Beijing’s air pollution had bounced back to pre-­Olympics levels (Chen, Jin, et al. 2013; Davis 2011).

Public Outrage and Government-­Led Clean Air Campaigns: 2009–­Pre­sent The public awareness of air quality in China has heightened significantly in the last de­cade. Urban residents per­sis­tently rank environmental quality higher than jobs and income in importance for their quality of life (Li and Tilt 2018), and many villa­gers in less affluent rural areas think that environmental protection is more impor­tant than economic development (Hansen and Liu 2018). The changing public awareness is reflected in the words p­ eople use to describe air pollution. In 2009, an obscure Chinese character, 霾 (mai), translated into En­glish as “smog” or “haze,” became one of the most searched keywords on Chinese-­language search engines. The Chinese word mai has a par­tic­ul­ ar menacing connotation, compared to other, more benign terms used to refer to bad air quality, such as sandstorm (shachenbao) or fog (wu). About that same time, a technical term—­PM2.5—­began to circulate on social media. The annual PM2.5 level in Beijing is often more than ten times the guideline recommended by the WHO.4

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The year 2009 marked the turning point in government action on air pollution control. That year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency installed an air monitor on the roof of the U.S. embassy in Beijing to provide information on PM2.5 levels to American diplomats, expats, and their families. The information was sent out daily via a Twitter account named BeijingAir. But Twitter is officially banned in China, so in the early days the embassy’s daily tweets had only a small following. In November 2010, the U.S. embassy released its AQI, which mea­sured PM2.5 levels at more than 500, indicating that air quality was “hazardous.” The U.S. embassy tweeted that the air was “crazy bad,” a tweet that quickly caught public attention via Chinese social media such as Weibo. In 2011 Beijing experienced long periods of heavy smog, but the government continued to use blue sky days as an indicator of air quality and did not release information on PM2.5 levels. More and more residents began to follow the U.S. embassy’s daily tweets on air quality. On October 22, 2011, a real estate tycoon and online celebrity, Pan Shiyi, posted on Weibo a screenshot of the U.S. embassy’s reading of the day’s PM2.5 level—439—­exclaiming, “My god, the air is poisonous.” Pan Shiyi’s Weibo account has a large following, and soon the post was widely shared on many social media sites. That same day the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau rated the air quality as only “lightly polluted.” The gap between the U.S. embassy’s tweets and the local government’s rating triggered intense criticism from the public, and p­ eople demanded to know the real levels of air pollution they ­were exposed to. PM2.5 quickly became a h­ ouse­hold word, and postings on the health consequences of PM2.5 proliferated on the internet. P ­ eople began to question why the city government did not release that information. The government initially refused to respond to citizens’ demand that it release PM2.5 data. The Beijing Eve­ning News asked the Deputy Chief of the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau why it was not disclosing information on PM2.5, and the official replied, “To use a meta­phor, it’s like sweeping your backyard. We ­haven’t removed the big stones, so why should we bother with the dust? For PM2.5, we have air monitors and technological capacity, and we also have data, but we c­ an’t disclose the data to the public yet.”5 The government preferred to report air quality conditions through the positive lens of “blue sky days” rather than the more ominously alarming PM2.5 data. The U.S. embassy’s air quality tweets w ­ ere a major source of irritation for Chinese environmental officials, some of whom urged the U.S. embassy to stop the tweets. On June 5, 2012, World Environment Day, the deputy minister of environmental protection told the press that it was a violation of Chinese law for foreign embassies to monitor Beijing’s air pollution, and in any event,

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the data w ­ ere not representative b­ ecause they monitored only a single location.6 While the government publicly stonewalled, Beijing’s air quality continued to worsen. Heavy smog days persisted for long periods, not only in the capital but all across the country, especially in the winter months, affecting hundreds of cities and towns. Air pollution, far more vis­i­ble than its insidious counter­parts such as soil pollution, quickly became targeted for public criticism and surged into a po­liti­cal tsunami that threatened the ruling party’s legitimacy. Faced with mounting public outrage, the government eventually began to address the ­matter of information disclosure. The Ministry of Environmental Protection sought public input for the revision of the 2000 Ambient Air Quality Standard, and within a month it received more than 1,500 suggestions, overwhelmingly demanding that PM2.5 be included as a standard air quality mea­sure­ment. In January 2012, PM2.5 monitoring started in Beijing, Shanghai, and cities in the Pearl River Delta. In May 2012, the Ministry of Environmental Protection ordered seventy-­four more cities to install PM2.5 monitoring centers and release data to the public by the end of the year. The Ministry of Environmental Protection also replaced China’s own API, based on PM10, with an AQI similar to the one used in the United States, which mea­sures PM2.5.7 Fi­nally, PM2.5 was included in the revised National Ambient Air Quality Standard in 2012. The central government and the Beijing city government also introduced comprehensive clean air action plans and progressive environmental legislation. In September 2013, the State Council released the Air Pollution Prevention Action Plan, with ambitious pollution reduction targets and an extensive list of air pollution control mea­sures backed by substantial government funding. The funding included both direct expenditures by the central government and earmarked transfers from the central to local governments. In 2013, the earmarked transfer for “energy saving and emission reduction” (jie’neng jianpai), which includes but is not ­limited to air pollution control, was 170 billion yuan. The central government can afford to allocate such a large sum to emission reduction b­ ecause it has a huge surplus of revenue—4.2 trillion surplus in 2014 alone, based on revenue totaling 6.4 trillion and expenditure of only 2.2 trillion (Wong and Karplus 2017). The Air Pollution Prevention Action Plan specified a reduction in PM2.5 levels of 25 ­percent nationally between 2013 and 2017. The central government disaggregated the target among provincial governments, which in turn mandated their subordinate city and district governments to define and meet their own targets (State Council 2013b). In 2013 the Beijing city government released the Beijing Clean Air Action Plan, proposing a wide range of mea­sures

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to meet the mandated targets (Beijing City Government 2013a). In January 2014, Beijing’s then mayor Wang Anshun promised the public that air quality would be improved significantly by 2017. The city also steadily increased its bud­get for pollution control, setting aside 18.2 billion yuan (2.6 billion USD) in 2017 to implement a wide range of pollution reduction mea­sures (Zheng 2017). China’s Environmental Protection Law was also revised in 2014, and the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Act amended in 2015, imposing more stringent mea­sures for polluters, including increased fines up to one million yuan, shutdowns for noncompliant factories, and criminal charges for individuals responsible for pollution.

A Territorial Approach to Air Pollution Reduction in Beijing A major feature of China’s pollution control efforts is its territorial approach, in which local territorial authorities—­specifically, municipal, district, town, and township governments—­are held responsible for environmental per­for­ mance and policy implementation (Lieberthal 1997; Jahiel 1998; Wang 2016). In national five-­year plans (the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth) and the Air Pollution Prevention Action Plan, the central government set time-­bound pollution reduction and energy-­saving targets and specified the actions required from territorial authorities such as local governments and state-­owned enterprises (Yan 2013).8 The core mechanism for ensuring implementation of the vari­ous plans is the Target Responsibility System (mubiao zerenzhi). The system requires local governments and state enterprises to sign a responsibility contract (zeren shu) with upper-­level authorities, promising to meet certain pollution control targets (­table 5.1).9 If the targets are not met within a given time frame, then officials in the local governments and state enterprises w ­ ill be held responsible, and their eligibility for promotion may be affected (Wang 2013). U ­ nder the Target Responsibility System, local territorial authorities have become the key actors responsible for pollution reduction in their jurisdictions. This contrasts sharply with the period before 2000, when central government ministries ­were the leading regulatory bodies responsible for policy implementation. Some describe the transfer of responsibility for pollution control from central ministries to local territorial authorities as a shift from “lines” (tiao) to “blocks” (kuai) (Qi 2013; Qi and Wu 2013). The National Air Pollution Prevention Action Plan illustrates how the Target Responsibility System works. Formulated in 2013 by the State Council, it provides by far the most extensive set of national-­level air pollution prevention guidelines.10 It sets forth a paradigm of air pollution prevention, described as “led by the government, dependent on enterprises, driven by the market, and based on public participation,” even though the space for market incentives

100  Ch a p te r 5 ­table 5.1. The Features of the Target Responsibility System for Air Pollution Control in Beijing Mea­sure

Milestones

State agencies involved

Setting air pollution control targets

2013 National Air Pollution Prevention and Control Plan; 2013 Beijing Clean Air Action Plan

State Council MEP Beijing city government

Signing target responsibility contracts

Beijing city government signs a responsibility contract with the MEP; the city’s target is further disaggregated among districts via responsibility contracts

MEP Beijing city government District governments State-­owned enterprises

Monitoring air pollution and local per­for­mance

Annual reporting of air pollution control per­for­mance by district governments and the city government to the respective authorities one level above between 2013 and 2017

MEP Beijing city government District governments City and district-­level environmental protection bureaus

Assessing ­whether targets have been met

Annual evaluation of city and district officials for environmental per­for­ mance between 2013 and 2017

State Council Beijing city government District governments State-­owned enterprises

Source: Adapted from Qi (2012). Note: MEP = Ministry of Environmental Protection.

and public participation is l­ imited. The 2013 plan aimed to improve air quality across the country within five years, especially in the three mega-­urban regions (Beijing-­Tianjin-­Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta, and the Pearl River Delta). By 2017, the PM2.5 level was supposed to drop by 25 ­percent for the Beijing-­ Tianjin-­Hebei region, 20 ­percent for the Yangtze River Delta, and 15 ­percent for the Pearl River Delta; Beijing’s annual PM2.5 level was supposed to stabilize at 60 µg/m3. The plan divided the tasks for achieving t­ hese ambitious targets among local governments and state enterprises, requiring local governments to devise their own action plans with specific time-­bound targets. If the targets ­were not met, then local officials would be “called in” (yuetan) by central government officials. Fi­nally, the 2013 plan also established a nationwide air pollution alert system, and on heavi­ly polluted days, local governments need to shut down factories, construction sites, and schools (State Council 2013b). In Beijing, the city government disaggregated the citywide pollution control target among the districts in its 2013 Clean Air Action Plan. By 2017, inner urban districts such as Dongcheng, Xicheng, Chaoyang, and Haidian needed

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to reduce the PM2.5 level by 30 ­percent of the 2013 level and control it at 60 µg/m3; outer urban districts such as Shunyi and Changping needed to lower the PM2.5 level by 25 ­percent of the 2013 level and control it at around 55 µg/m3 (Beijing City Government 2013a).11 The city government published a task allocation notice linking eighty-­four specific air pollution control tasks to individual officials in the environment, transport, and housing sectors, as well as district governments (Beijing City Government 2013b). If the pollution reduction targets are unmet, local officials ­will be denied promotion even if their per­for­mance is other­wise excellent (Beijing City Government 2013a). In the short term at least, the territorial approach to control air pollution has been effective. City and district officials, worried about their evaluation and pressured by their superiors, have used all means pos­si­ble to keep the PM2.5 level down, including forcible mea­sures such as confiscating coal-­ burning stoves from p­ eople’s homes. Four years into the war on pollution, in January 2018, the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau announced that the city had met the air quality targets set in the 2013 Clean Air Action Plan. The city’s PM2.5 level dropped by 35.6 ­percent between 2013 and 2017. The overall national target of lowering PM2.5 by 25 ­percent has been achieved too. Some of the biggest winners w ­ ere the most polluted cities: Shijiazhuang, the capital city of Hebei province, slashed its PM2.5 concentration by 39 ­percent; and Baoding, which has the worst air quality in the country, reduced its PM2.5 concentration by 38 ­percent (Greenstone 2018). In 2018, the State Council announced a new 2018–2020 Clean Air Action Plan for Winning the Blue Sky War (State Council 2018). The new plan targets more cities but has a less ambitious pollution reduction target than the previous 2013–17 plan. Concurrent with the thirteenth five-­year plan (2016–20), it mandates that ­those cities not yet meeting the national air quality standard must, by 2020, reduce their PM2.5 level by 18 ­percent, using a 2015 benchmark. But for the more than a hundred cities that have already met the national air quality standard, the 2018–20 plan proposes no new targets. Beijing, for example, had already met the mandated target by 2017, so no expectations ­were placed on it for the next three years. A commentator on China Dialogue, a blog focusing on China’s environmental issues, wrote, “­After an exhausting five-­year sprint, China is settling for a long and steady jog” (Feng 2018). In the long term, w ­ hether a territorial approach to pollution control in China ­w ill be effective is questionable. First, the heavy reliance on “plans,” instead of legislation, comes with limitations. Plans are temporary and may be more readily avoided or ignored than laws. Both national five-­year plans and action plans are time bound and can be changed as conditions change (Young et al. 2015). Second, the implementation of plans by local officials leads to wide disparities in outcome. Plans may be readily implemented if the officials in

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charge are capable and committed but poorly followed if entrusted to officials who are less capable or concerned about environmental protection. Moreover, some officials may opt for temporary mea­sures to create short-­term gains that ­w ill be vis­i­ble during their tenure, only to fade away in the long term (He, Zhang, and Wang 2012; Young et al. 2015). Third, the effectiveness of the Target Responsibility System correlates with the nature of the urban economy. The system works better in periods of steady economic growth than during times of recession, when local officials bow to pressure to prioritize economic growth over environmental protection. Likewise, it works better in more affluent cities, where local officials are ­eager to upgrade the urban economy, through, for instance, relocation of polluting factories, than less developed cities, which still rely on heavy industries for GDP growth and job creation. Fi­nally, the territorial approach is in­effec­tive to solve pollution issues that transcend administrative bound­aries. Beijing ­will not be able to clean up its air if the surrounding provinces do not take radical action, and currently no incentives are in place to encourage regional cooperation.

Fighting Air Pollution beyond the State: Social Media, Pop Art, and NGOs Vari­ous nonstate actors have also played a major role in Beijing’s clean air campaign, spearheaded by the city government. But within the framework of the territorial approach to environmental governance, the role of nonstate actors has been confined to information disclosure. The government endorses civil society participation without opening up formal channels for it. As a result, the principal outlets for participation are social media, ­music, art, and documentary films. In January 2013, when Beijing was blanketed by heavy smog for days, a ­music video by pop singer Wang Feng caused a sensation. The artist released a “super-­smog version” of his hit song “Beijing, Beijing.” The ­music video featured images of smog-­covered streets and landmarks in Beijing, hospital rooms full of patients suffering from respiratory prob­lems, pedestrians wearing face masks, and cars with blinking emergency lights b­ ecause of poor visibility. Contrasting economic growth with environmental devastation, the video featured images of stacks of renminbi bills falling from the sky while industrial chimneys pumped out black fumes that wafted upward. The song satirizes Beijing’s air quality and its toll on citizens: ­ very street in the city is blurred, as the air pollution index explodes. E Buildings are covered by smog and ­people hide ­behind face masks. Who is searching in the smog? Who is breathing in the smog?

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Who is ­running in the smog? Who is crying in the smog? Who is struggling in the smog? Who is choking in the smog? Visibility is less than 200 meters, same distance as from developers to inspectors. Whispering and wondering in the smog, ­people are asking, how to save the environment. Beijing, Beijing (my translation) Air pollution has also become a subject for artists, and “smog art” is now an established genre of con­temporary Chinese art. On February 25, 2014, five days ­after Beijing issued a pollution alert at the second highest level (orange) that lasted 132 hours, a group of artists gathered in front of the historic T ­ emple of Heaven, lay on the ground wearing face masks, and prayed to the sky for better air. The photos ­were quickly disseminated via social media and spurred intense debates. In 2015, a graphic design competition was or­ga­nized around the theme of smog, prompting the submission of more than three thousand entries from all over the country. The finalists included posters of Mao Zedong and Lei Feng (a socialist-­era national hero) wearing face masks, as well as a poster of a baby whose face bore a face-­mask-­shaped birthmark. An environmental documentary film, ­Under the Dome, caused a big stir in 2015. Produced by a former CCTV (Chinese Central Tele­v i­sion) anchorwoman, Chai Jing, the film condemns the weak enforcement of environmental regulations and spotlights the public health consequences of air pollution. Narrated from the perspective of a young m ­ other, the film resonated with ordinary residents. Within one week of the release, it was viewed 200 million times online.12 Authorities promptly shut it down. The im­mense popularity of the documentary signaled the vast public discontent over air pollution. A new generation of environmental NGOs has emerged in China since 2000, and many of them have actively advocated for disclosure of information about air quality. One leading NGO is the Beijing-­based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), led by journalist and activist Ma Jun. Founded in 2006, IPE has focused on raising public awareness, gathering and disclosing information, and monitoring major polluting enterprises. IPE, like most other environmental NGOs in China, avoids playing any role in organ­ izing environmental protests, which in China are often centered on local issues and spontaneously or­ga­nized by the affected residents via social media (Gottlieb and Ng 2017). Rather than criticizing the government, IPE tries to work with the government by promoting information disclosure and transparency. IPE proposed a series of mea­sures to help the government reach the target number of blue sky days (IPE 2011, 2014, 2015). Partnering with the U.S. Natu­ ral Resources Defense Council, IPE also developed a pollution information

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transparency index, mea­sur­ing pollution data transparency in 113 Chinese cities. Having gained the government’s trust, IPE now enjoys support from the Ministry of Environmental Protection and is frequently consulted on the preparation of environmental legislation. IPE chose to rely on the government’s official data on pollution rather than in­de­pen­dent sources. Director Ma Jun commented that this was a strategy to gain support from the government.13 But collecting official pollution data has not been easy. The core data come from local environment protection bureaus, which use dif­fer­ent formats to release data on their websites, making automatic computer-­based data collection difficult. IPE had to have its employees manually check pollution data from more than three hundred local environment protection bureaus on a regular basis (Tarantino and Zimmerman 2017). Based on the official data, in 2009 IPE released a China ­Water and Air Pollution Map, with information on the locations of major polluting enterprises, and in 2014 it developed a mobile app version of the pollution map. With the mobile app, the public can access information on polluting enterprises from their smartphones, share it on social media, and even file a report to supervisory authorities if they find any noncompliance by enterprises. The pollution app was mentioned in Chai Jing’s documentary, and ­after the film’s release, it was downloaded three million times. Soon afterward, the data flow from local environment protection bureaus to IPE was blocked, and it resumed only a few weeks l­ ater (Tarantino and Zimmerman 2017). The sphere of activity for civil society groups remains l­imited in China, and the government sets the par­ameters of civil society participation (Van Rooij 2010; Spires 2011; Stern 2013; Hsu 2017). Policy recommendations are made by NGOs, the scientific community, and the general public, but how much their recommendations are ­adopted ultimately depends on the government. The government has taken a somewhat more accommodating stance ­toward environmental NGOs in recent years, mostly b­ ecause it hopes that the NGOs can help with “stability maintenance” (weiwen), by preventing large-­scale disruptive environmental protests from flaring up (Chen 2013; Wang and Minzner 2015). But despite the improved relationship between the state and NGOs, a wide range of activities by civil society groups can still be construed as subverting state power, spreading rumors, and damaging national interests (Gottlieb and Ng 2017). In 2016, a group of l­ awyers in China sued the governments of Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei province for not taking adequate action to curb air pollution; the government immediately banned media coverage of the case (Guardian Cities 2017). Environmental NGOs in China face many constraints imposed by the state in their daily operations. The amended Environmental Protection Law of 2014 and the National Air Act of 2015 allowed NGOs to use public interest litigation to address environmental violations, but the same legislation also required

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NGOs to meet certain qualification criteria, such as registering with a government organ­ization at the provincial level or above. Friends of Nature, a prominent NGO with an extensive network in China, cannot qualify to file public interest litigation b­ ecause it is registered with a Beijing district government instead of a provincial-­level government organ­ization. In 2016 the central government passed a new law for foreign NGOs in China, further raising the bar for registration and tightening state control over their activities (State Council 2016). Effective January 1, 2017, the new law requires foreign NGOs to register with public security bureaus at the level of provincial governments or the central government, and it bans all fund-­raising activities by foreign NGOs in China. U ­ nder the new law, environmental NGOs have to work carefully with the state to avoid repression, and in the case of air pollution control, even the most prominent environmental NGOs have to work in the shadow of the state-­led territorial-­based clean air campaigns.

Let Delhi Breathe In May 2015, the Times of India launched the Let Delhi Breathe campaign to raise public awareness of air pollution. The organizers proposed several antipollution mea­sures, such as raising emission standards for diesel vehicles, controlling roadside dust, and even building expressways to divert diesel trucks from entering the city. The campaign aimed to gather 100,000 signatures and then appeal to the Delhi government for more action. But six months ­later, the campaign recorded only 15,498 signatures. The response could not have been more tepid, particularly in light of the overwhelming popu­lar response to the documentary ­Under the Dome in China around the same time. Compared to Beijing, the general awareness of air pollution in Delhi is still relatively low. The debate in Delhi over air quality is mostly confined to the circle of environmental activists and the urban ­middle class. In Delhi the clean air campaign is primarily led by environmental NGOs via associational mobilization of the media, the judiciary, and government regulatory bodies. Delhi’s clean air campaign from the 1980s to the pre­sent can be roughly divided into two phases. The first phase, marked by public interest litigation filed in the 1980s and 1990s by NGOs and activists with the Supreme Court of India, ended with a court order to convert diesel used in public vehicles to clean energy by 2002. The second phase, from 2003 to the pre­sent, has been marked by more media coverage and public discussion on air pollution, but it has not seen any success comparable to that achieved in the first phase. In both phases, Delhi’s clean air campaign was led largely by environmental NGOs and exhibited an associational type of mobilization centering on contingent alliance building.

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The Supreme Court and Public Interest Litigation: 1980–2002 Delhi had an ­earlier start than Beijing in its clean air campaign. In 1985 the activist and ­lawyer M. C. Mehta filed a public interest lawsuit with the Supreme Court, arguing that the government was required ­under the country’s environmental laws, such as the 1981 Air Prevention and Control of Pollution Act, or Air Act, to take action to reduce air pollution in the interests of public health. In response to Mehta’s litigation, the Supreme Court ordered the Delhi government to set emission standards for vehicles (Narain and Bell 2005; Narain 2008). Following the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984, India passed the Environment Protection Act in 1986 and formed the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) to become the main regulatory body for environmental protection. A wave of legislation ensued, including the amendment of the Air Act imposing fines on polluters (1987), the Motor Vehicles Act (1988), and the Central Motor Vehicle Rules (1989). This legislation, however, did not have much impact on Delhi’s air quality ­because of poor compliance and weak enforcement (Bell et al. 2004). The central and state pollution control boards—­the main regulatory bodies for air pollution—do not have any power to levy penalties on polluters. That power lies with the criminal courts. In the rare instances in which state pollution control boards do take polluting factories to court, litigation can take a long time before the court reaches a final conclusion. For example, in Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board vs. Mohan Meakins Ltd., the Supreme Court did not make a decision regarding the pollution of a river u­ ntil seventeen years ­after the litigation was launched. While litigation is pending, polluting enterprises still can operate and continue to pollute ­unless the court issues a stay order to restrain them from ­doing so (Ghosh 2015). Ten years a­ fter Mehta’s public interest litigation, in 1996, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a Delhi-­based NGO, launched a clean air campaign. It published a major study on the effects of vehicular emissions on public health—­Slow Murder: The Deadly Story of Vehicular Pollution in India—­ edited by its executive director, environmental activist and journalist Anil Agarwal. Drawing on in­de­pen­dent research and data collection, CSE argued that vehicular pollution contributed 64 ­percent of the total air pollution in Delhi in 1996 (Agarwal, Sharma, and Roychowdhury 1996). The report examined vari­ous sources of vehicular pollution, such as poor fuel quality, low emission standards, inadequate traffic planning, lack of road space, and the increase in private car owner­ship. CSE was highly critical of the Delhi government and attributed the worsening air quality to an inefficient state that did not take enough preventive mea­sures. In 1997, a year ­after the launch of CSE’s clean air campaign, the Supreme Court ordered some polluting industries to relocate

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from Delhi to the surrounding states. That same year, the MoEF released a white paper on pollution in Delhi in response to the court ruling. The MoEF also set up the Environmental Pollution Control Authority for the Capital Region (EPCA) in 1998 and nominated Anil Agarwal as the public representative to participate in its deliberations (Bell et al. 2004). CSE strongly advocated for public vehicles to be converted from ­running on low-­grade diesel to ­running on compressed natu­ral gas. CSE released lab results comparing pollution levels from diesel and compressed natu­ral gas and presented the information to the public. The proposal for switching to compressed natu­ral gas met strong opposition from the transport ­union, which was backed by then opposition party BJP. A ­ fter two years of charged debates, the Supreme Court in 1998 ordered the conversion to compressed natu­ral gas, and the court order was eventually carried out in 2002 with cooperation from the Delhi government (Sharan 2013). The phasing out of diesel in public vehicles is a major triumph of the two-­decade-­long clean air campaign from the 1980s to the early 2000s.

Rising Public Awareness but Inadequate Government Action: 2003–­Pre­sent The effects of switching to compressed natu­ral gas, however, ­were short lived. Rapid urban growth in the Delhi capital region and rising energy consumption spawned new sources of air pollution. By 2005, Delhi’s air pollution level had spiked and surpassed the pre-2002 level (Ministry of Environment and Forests 2010). In January 2012, the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), the national-­level regulatory agency in charge of pollution monitoring, found that in thirty out of thirty-­five monitored cities, the PM10 level in the air exceeded the national standard of 100 μg/m3. Delhi was among the eleven critical cities with the highest PM10 concentration—­ reaching above 250 μg/m3 in 2010 (CPCB 2012). Delhi’s air quality has since worsened even further. According to one study from CPCB in June 2018, the twenty-­four-­hour average levels of PM2.5 and PM10 in the Delhi National Capital Region ­were 113 and 270 μg/m3, respectively, much higher than the WHO standards (CPCB 2018). The increase in private car owner­ship is a major reason (Ghate and Sundar 2014), but many other ­factors also contribute to the poor air quality, including industrial emissions (from sources such as coal-­powered plants and kiln factories), road and construction dust, diesel generators widely used across residential and commercial sectors, as well as seasonal crop burning in the nearby states of Punjab and Haryana (Ministry of Environment and Forests 2010; Guttikunda 2012, 2015; Guttikunda, Goel, and Pant 2014).

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Unlike Beijing, where the anti-­air-­pollution campaign has been led by territorial authorities such as the city government, in Delhi the role of the local government—­the Delhi Government for the Union Territory—­has been far less con­spic­u­ous. As early as 1962, the Delhi Master Plan, prepared by the Delhi Development Authority, called for the closure of polluting industries, but the Delhi government took no enforcement action over the next three de­cades. In 1990, a new master plan reiterated the need to shut down and relocate polluting industries, and it proposed a three-­year win­dow for implementation, but the Delhi government again took no mea­sures. Relocating polluting factories alone would have made ­little difference in improving air quality (Sharan 2014), but the lack of intervention by the Delhi government spotlights its marginal role in environmental governance. The situation has not changed much t­ oday. The Delhi government continues to grant approvals to polluting industrial plants, to avoid mea­sures to curb vehicular and industrial pollution, and to disregard a range of other polluting sources such as diesel generators and construction and road dust (Ghosh 2015). In 2009, the Delhi government released an action plan on climate change mitigation, but the plan has had no impact on air quality, and critics argue that it was formulated simply to facilitate image building and to gain access to alternative sources of funding (Aggarwal 2013). The Delhi government continued its ad hoc air pollution control mea­sures into the 2010s. To prepare for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, the Delhi government a­ dopted several mea­sures, such as controlling traffic, halting construction, reducing power plant emissions, adding forty kilo­meters of bike lanes, converting power plants to natu­ral gas, banning open burning, and adopting the Euro VI fuel standard for new vehicles in 2010 (Beig et al. 2013). ­These mea­sures ­were all short lived, however; their implementation did not last beyond the preparatory phase of the Commonwealth Games. Emulating Beijing, Delhi experimented twice in 2016 with the odd-­even scheme of ordering half of the vehicles off the roads each day. But many exemptions allowed vehicles on the roads regardless of their license plate numbers, and the experiment lasted only two weeks each time (Guttikunda 2017). Compared to Beijing, Delhi has far fewer traffic police and surveillance cameras, and the government simply does not have the capacity to check license plates and levy penalties on noncompliant vehicles. Delhi’s short-­lived attempt at the odd-­ even scheme did not lead to any significant reduction in air pollution. Most of the Delhi government’s attempts to curb air pollution have been on a small scale, and it has not ventured anything wide ranging, such as addressing all sources of air pollution si­mul­ta­neously. Facing mounting public pressure, the central and Delhi governments have fi­nally taken steps to provide information on air quality to the public. In 2009,

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the CPCB revised the 1984 National Ambient Air Quality Standards and included PM2.5 in its monitoring. In 2015, Prime Minister Modi launched India’s first national air quality index, promising to release information on real-­time pollution levels in ten pi­lot cities. India’s AQI is based on estimates of five major pollutants—­PM10, PM2.5, O3, NO2, and CO—­and air quality is classified into six categories: good, satisfactory, moderately polluted, poor, very poor, and severe. Compared to the AQI used in the United States, India’s index, like China’s, follows less strict criteria. For example, for PM2.5 levels between 35 and 40, the air quality is described as “satisfactory” in India, “good” in China, and “unhealthy for sensitive groups” in the United States (see appendix, ­tables 6 and 7). At any rate, many welcomed the launch of the national AQI, even though it is not attached to any action plan. A journalist wrote in the Hindu, “We d­ on’t yet know what to do with the AQI, except look at it and panic” (S 2015). The central government of India and the Delhi government have a­ dopted a few action plans for air pollution mitigation, but none of them offers any concrete and enforceable action. In 2017, the Delhi government a­ dopted an emergency plan called Graded Response Action Plan, listing a series of actions to be undertaken on polluted days. For example, for “very poor” air conditions (PM2.5 between 121 and 250 µg/m3), the government can ban diesel generators, increase parking fees, and stop coal and wood burning at h­ otels; for “severe” conditions (PM2.5 between 250 and 430 µg/m3), brick kilns w ­ ill be shut down; and for “emergency” conditions, all construction activities w ­ ill be ­stopped, trucks ­w ill not be allowed to enter the city, and additional measures—­including shutting down schools—­can be taken as well. What is not mentioned in the emergency plan, however, is which government authority ­w ill be responsible for implementing t­ hese extreme mea­sures in a short turnaround time, such as shutting down the more than one thousand kilns in the capital region (Guttikunda 2017). Enforcement of the actions listed in the plan w ­ ill surely be met with re­sis­tance from vari­ous ­unions and lobbying groups, such as from the transport and manufacturing sectors. In May 2018, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change released a draft National Clean Air Program for public consultation.14 But the draft program immediately became a target of public ridicule. Notwithstanding the obvious health risks associated with air pollution, the draft program merely recommended more studies and data gathering. It did not mention any immediate action except planting more trees on roadsides as a means to absorb pollutants. The opening page of the document also belittled the findings by international organ­izations on India’s air quality: “The reported perplexing statistics in vari­ous international reports, drawing correlation of air pollution with vari­ous aggravated figures on health, without validation on Indian population further complicates the issues by creating a flawed public perception”

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(Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change 2018, 1). The draft program recommends forty-­two specific pollution control mea­sures for the CPCB, but does not suggest how t­ hese would be implemented, given the board’s lack of enforcement power (Gupta 2018). In October 2018, anticipating the approaching high-­pollution season, the Delhi government fi­nally introduced an air pollution alert system. Called the Air Quality Early Warning System, its purpose is to provide information on air quality to the public forty-­eight hours in advance (Mohan 2018). It did not take long for the early warning system to be put into use. The following month, during the Diwali festival, Delhi’s AQI shot up to 642 (in the emergency category). As the capital gasped for air, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal slipped away to Dubai for a ­family vacation. Upon his return, the minister was heavi­ly criticized by the media and the public (India ­Today 2018). ­These developments show that the Delhi government at last is being forced to take some action, but air pollution is still not on the government’s priority list, as the capital ­faces many other urgent issues, such as housing shortages, inadequate infrastructure, and a chronic energy crisis (Khosla 2014; Weinstein, Rumbach, and Sinha 2019).

Environmental NGOs and an Associational Approach to Fighting Air Pollution The campaigns for clean air in Delhi are being led not by the Delhi government but by environmental NGOs. Delhi’s environmental NGOs employ vari­ous strategies and tactics, such as mobilizing the Supreme Court, government bureaucracies, and the media. The success of air pollution control in Delhi so far has largely hinged on w ­ hether environmental NGOs can form an alliance with ­these other stakeholders. The activities of the CSE exemplify this associational approach to mobilization. The first associational strategy widely used by India’s environmental NGOs such as CSE is mobilizing the judiciary through public interest litigation. Unlike China, the judiciary in India, especially the Supreme Court, is a major player in environmental protection (Dembowski 2001). The Supreme Court is made up of middle-­class intellectuals who support cleaner air and garbage-­free cities, and they sympathize with the cause of environmentalists (Veron 2006; Rajamani 2007). Judges can wield tremendous influence in par­tic­u­lar public interest cases. They can, for instance, take suo moto (on its own) actions and commission expert committees to carry out fact-­finding research, based on which they make their decisions. In the context of fragmented government authorities, the Supreme Court of India fills a void by exerting pressure for policy implementation. In the case of clean energy conversion in the 1990s, the Supreme Court quickly responded to public interest lawsuits by actively reaching out to—­and pursuing

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constructive resolutions with—­numerous parties and stakeholders, such as the Ministry of Environment and Forests, the Ministry of Transport, and the Central Pollution Control Board. This activist tendency of the Supreme Court of India has been noted by many, and some argue that the Court has ensconced itself as the main protector of the environment (Bell et al. 2004; Rajamani 2007). But the Court lacks the authority to intervene on its own; it must wait for the cases to be brought to it. Environmental NGOs have aggressively employed public interest litigation to advance their agendas. The second major associational strategy used by the CSE is to mobilize the media to criticize the government’s inaction. The former director of CSE, Anil Agarwal, was a journalist and a vocal critic of government inertia. In the publication Slow Murder, Agarwal cited his interview with a se­nior official of the CPCB, which he ripped for its in­effec­tive­ness and lack of in­de­pen­dence: “The Central Pollution Control Board—­one would expect an organ­ization with a name like that to penalize polluters and care about the quality of air that citizens breathe. But this interview with the CPCB chairperson shows that CPCB is merely a lapdog of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, and all it can do about the deteriorating air quality in urban areas is ‘write letters’ ” (Agarwal, Sharma, and Roychowdhury 1996, 126). The CPCB chairman, in his reply, acknowledged his organ­ization’s lack of power and heralded the pivotal role of NGOs: When it comes to ­doing t­ hings, it is not up to the CPCB, even in the area of air pollution. I ­can’t ask the state transport authority to do anything. At the most, I can ask the state pollution control boards. The state pollution control boards also turn their back and say this is not their responsibility. . . . ​ We provide information to the Supreme Court. B ­ ecause we d­ on’t have power to act, we go through NGOs and media. (Agarwal, Sharma, and Roychowdhury 1996, 126) Agarwal also derided India’s environmental laws, which lack detail, standards, and any prospect of implementation: Let us take a look at India’s wonderful Air Prevention and Control of Pollution Act, 1981. One would assume that since India has such an act, ­there would also be a program to implement the act and thereby ensure that air pollution is controlled. But if you think so, you are living in some dreamland. . . . ​[T]­here is no action plan in an Indian city to control air pollution, except Delhi, where all the action is coming from the venerable judges of the Supreme Court. . . . ​The air quality standards, obligations of the central and state governments to achieve air quality targets, deadlines, and periodical updates are all missing in India’s Air Act. It is clear that the state does

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not function in India. But in this case, what seems to have worked is a combination of non-­governmental organ­izations and court pressure and a good mea­sure of competition. The politicians and the bureaucrats can go hang themselves. (Narain 2007, 169–70) CSE has vocally criticized the lack of action by the Delhi government. ­ fter Agarwal died from cancer in 2002, Sunita Narain became the director, A and CSE has continued to speak out in the media against the government. It questions the government’s dubious claims about the sources of air pollution and has demanded that the government get its data right. In 2015 the MoEF submitted an affidavit to the Supreme Court, arguing that vehicular emissions are not a major source of air pollution in Delhi (CSE 2011). Citing a six-­city study conducted by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute in 2009, the MoEF argued that the major contributors to air pollution ­were not vehicular emissions but road dust, industries, and power plants. CSE condemned the report immediately. Narain wrote on CSE’s website, “We are deeply shocked at the callous and indifferent attitude of the Ministry t­ owards one of the most serious public health crises in Delhi and other cities of India” (CSE 2015). Pointing out the outdated nature of the study used by the MoEF, the chief executive of CSE, Anumita Roychowdhury, criticized the government for downplaying the role of vehicles and protecting the automobile industry (CSE 2015). In the same report the MoEF also argued that inhaling road dust was benign. It minimized the harmful effects of air pollution on ­children, and argued that schools did not have to be shut down on heavi­ly polluted days. CSE countered with studies conducted by the University of California–­Berkeley, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the CPCB about the dangerous levels of toxins in road dust. Highlighting the health effects of air pollution on ­children, it argued that schools must be shut down on heavi­ly polluted days. In 2015, a­ fter the government launched the national AQI, CSE welcomed the move but also immediately began to question the government’s data reporting. It found many flaws in the AQI due to poor maintenance of monitoring equipment—of the twenty-­eight monitoring stations across Delhi, many ­were not operational, and the data ­were insufficient to report real-­time air pollution. CSE recommended expanding air pollution monitoring across the country and setting up an early warning system on heavi­ly polluted days to tell citizens what to do (Down to Earth 2015). The recommendation was fi­nally ­adopted in 2018, when Delhi introduced its Air Quality Early Warning System. A third associational strategy used by CSE in its mobilization efforts with the Supreme Court and government bureaucracies has been its emphasis on

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the transport sector. In the 1990s CSE focused on vehicular emissions, and in more recent years it has promoted public transit. Roychowdhury described this strategy as a natu­ral choice. In an interview, she recounted that Delhi of the 1990s was polluted but did not have that many cars, so CSE tried to figure out the source of the pollution. ­After conducting in­de­pen­dent lab tests, CSE found that Indian diesel was much dirtier than that used in the United States and Eu­rope. At that time the government had already ordered polluting factories to move out, so CSE de­cided to focus on vehicular emissions.15 The focus on the transport sector reflects the l­ imited capacity of NGOs. CSE cannot address all sources of air pollution, and vehicular emission control is one of the fields in which the government has some regulatory power, and if CSE can effectively mobilize the judiciary to prod the government into using its power, substantial pro­gress can be made. Lastly, in pursuing its associational strategies to fight air pollution, CSE has sought to fill the void left by the government by proposing action plans. In 2015, CSE released the Delhi Clean Air Action Plan. In the document, CSE criticized the government’s action as too l­ ittle and too late (Narain, Roychowdhury, and Chattopadhyaya 2015). It also included findings from an in­de­pen­ dent study of the daily exposure to air pollution. Between November 5 and December 9, 2014, CSE or­ga­nized a group of “prominent citizens” of Delhi to carry a small air-­pollution-­monitoring device with them everywhere they went; participants included the chairperson of Delhi’s Environmental Pollution Control Authority, a se­nior advocate in the Supreme Court, the head of a major hospital, and a few architects and urban planners. The study found that even in the Lutyens’ Delhi neighborhoods, which are expected to be the cleanest and greenest, PM2.5 reached a critically high level. The report sent out a clear message that air pollution transcended class divides, and that even the rich and power­ful had to breathe foul air. Following the study, CSE made a dozen policy recommendations, such as controlling dieselization, banning open burning, and regulating private generators. That an environmental NGO, instead of the Delhi government, drafted the city’s clean air action plan spotlights the NGO-­centered associational approach to fighting air pollution in India. The CSE’s action plan does not identify funding sources for its vari­ous policy recommendations and has no specific pollution reduction targets. It focuses mainly on the transport sector, which is in­effec­tive, as all sources of pollution need to be addressed si­mul­ta­ neously.16 ­These limitations are inevitable, as the government is ultimately responsible for allocating funding, setting targets, devising policies, and enforcing implementation. The Delhi government, however, has not responded to the action plan advocated by the CSE.

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The “Beijing Effect” in Delhi Environmental activists and the media in India have been closely watching Beijing’s strong-­handed territorial approach to fighting air pollution. At a public lecture in Chicago, Indian author Suketa Mehta, bemoaning the air quality in Delhi and Mumbai, said that Beijing by comparison was “Darjeeling.”17 Beijing’s air quality is nowhere close to that of Darjeeling—­the scenic tea estate in West Bengal. But this casual remark reflects the recent trend in Indian public discourse over pollution of using Beijing as a frame of reference. When the WHO released its air quality ranking by cities in 2014, it triggered intense debates in Delhi, not b­ ecause Delhi’s air was bad but b­ ecause it was worse than Beijing’s. Beijing’s government-­led air pollution control effort met dif­fer­ent reactions from the state and civil society groups in Delhi, and it prompted collective soul searching on what India should do to prevent a total airpocalypse. The Indian government is defensive about its environmental rec­ord, embarrassed to see Delhi falling b­ ehind Beijing in efforts to fight pollution (Hsu and Schwartz 2014). In 2014, when the WHO released its report, Indian government agencies dismissed Beijing’s efforts in air pollution control. The System of Air Quality Forecasting and Research (SAFAR), a government-­affiliated air quality monitoring agency in Delhi, disputed the report’s figures. It argued that, based on the U.S. embassy’s numbers, the annual average level of PM2.5 in Delhi should be in the range of 110–20, instead of 153, and that Beijing’s PM2.5 level should be at least double the reported 56 (AFP in Delhi 2014). Similarly, the Ministry of Earth Sciences in India told the press that the WHO report overstated Delhi’s data and underestimated Beijing’s. For example, the report used 2010 figures for Beijing but 2013 data for Delhi (Nandi 2014a). But environmental NGOs and the media in Delhi view Beijing much differently—as a role model for aggressively tackling air pollution. News articles of Beijing’s war on air pollution frequently appear in the media, blaring such headlines as “Beijing Battled Crisis, Delhi Fiddled” and “Delhi Air Stinks, Govt Worried about Beijing” (Nandi 2014a, 2014b). CSE carefully examined the policy mea­sures a­ dopted in Beijing and concluded that u­ ntil 2008, the two cities w ­ ere head to head, but ­after that, Beijing kept the momentum ­going while Delhi lost steam (Roychowdhury 2014). Speaking to the media, CSE’s Roychowdhury disparaged the government’s dismissive reaction to the WHO’s air quality ranking: “Why are they so hung up over Beijing’s air quality? Why ­can’t we accept the prob­lem? If they want to emulate Beijing, they should have aggressive policies on capping the number of cars and implementing Euro V emission standards” (Roychowdhury 2014). Beijing’s environmental policies are also closely watched by environmental activists in India. Sarath Guttikunda, a researcher and activist, wrote extensively

A ir p o ca ly p s e in Be i j ing a n d De lhi  115 ­table 5.2. The Top Twenty Most Polluted Cities in the World Rank

Country

City

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

India India India India India India India Cameroon India India India India Pakistan Pakistan India Uganda India India Bangladesh China

Kanpur Faridabad Gaya Varanasi Patna Delhi Lucknow Bamenda Agra Gurgaon Muzaffarpur Srinagar Peshawar Rawalpindi Jaipur Kampala Patiala Jodhpur Narayangonj Baoding

PM2.5 annual mean (µg/m3) 173 172 149 146 144 143 138 132 131 120 120 113 111 107 105 104 101 98 94 93

Source: WHO (2018).

about Beijing’s air-­pollution-­monitoring capacity on his blog Urban Emissions.18 Using the Beijing Olympics as an example, Guttikunda praised Beijing’s stringent air pollution control mea­sures during the Games.19 Other think tanks and research centers, such as the Centre for Policy Research, have also examined Beijing’s strategies for cleaning up its air (Khosla 2014) and have or­ga­nized seminars on themes related to air pollution, in an attempt to raise public awareness and improve access to data on air quality. In 2018, the WHO released an updated report on air quality, this time covering more than four thousand cities in 108 countries, including hundreds of cities in China and India (WHO 2018). The 2018 report showed the rapidly widening gap in air quality between Beijing and Delhi: for Beijing, the annual average level of PM2.5 dropped from 90 in 2013 to 73 in 2016, while for Delhi, it ­rose from 119 in 2013 to 143 in 2016. India’s environmental officials ­today no longer debate ­whether Delhi’s air is better or worse than Beijing’s. Beijing’s war on air pollution has delivered positive results, and Delhi’s inaction has had alarming consequences. In 2018, Delhi’s PM2.5 level nearly doubled that of Beijing, and fourteen out of the twenty most polluted cities in the world are in India (­table 5.2).

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Up in the Air: The Environmental ­Battle in China and India This chapter has examined environmental governance in China and India by analyzing clean air campaigns unfolding in Beijing and Delhi. The previous scholarship has often summarized the difference between climate change mitigation policies in China and India as state-led versus market-led. This chapter has shown that the dichotomy of state versus market does not capture the full spectrum of environmental governance in the two countries. Beijing’s clean air campaign is not only state led but also features a territorial logic, as manifested in the Target Responsibility System. Delhi’s clean air campaign is not centered on any market-­based mechanisms but rather is led by environmental NGOs, whose weapon has been public interest litigation. The Target Responsibility System at the center of Beijing’s clean air campaign holds territorial authorities responsible for pollution control within their jurisdictions. Pollution reduction has been incorporated into evaluations of local officials. By transmitting pressure from upper-­to lower-­level administrations, this territorial approach is effective in the short term, as local officials are concerned about their po­liti­cal c­ areers and motivated to improve the environmental rec­ord in their jurisdictions. Besides the government, nonstate actors are also active in fighting pollution. The internet and social media have become a new public sphere in China, a space for citizens to voice their opinions and demand accountability from the government (Lei 2017). But despite this widening citizen participation, the role of nonstate actors is only supplementary; their participation is confined within the par­ameters set by the state. China’s territorial approach to reducing air pollution is ­limited in many ways. First, to try to contain air pollution in single cities or urban regions is insufficient ­because of the substantial regional transport of polluted air masses across city bound­aries. Beijing has been trying to work with nearby cities in Hebei province, but the collaboration has not been easy, as Hebei province is less developed than Beijing and still relies on its heavy industries for GDP growth. Other limitations include the uneven capacity of local officials, some of whom are less capable and less motivated about environmental protection; over-­reliance on action plans, which may set ambitious or moderate goals; and fluctuating economic cycles, including downturns that can lead to a prioritization of development over environment. The territorial approach to pollution control has also led to widening regional disparities in environmental per­for­mance. In general, urban, more developed regions have more financial resources and capacity to tackle pollution than rural and less developed areas. Most urban areas have developed

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comprehensive air quality monitoring networks, but many rural areas do not yet have a single air monitor. Rural residents lack reliable information on air quality, a shortcoming that can become an obstacle when negotiating with local polluting factories (Hansen and Liu 2018). T ­ oday the worst air quality is found not in big cities but in smaller cities and rural areas that have neither financial resources nor motivated local officials to fight pollution. In Delhi, the clean air campaign is led by NGOs whose main strategy is filing public interest litigation. To date, the major successes of Delhi’s clean air campaign have depended on the ability of environmental NGOs to mobilize the Supreme Court to protect the environment. Interventions by the Supreme Court are inefficient, in terms of the time and effort required to investigate a case. Lacking expertise in many environmental issues, judges need to rely on special expert committees to conduct investigations, and their rulings often reflect their ­limited knowledge (Gadgil and Guha 1995). Compared to NGOs and the Supreme Court, the Delhi government plays only a minor role in the city’s air pollution control efforts. The Delhi government has yet to advance any action plan with a clear pollution reduction target or allocate funding to fight pollution. At the national level, the central government of India is in the pro­cess of drafting a clean air action plan. But unlike China, where the implementation of the action plans is assigned to local officials and government agencies, in India no agency or individual is responsible for carry­ing out recommended actions. In the longer run, w ­ hether blue skies can return to Beijing and Delhi w ­ ill depend on effective intervention by the government, compliance from industries, monitoring by NGOs, and more importantly, the opening up of more channels for average citizens—­beyond the urban ­middle class—to participate. China and India face dif­fer­ent obstacles to citizen participation. In China, decision-­making authority is concentrated in a few executive government ministries, and t­ here are scant official channels for the public to participate in environmental policy making. In India, robust channels—­both formal and informal—­exist for the public to voice their opinions, but access to information on air quality is still poor outside the circle of the urban m ­ iddle class; without reliable information, the larger public is unlikely to demand that the government take action. Therefore, China’s task is to create more institutional channels for the public to participate, and India must improve information disclosure among the poor. Th ­ ese are crucial next steps in the two countries’ fight for the blue sky.

6 Territorial and Associational Politics in Historical Perspective

across the housing, land, and environmental sectors, we observe a territorial logic in urban governance in China and an associational logic in India. This chapter traces the emergence, consolidation, and entrenchment of territorial and associational politics from a historical perspective. Drawing on examples from the historiography on local governance in China and India, I examine how territorial institutions and elites dominated local governance from the imperial period to the market reform era in China, and how associational politics characterized local governance from the precolonial period throughout the colonial and postin­de­pen­dence eras in India. In China, Confucian elites and institutions ­were clearly in control of local affairs in the imperial and republican periods, and a­ fter 1949 they w ­ ere replaced by a new set of territorial authorities and institutions brought about by the Communist government. In India, it is difficult to identify local territorial elites and institutions similar to the Chinese case. It is acknowledged that t­ here is no ­simple story of continuity in ­either case. Territorial and associational forms of governance also underwent ruptures, mutations, and entrenchment, especially in the postin­de­pen­dence de­cades in both countries.

Territorial Governance from Imperial China to the Market Reform Era Territorial forms of governance have persisted through revolutions and reforms in China from the imperial era to the pre­sent. The baojia system, a state orga­nizational strategy in­ven­ted in the Song dynasty in the eleventh ­century, divided the national territory into neighborhood-­level jurisdictions for social control and surveillance purposes. This early form of state spatial organ­ization survived the 1911 Revolution and continued to exist throughout the republican period (1911–48). The Communist government terminated the baojia system 118

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and replaced it with hukou, and it in­ven­ted another pillar institution, danwei, to govern the urban population and affairs. While hukou retains some features of the baojia system, danwei is a new territorial institution ushered in during the socialist de­cades. In the market reform era, the central government devolved power, authority, and resources to local governments. The entrenchment of territorial forms of governance is exemplified in the empowerment of local governments and the proliferation of special developmental zones since the 1980s.

The Imperial and Republican Periods (Eleventh ­Century to 1948): State Spatial Organ­ization and the Local Territorial Elite One can trace historical pre­ce­dents for local governance dominated by territorial institutions and elites to imperial China. As early as the Song dynasty (960–1276), the imperial court in China had mastered the craft of spatial and administrative divisions to govern its vast territory. The basic nationwide administrative unit was the county (xian), of which the imperial territory was divided into more than a thousand. The Song court frequently changed the administrative bound­aries of counties, by promoting, demoting, merging, and splitting counties to prepare local authorities for foreign invasions and domestic unrest (Mostern 2011). Baojia is one of the earliest territorial institutions in China’s history. The Song reformer Wang Anshi (1021–86) instituted the baojia system to invigorate the military, lower state expenditures, and extend the imperial presence in local society. ­Under the baojia system, h­ ouse­holds w ­ ere numbered and grouped for policing, militia training, and tax collection purposes. For tax collection, between ten and thirty ­house­holds ­were grouped into a jia (tithing); for militia training and self-­defense, ten h­ ouse­holds w ­ ere grouped into a xiaobao, fifty ­house­holds ­were grouped into a dabao, and five hundred ­house­holds formed a dubao. Leaders—­typically the most virtuous and wealthiest citizens of the local community—­were appointed to take charge of each bao and jia. Baojia represented the recognition of local community and ­family power and its incorporation into a nationwide system of governance (Dutton 1988). The local spatial organ­ization of the baojia system continued well into the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasties (1644–1911). As a spatial-­administrative instrument, it helped the imperial state maintain social order, police neighborhoods, and penetrate into local communities (Brook 1985). Anthropologist Wang Mingming studied how the locals in the coastal city of Quanzhou in Fujian province appropriated the baojia system imposed by the imperial court. Being far away from the imperial capital, Quanzhou was a marginal place where social control and state ideology w ­ ere only loosely enforced during the

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Ming and Qing dynasties. By instituting baojia, however, the imperial state turned the city from a remote corner of the empire into an outpost of coastal defense and imperial administration (Wang 1995). Baojia (locally referred to as pujing) was instituted in the 1370s by regional magistrates for the purpose of militia training, self-­defense, and information gathering. Soon it also came to be used for administrative control and as a symbol of the imperial bureaucracy in the local community. The city was divided into thirty-­six pu (wards) and seventy-­two jing (neighborhoods), and community leaders ­were selected as the heads of each pu and jing. In a pu, each h­ ouse­hold hung a placard on its front door, noting the name of its ward; the registration number of the ­house­hold; the size of the ­family; its occupation, land owner­ship, and birthplace; as well as the number of rooms, cows, ­horses, and agricultural facilities. ­These detailed statistics w ­ ere cata­loged in h­ ouse­hold registration books (puce) and kept in territorial ­temples. Although imposed from above as an instrument of sociospatial control, the baojia system became a major territorial institution in local communities. Local residents of Quanzhou used the pujing system to foster a sense of territorial identity (Wang 1995). They built ­temples in their wards, designed banners for each ward, worshiped territorial gods and deities, and held territorial festivals and street pro­cessions. Baojia was reintroduced for military purposes by the Nationalist government between 1932 and 1949, to or­ga­nize ­house­holds to fight against Communists. When the Communists came to power in 1949, the baojia system was abolished and replaced by another, more power­ful territorial institution—­hukou. Just as the baojia system represents a pre­ce­dent for power­ful territorial institutions, the gentry class is a historical example of influential territorial elites who controlled local affairs. The emergence of the gentry as a ruling elite in local affairs can be traced back to the Southern Song period (1127–79; Hymes 1986). As the Song state weakened and retreated from local affairs, it opened up space for the local gentry to step in and provide the needed infrastructure and ser­vices. The gentry (shishen) w ­ ere a local elite class comprising scholars (shi) and officials (shen) with titles and degrees conferred by the government; thus, gentry membership was based on the attainment of bureaucratic status (Zhang 1955; Chu 1962). The gentry actively intervened in local affairs. Filling the gap left by the retreating central state, they used their own wealth to provide much-­needed ser­vices, such as irrigation, education, famine relief, religious ceremonies, and self-­defense from bandits. To maintain a stable local community was impor­tant for the gentry, as their own wealth and security depended on it (Chu 1962). The gentry w ­ ere a prototypical territorial elite basing their power in their native places. They turned their attention to their hometowns instead of

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seeking a c­ areer in the central administration. The close ties that the gentry maintained with their communities contrasted sharply with the relationship that appointed county magistrates had with their jurisdictions. The “law of avoidance” during the Qing dynasty forbade officials from serving in their hometowns, so that county magistrates appointed by the imperial court ­were invariably nonlocals. They had only superficial knowledge of the county they governed, and some did not even speak the local dialect, so they had to seek advice from the local gentry, who ­were the “eyes and ears” for the county magistrates (Chu 1962). The gentry performed crucial functions and ­were a major force in the governing of local affairs. The commoners had to support the gentry, as it was the only group that could legitimately represent them to negotiate with the local representatives of imperial power and prevent infliction of extreme hardship by the central government, such as increased taxation (Fei 1953). The gentry class not only survived but even thrived in the turbulent years of the early twentieth ­century. The abolition of the national examination system in 1905 and the collapse of the Qing dynasty destabilized but did not end local rule by the gentry. The gentry maintained their privileged positions and ruled the counties informally (Skinner and Elvin 1974; Esherick and Rankin 1989). The gentry took advantage of the po­liti­cal, economic, and military reforms, and they gradually institutionalized their dominance by acquiring formal positions in local administrations. Elected local assemblies appeared ­after 1909, and many of the assembly representatives ­were members of the same gentry who had ruled their local community for generations. The local rule by the gentry was fi­nally destabilized in the chaotic years of the 1930s. Selected historiography on Beijing (Strand 1989) and Jiangsu province (Barkan 1989) suggests that the gentry found themselves increasingly squeezed between the Nationalist government based in Nanjing (1928–37) and dissenting activists, such as students, ­labor organizers, and party organizers. In the name of the masses, t­ hese activists challenged the elite establishment. ­After the founding of the PRC in 1949, the gentry class was completely eliminated by the Communist government, but in its place, the government installed a new set of formal state apparatuses and territorial institutions (Esherick and Rankin 1989).

Building New Territorial Institutions ­under Socialism Upon coming to power, the Communist Party began a series of administrative restructuring actions that fundamentally changed power relations at the local level. It abolished the baojia system and destroyed the entire gentry class with land confiscation and po­liti­cal campaigns. In the countryside, the party

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appointed representatives in e­ very village to form a new link between the rural community and state authority. In cities, it introduced two major territorial institutions, hukou and danwei, and delegated to government party cadres substantial decision-­making power (Barnett 1967). The roots of hukou as an instrument of sociospatial control can be traced back to the baojia system, but it differs from baojia in that its main function is not to police the population but to distribute welfare based on differentiated citizenship. As discussed in chapter 2, the central government installed the hukou system in the 1950s to prevent population movement between cities and the countryside. Residents with agricultural hukou w ­ ere confined to the countryside and denied access to social welfare benefits enjoyed by urban residents. They could not easily travel to cities, and even if they did, they could not survive ­there, as ­there was no market economy and the state distributed jobs, food, education, and healthcare, but only to residents with urban hukou (Brown 2012). Thus, as a territorial institution, hukou concentrated resources for cities and urban residents, while exploiting the peasantry by imposing unequal terms of citizenship. Danwei, translated as “workplace” or “work unit,” refers to vari­ous kinds of social and economic enterprises, including factories, schools, and government organ­izations. The government installed the danwei system a­ fter the G ­ reat Famine (1958–61) to effectively control population movement and preserve resources for cities. A large proportion of urban residents in socialist China worked for a danwei, and based on their danwei affiliation, they and their families ­were provided a range of welfare benefits, such as housing, c­ hildren’s education, medical care, and pensions. Spatially, the danwei system divided the socialist Chinese city into relatively autonomous cells and or­ga­nized everyday urban life within the cells—­many community institutions such as schools and hospitals w ­ ere built within the danwei compounds, catering to employees and their families. Th ­ ere was a g­ reat deal of variation in size, rank, and wealth among danwei, and personal economic well-­being depended on the power, prestige, and resources of one’s danwei. Besides social welfare distribution, danwei also served po­liti­cal and social control functions, such as enforcement of the one child policy and surveillance of employees’ everyday life (Whyte and Parish 1984). The welfare needs of ­those without a danwei affiliation ­were taken care of by street offices and residents’ committees—­two other territorial institutions set up by the socialist government. Th ­ ese are neighborhood-­level government bureaucracies that in the socialist era ­were put in charge of a range of social control and welfare functions prescribed by municipal and district governments (Read 2000). Street offices have larger geographic jurisdictions and typically cover several residential blocks and thousands of h­ ouse­holds, while

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residents’ committees are base-­level government agencies typically in charge of a few hundred h­ ouse­holds. ­These lower-­level government units played a complementary role in urban governance in the socialist years (Lewis 1971).

Consolidation of Territorial Institutions in the Market Reform Era The beginning of the market reform marked a new era of consolidation of territorial forms of governance. Since 1978, all levels of territorial authorities in urban areas have experienced significant empowerment. One of the major developments in the 1980s and 1990s was the devolution of power from central government ministries to local territorial institutions (Lieberthal 1995). The central government encouraged localities to attract investment and put local governments in charge of promoting economic growth. Municipal and district governments ­were empowered to make most policy decisions in urban affairs without having to seek central approval. Neighborhood-­level institutions ­were empowered too. In the aftermath of the collapse of the danwei system in the 1990s, neighborhood-­level territorial institutions such as street offices and residents’ committees acquired new functions, including providing social welfare, training residents for employment, and monitoring mi­grant workers (Wu 2002). Around 2010, the central government introduced a new territorial institution—­shequ (translated as “community”)—to take over some of the functions of street offices and residents’ committees. Shequ is designated by the state as the basic unit of urban social, po­liti­cal, and administrative organ­ization, and it is initially designed to be a partner of the state in implementing policy programs and helping provide social ser­vices through market channels. More recently, its functions have been broadened to also include moral education, dissemination of government propaganda, policing and security, and monitoring of mi­grant workers (Bray 2006; Tomba 2014). The introduction of shequ is thus another example of consolidating welfare provision and social control through local territorial institutions. The proliferation of SEZs since the 1980s represents an innovation in the long tradition of territorial forms of governance in China. Special economic zones are designated as export-­processing zones to attract foreign investment. ­These special zones are given preferential treatment in tax, l­ abor, and environmental regulations. In 1982, Deng Xiaoping toured south China and chose five localities to experiment with SEZs. As the first SEZs began to have spectacular success in attracting foreign investment, the experiment was introduced across the country. Each SEZ has a governing board that oversees policy making within its jurisdiction. Shenzhen is one of the first SEZs in China, and it exemplifies the use of territorial exceptionalism (O’Donnell, Wong, and Bach 2017) as a strategy to develop the economy. Shenzhen is governed differently

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from other cities in China, and the city’s territory is divided into many subzones, such as urban villages, the airport zone, and the industrial zone, which are subject to dif­fer­ent regulations. In addition to SEZs, other types of development zones include economic and technological development zones, industrial parks, and high-­tech manufacturing zones. Th ­ ese special-­purpose territorial units have proliferated across the country since the 1990s—­a phenomenon described as “zone fever” (Cartier 2001; Yang and Wang 2008) or “zoning technology” (Ong 2004). In short, territorial forms of urban governance in Chinese cities are not just byproducts of China’s single-­party rule. Throughout the imperial and republican periods, local affairs ­were firmly controlled by Confucian territorial elites and institutions. The founding of PRC in 1949 was a watershed moment, marking both a rupture and a consolidation of territorial institutions. The Communist government began to build a new state apparatus at the local level and replaced some of the older institutions. The market reform in the 1980s entailed devolution of power and resources to local governments, which eagerly pursued development zones as a spatial strategy to promote growth. Associational ties, strategies, and mobilization are undoubtedly also pre­sent in China in both history and the pre­sent, but they are much less consequential compared with territorial institutions such as hukou and danwei, and state spatial strategies such as SEZ policies.

Associational Governance in India from the Precolonial Era to In­de­pen­dence India did not have territorial institutions similar to the baojia and hukou systems, nor was t­ here a consistent local ruling elite similar to the Chinese gentry. The historiography of local governance in Mughal and colonial India identifies several types of local leaderships, which worked as intermediaries between the formal authority and the p­ eople, such as the rais (wealthy magnates) in urban areas and zamindars (landowners who collected tax for the central administration) in rural areas. Th ­ ese patrons ­were at the center of clientelist networks, but their influence depended on cultivating connections and eliciting support from other community leadership bodies, such as caste, religious, and trade associations. Their control over local affairs was constantly challenged by ­these other community leaders and by the new municipal councils in the early twentieth c­ entury (Bayly 1971, 1988). The local governing structures in India have varied greatly across time and localities, defying any endeavor of generalization. Below, I use select examples of local elites and institutions to highlight the associational character of local governance in India.

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Local Rulers in the Late Mughal Period (Seventeenth–­Eighteenth Centuries): Zamindars and Village Headmen Zamindars and village headmen are two examples of landed local elites in precolonial India, but their control over local affairs does not amount to a territorial form of governance. Both groups’ authority over local communities was conflictual and incomplete. In the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries, the Mughal state ruled most parts of the Indian subcontinent, relying on cooperation from zamindars.1 Often described as a fiscal sponge, the Mughal state was built on a hierarchy of fiscal systems, and much state action was driven by the ruling elite’s desire to collect more agricultural surplus (Alam and Subrahmanyam 1998). Zamindars ­were a crucial cog in the Mughal system of revenue collection (Mill 1997). ­There ­were considerable differences in wealth, status, and power among zamindars. Large zamindars, referred to as rajas, held thousands of acres of land. They did not collect revenue directly from peasants but relied on intermediaries. Petty zamindars might hold fifty acres of land or less, and they collected revenue directly from villa­gers or village headmen. In the ­middle ­were intermediary zamindars, who collected revenue from petty zamindars and reported to large zamindars (Hasan 1998). The relationship between the Mughal state and its revenue-­collecting agents was a complicated one, as the two sides ­were not only partners in exploitation but also competitors for revenue. The Mughal state constantly strug­gled with zamindars for a greater share of agricultural surplus, and zamindars or­ga­nized revolts and ­stopped remitting revenue to the central administration when the state showed signs of weakness. The triangular relationship among the Mughal state, zamindars, and the peasantry formed the basic governing structure in precolonial India (Hasan 1998). The Mughal state left the governance of localities to local rulers, and zamindars wielded much influence in local life. The power of zamindars had a territorial basis, as it was tied to their landholding status, but they w ­ ere not landowners in the strict sense, b­ ecause individual and alienable land rights did not exist in precolonial India.2 Rather, multiple individuals, from local rajas and zamindars to cultivators, held complementary rights to the same piece of land, and no written rec­ord defined ­these layered rights to specific plots (McLane 1993). Nevertheless, as agents appointed by the state for revenue collection, zamindars held rights to p­ eople’s ­labor, crops, and deference (McLane 1993). Based on their control of revenue collection, zamindars could influence decision making in agricultural production and management. Some dictated production decisions and the timing of harvest, and o­ thers removed village headmen and assumed direct control over villages. Peasants, ranging from ­free farmers

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to bondage laborers, w ­ ere dependent on zamindars to dif­fer­ent degrees (Bayly 2012). Zamindars sometimes contributed to public welfare in their jurisdiction, but their contribution rarely went beyond t­ emple building and basic infrastructural repairs (McLane 1993). Although the Mughal state relied heavi­ly on zamindars for revenue collection, ­there ­were also vast territories in the Mughal Empire where the zamindari right was not established. ­These places ­were known as roytwari, or peasant-­ held land. In ­these areas, village headmen collected revenue and ­were the primary authority figures, and they had direct control over the everyday life of peasants, artisans, and merchants in their villages.3 Called by dif­fer­ent names, such as muqaddam, patel, and munigar, village headmen ­were the general superintendents of village affairs (Habib 1963). Their responsibility was largely financial. The headmen collected taxes assessed for their villages. For this work they w ­ ere offered a reward by the state, and they could always collect more revenue than was assessed and keep some for themselves. In addition to revenue collection, village headmen also performed some social control functions, such as settling disputes among villa­gers. The headman was normally a peasant, but sometimes the office could be purchased by outsiders as an investment. The revenue authorities could remove a headman if he failed in his revenue-­gathering obligations, and they could also nominate a headman in villages that ­were newly settled, or in older villages where the post was vacant (Habib 1963). The distinction between petty zamindars and village headmen was not clear cut. In ­those areas where zamindars and village headmen coexisted, village headmen ­were seen as servants to zamindars, as they collected revenue for zamindars and would ask for ­favors for themselves, such as lower assessment rates (McLane 1993). But as some village headmen became successful in amassing a fortune, the distance grew between them and ordinary peasants, and they could claim certain rights like ­those of zamindars (Habib 1963). The power of both zamindars and village headmen declined in the latter half of the eigh­teenth c­ entury, as the local land-­based elite was squeezed by colonial revenue extraction and the rising pressure of commercialization (Bayly 1988). The traditional authority of village headmen was further undermined in the nineteenth c­ entury, when the British standardized land revenue collection with a zamindari system in the northern and eastern parts of the subcontinent and a roytwari system in the south. The first system empowered zamindars at the expense of village headmen (Habib 1963), while the second collected revenue directly from cultivators, therefore bypassing village headmen altogether (Mukherjee and Frykenberg 1969).4 ­There was built-in tension between local elites and their subjects. The primary role of zamindars and village headmen was not to govern but to collect

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revenue. They offered patronage, gifts, and f­ avors to gain legitimacy among their subjects, but at the same time, they needed to extract tax from their subjects to satisfy their superiors. This dual role, as both patrons and exploiters, underscores the conflictual nature of the territorial authority of ­these elites. Moreover, their territorial roots ­were shallow, as the position of zamindar or village headman could be bought by an outsider as an investment opportunity, as long as the village in question was not completely impoverished by tax burdens already. Fi­nally, their authority over local affairs was partial and segmented, as ­there was a range of other leaderships—­based on caste, lineage, religion, and occupation—­that also provided patronage and protection to the populace. Similar patterns of local governance continued in the British era, with multiple local elite groups competing for power and influence in local affairs.

Local Governance in British India (1858–1947): Rais, Municipal Councils, and Patron-­Client Networks The historiography on local governance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depicts a combination of traditional elites and emerging new actors and institutions influencing local affairs. The British needed an informal po­liti­cal authority to mediate disputes that arose from market competition, fast urban growth, and communal tensions in the late nineteenth ­century (Bayly 1971). In small towns and the countryside, the government relied on the landed zamindars as intermediaries to ­settle disputes and collect revenue. In bigger and more populous towns with active trade and occupational diversity, the rural zamindars could not exert sufficient influence to maintain social order and resolve disputes. The government had to seek alternative intermediaries, such as wealthy merchants and traditional neighborhood-­based leaderships. Wealthy merchants (rais) became patrons in some market towns in late nineteenth-­­century India (Bayly 1971). Rais w ­ ere urban magnates who accumulated wealth from commerce, trade, and banking in colonial Indian towns. They headed power­ful banking families and controlled the urban credit systems. They actively engaged in trade but also heavi­ly invested in urban property and rural landholding to diversify their income sources. From the late eigh­teenth ­century to the nineteenth, as Mughal elites became impoverished, merchants and commercializing landlords stepped in and assumed the local leadership in large towns, such as Agra, Banaras, and many maritime cities. They became the patrons of education, culture, and religious and urban affairs, and their local leadership was consolidated in the first half of the twentieth ­century (Bayly 2012). Rather than basing their power territorially in a single locality, urban rais exerted their control and influence across communities (Bayly 1971). As rais

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­ ere urban property ­owners, they could manipulate their rental tenants as w block voters to intervene in municipal elections; as they controlled the banking and credit systems, they had influence over small merchants who needed credit as well as poor laborers who w ­ ere in debt; and their patronage extended to small towns and rural areas as well, ­because of their landholding and control over landless farmers. The urban rais also maintained their influence by serving on municipal boards, holding official positions so that they could issue building permits and distribute subsidies, and contributing to charity and philanthropy through sponsorship of ­temple construction and religious festivals. Thus, their influence traversed the bound­aries of caste, class, and religion, as well as locality. The rais needed to build alliances with other neighborhood leaderships to mediate disputes, maintain public order, and influence local affairs. Bayly (1971) notes that beneath the rais, one could find a diverse range of neighborhood leaderships that could pre­sent challenges to the rais. Th ­ ese leaderships represented sectional interests in the city, such as dif­fer­ent bazaar factions, occupations, religions, castes, and mi­grant communities.5 They ­were unable to exert power beyond a residential block or a few blocks, and had to seek help from the rais to attain any considerable advantage in distributing local resources. Conversely, as many neighborhood leaderships w ­ ere poorly integrated in the rais’ network of economic influence and social control, the rais ­were often unable to resolve disputes among ­these sectional interest groups. In other words, the neighborhood leaderships themselves had l­ imited authority, but they could nevertheless undermine the power of the rais. The ­limited influence of urban commercial rais was evident in the time of communal riots. In India’s pluralist society, disputes, clashes, and riots frequently broke out among dif­fer­ent religious, caste, and occupational groups. The complex economic structures and the succession of formal po­liti­cal powers in cities bred conflicts between ­wholesalers and retailers, old and new trading groups, Hindustani and Bengali government servants, and old ser­v ice communities and immigrants (Bayly 1971). The per­sis­tent conflicts among religious groups w ­ ere especially vis­i­ble, including, for instance, tensions between the Ganges priests of the Hindu community and the religious trusts of the Muslim community. When tensions flared up along religious lines, the rais often lacked means to contain the clashes. Neighborhood leaderships contacted British authorities directly and bypassed the rais, thereby undermining the informal authority of the rais in the eyes of the British (Bayly 1971). With industrialization and migration u­ nder way in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reliance on informal intermediaries for governance became increasingly inadequate. The colonial authority tightened its control over urban affairs by expanding the regulatory power of municipal institutions

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and experimenting with more interventionist governance methods. An example is the police reform in Bombay in response to increasingly violent riots between Sunni and Shia Muslims during annual religious festivals (Kidambi 2007). As none of the existing informal authorities could contain the riots among dif­fer­ent Muslim neighborhoods in the city, the colonial authority enhanced its police force and intervened directly in the disputes. A new City Police Act was introduced to bring a wide range of activities u­ nder police surveillance, and it also vested special powers in the police to regulate activities in public space. The police reform, however, did not end sectarian vio­lence but instead introduced a new dimension to the conflict—­between the police and local society. The colonial police thus became a new player in local politics that all other players, from the urban rais to traditional caste-­and religion-­based authorities, had to contend with (Kidambi 2007). Slum clearance in the colonial era pre­sents another case to illustrate the decline of traditional authorities and the rise of municipal institutions. In the late nineteenth ­century, rapidly industrializing Bombay attracted a large number of mi­grants, and the existing housing and urban infrastructure could not meet the demand generated by the sudden population increase. As a result, slum settlements proliferated, and when a series of epidemics hit the city in 1896, the colonial officials came to see the city’s slums as breeding grounds for disease. To contain public health epidemics, the colonial authority expanded its own regulatory power instead of relying on intermediaries. The municipal corporation undertook a series of initiatives to clean up the city, such as demolishing slums, opening up overcrowded areas, and building sanitary dwellings for the poor (Kidambi 2007). Although most of the initiatives failed to improve sanitary conditions or provide better housing for the poor, they did position municipal institutions in a more central spot in the local power matrix. With the introduction of municipal elections in the 1910s, professional men such as ­lawyers and activists replaced the old banking and landholding rais in the role of intermediaries between the local government and the community. The change had to do with the shifting tax base—as professional men became major taxpayers, they became more interested in having some control over local affairs. The change also had to do with the increasing importance of municipal offices as stepping stones into regional and national politics. Municipalities became authorized arenas for elite Indians to participate in politics. Local elites in Indian cities thus became more diverse in the early twentieth ­century (Bayly 1971). Municipal institutions at the turn of the twentieth c­ entury w ­ ere weak territorial institutions. Their primary function was to raise revenue for urban ser­vices and lighten the financial burden on the imperial state. Municipal elections brought more Indians into consultation about the management of local affairs, but municipalities did not have substantial power (Seal 1973). The

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functions of municipalities ­were deliberately left vague, and crucial po­liti­cal decisions for Indian cities remained in the hands of provincial governments controlled by the British, who did not want to devolve power to the municipal level ­because Indians often dominated municipal councils. Most public sanitation and slum improvement programs undertaken by municipal corporations failed ­because of the corporations’ ­limited authority and bud­get constraints (Kishore 2015). The municipal corporation entered into the crowded space of patron-­client networks by providing ­favors and accommodating demands from dif­fer­ent interest groups, and the colonial Indian city became a strategic arena for po­liti­cal negotiations (Leonard 1973; Kidambi 2007). ­Toward the end of colonial rule, local governance in India began to exhibit an even stronger associational character. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ­were a pivotal period in the development of civil society in large Indian cities. Cities such as Bombay and Calcutta saw a growing number of civic associations, facilitated by the pro­gress in media and printing. Some ­were modern associations built on the princi­ple of equal access, and o­ thers w ­ ere hybrids that combined both voluntary and ascriptive forms of membership—­ for instance, by restricting membership to certain castes (Kidambi 2007). The vibrant associational life emerging in the early twentieth ­century was encouraged and actively promoted u­ nder British rule. As the colonial rule drew to a close, the British increasingly relied on the strategy of creating divisions by encouraging the establishment of po­liti­cal associations, to ensure that no native po­liti­cal groups gained dominance. Some historians view the endorsement of associational activities as a governing technique by the British (Seal 1973). Po­liti­cal associations ­were set up as “the expression of claim and counter-­claim, of group and counter-­group, of competitors vying for the f­ avor of the Raj by playing politics couched in its own formulae” (Seal 1973, 341). Some associations ­were small and represented parochial interests, such as local caste-­based associations, but o­ thers had wider constituencies across the country. Aspiring politicians sought to set up new associations or claim affiliation with existing ones. As historian Anil Seal put it, “Associations, like cricket, ­were British innovations, and, like cricket, became an Indian craze” (1973, 339). The forming of one association provoked a rival association, and local governance was fragmented by the proliferation of po­liti­cal associations (Seal 1973).

Associational Politics ­after In­de­pen­dence Associational life is not unique to India and can be identified in all industrial democracies, but historical developments in India—­the long British rule, followed by nationalist strug­gles and state building in the postin­de­pen­dence era—­decisively ­shaped the features of its associational culture. Associational

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life in postin­de­pen­dence India is characterized by the rise of “demand groups” from the unor­ga­nized sector of the economy (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987). Examples include student groups and agricultural producers who or­ga­nized in large numbers with ad hoc strategies (instead of stable bureaucratic social movement organ­izations) to bargain with the state for sector-­specific benefits and subsidies (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987). Po­liti­cal theorists have also noticed evolving features of associational life unique to India since the 1980s. The most power­ful depiction is Partha Chatterjee’s characterization of the divide between “civil society” and “po­liti­cal society” (Chatterjee 2004). Dif­fer­ent from the common use of “civil society” to refer to the nonstate sector, Chatterjee’s use of the term denotes a much smaller sphere of activities inhabited by the elite and ­middle class—­legitimate, rights-­bearing citizens. The vast majority of India’s population belongs to “po­ liti­cal society,” an unor­ga­nized subaltern domain, which negotiates with the state not as citizens but as “population groups” demanding access to urban resources, special welfare and protection. Chatterjee traces the development of po­liti­cal society to two concurrent trends in the 1980s: the rising notion of governmental per­for­mance that emphasizes welfare and protection of the poor, and the intensified po­liti­cal mobilization among the poor for electoral ends (Chatterjee 2004).6 Chatterjee’s articulation of “civil society” versus “po­liti­cal society” as the central feature of associational life in India still rings true t­ oday. Although recent scholarship has identified some convergence between the two in their mobilization strategies (Coelho 2009), the or­ga­nized sphere of middle-­class politics can be distinguished from the unor­ga­nized domain of subaltern politics (Baviskar 2011). Both civil society and po­liti­cal society must deal with the ­limited presence of the local state (Heller 2009), including relatively weak municipal governments; when civil and po­liti­cal society strug­gle to interact with weak local territorial authorities, we observe a wide range of associational politics of alliance building.

Conclusion: State Formation and Local Governance in China and India Dif­fer­ent trajectories of state formation in China and India have had a major impact on how localities are ruled in the two countries. For much of its history, China had a relatively strong and unified state. State formation in China was achieved during the Qin Empire in 200 BC. Some attribute the early unification of the Chinese state to the political-­philosophical traditions of Confucian-­ legalist thought (Zhao 2015), as well as to the consolidation of secular and spiritual power. In China, the emperor was seen as the mandate of heaven, and his

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authority was unproblematic; this was not the case in India. In India, the subcontinent was not unified ­until the twentieth ­century, and it was foreigners—­ first the Mughals and then the British—­who took the first steps t­ oward unified statehood for India (Fukuyama 2011). The more rugged path of Indian state building has to do with the separation of secular and spiritual power (Heesterman 1985). Local kings could not have ultimate authority and legitimacy, as ­these belonged to the sphere of Brahmin priests. The ­limited state formation in precolonial India is also a result of power sharing among dif­fer­ent levels of authorities with overlapping rights and obligations, such as the Mughal rulers, local chieftains, and revenue-­collecting agents (Bayly 1988). The sharing of power fragmented the authority of kings and prevented the rise of one dominant state power. Th ­ ere are perhaps a plethora of other economic, po­liti­cal, and cultural f­ actors shaping the dif­fer­ent trajectories of state building in China and India, but what­ever the c­ auses are, the unified central state in China and the lack thereof in India have molded local governance structures differently. At the local level, the Chinese state was able to implement a sophisticated system of administrative control via territorial institutions throughout both imperial dynasties and modern regimes. In the Song, Ming, and Qing periods, the central state created territorial institutions for social control down to the neighborhood level, and the relatively stable domestic environment enabled a Confucian gentry class of officials and scholars to develop and consolidate its grip on localities for hundreds of years. The imperial-­era territorial institutions ­were eliminated ­under communism, but the Communist government soon in­ven­ted a set of new and even more power­ful territorial institutions to govern the population, such as hukou and danwei. The strengthening of territorial authorities and institutions continued ­after market reform, with the devolution of power from central ministries to local governments and the proliferation of special development zones. In India, the Mughal state and the British raj did not make deliberate efforts to build territorial institutions with substantial governing power at the local level. Instead, local governance exhibited an associational character, with constant building and breaking of alliances. Unlike the Chinese gentry, which firmly controlled their native communities, Indian intermediary groups—­ power­ful merchants, tax collectors, and village headmen—­did not have strong territorial roots, and their local leadership was always challenged by other types of authorities based on castes, religions, and trade associations. ­These vari­ous local leaderships had to form alliances with one another to navigate the web of patronage and obligations. The l­imited state presence at the local level thus gave rise to a par­tic­ul­ar power structure characterized by associational forms of governance, which was further entrenched with the rise of civil society groups and po­liti­cal parties in the twentieth ­century.

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Conditions in China and India ­today are very dif­fer­ent from ­those of the imperial, colonial, and postin­de­pen­dence eras. Th ­ ere have been major ruptures, such as the abolition of the landed gentry class in China and the decline of traditional authorities, as well as the rise of new po­liti­cal elites and institutions ­after in­de­pen­dence in both countries. But throughout the ruptures and changes, territorial and associational forms of governance have persisted, albeit in mutated forms, and they continue to affect how cities are governed ­today. Across a wide range of policy arenas, such as slum clearance, land acquisition, and air pollution control, as previously examined, urban development in China continues to be ­shaped by power­ful territorial institutions, while in India it is molded by associational forms of governance anchored in alliance building. In the absence of power­ful territorial institutions, a multitude of other actors compete for power and influence in Indian cities.

7 Conclusion

the case studies on slum eviction, land acquisition, and environmental activism in this book reveal complex patterns of urban governance, characterized by shifting institutional alignments and co­ali­tion building among dif­fer­ ent interest groups. The urban politics may be messy, chaotic, and intensely contested, but some patterns nevertheless can be discerned from the comparisons. In China, urban policies are largely s­ haped by territorial politics—in the form of place-­based institutions and authorities. In India, the outcomes of urban policies and proj­ects often hinge on associational politics—­the ability of individuals and organ­izations to form temporary alliances to exert influence, build consensus, and suppress opponents. By way of conclusion, this chapter situates the territorial and associational forms of governance in the larger context of the sociospatial restructuring of Chinese and Indian socie­ties. It highlights several parallels in socioeconomic in­equality, points of divergence in institutional arrangements, as well as the dif­fer­ent implications of the territorial and associational forms of urban governance for citizens’ rights.

In­equality and Contestation in Urbanized Society Both China and India grapple with in­equality that has been rising over the past de­cades from intensifying urbanization (Bardhan 2012; Hung and Kucinskas 2011). In the housing sector, across China and India, a severe shortage of affordable housing has spawned a proliferation of informal settlements. In both countries, the state is unable and unwilling to provide affordable housing for low-­income groups, thereby producing a large subaltern class that strug­gles to survive on the city’s margins. Property speculation has only accelerated the pro­cess. Supported by the state, developers obtain large tracts of land on which to build market-­rate housing for the m ­ iddle class, and profit-­driven real estate development displaces the poor. In the name of redevelopment, the state in both countries has launched aggressive policies to reclaim land occupied by informal settlements. The real purpose ­behind ­these policies, however, 134

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is not to improve housing conditions for the poor but to make space available for property development. The dominant models of redeveloping informal settlements in China and India converge on the same formula: mobilize private capital to resettle a minority of qualified residents, demolish existing structures, and transfer the vacated land to developers as a reward for resettling residents. With regard to land development, urbanization and industrialization in China and India increasingly encroach on farmland. In both cases, the subnational state plays a major role in helping the private sector acquire land. In India, state governments frequently take land from peasants in the name of the public interest, an expansively interpreted term that applies to nearly all proj­ ects. In China, municipal governments refer to public interest to justify a wide range of proj­ects and to minimize the amount of compensation given to affected residents. The rural ­house­holds in both socie­ties, however, are not powerless victims of land acquisition; they have actively mobilized to get their land back. In India, peasants often reach out to po­liti­cal parties and mobilize nationally to advance their cause; in China, they mobilize only locally and target local authorities. On the environmental front, both countries are caught in the dilemma of promoting development and protecting the environment. The Delhi government took some steps to fight air pollution—­such as relocating polluting industries outside the city and requiring public vehicles to shift to clean energy—­but only ­after the Supreme Court ordered it to do so. Instead of the Delhi government, environmental NGOs lead the city’s clean air campaigns. In Beijing, only ­after 2009 did the city government begin to tackle the issue of air quality more seriously, by assigning pollution reduction targets among local officials and by linking environmental per­for­mance to c­ areer promotion. In the short term, at least, the approach has been effective. Across ­these dif­fer­ent issue areas, from housing to land and environment, in­equality mounts to alarming levels. Housing in­equality has widened and driven a wedge between the property-­owning and propertyless classes. Homeowners in both countries continue to accumulate wealth thanks to the soaring housing prices in large cities. Meanwhile, the propertyless face constant threats of eviction. Land dispossession has stripped millions of farmers of their main livelihood. With ­little education and few job skills, many landless farmers cannot survive in the competitive new urban economy. Further, air pollution knows no class bound­aries, as both the rich and the poor have to breathe the same bad air. But health disparities exist across dif­fer­ent socioeconomic classes: in general, ­those who are better educated and better resourced are more likely to be aware of the health consequences of pollution and more likely to be able to afford to take proactive mea­sures, such as installing air

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purifiers in offices, homes, and ­children’s schools, or even moving abroad to escape the toxic air altogether. The rising in­equality has escalated social tensions in both socie­ties and ­will significantly challenge the countries’ leadership in the coming years.

Divergence: Institutions, Politics, and Mobilization by Civil Society China and India have a­ dopted contrasting approaches to solve their urban social issues. In China’s case, the devolution of power from the central to local governments has strengthened local territorial authorities, while in India the lack of pro­gress in devolution further disempowers local territorial authorities and leads to a governance model centered on alliance building. The territorial and associational ways of governing cities are reinforced by the following contextual ­factors.

Land Owner­ship China and India have dif­fer­ent land owner­ship regimes, which profoundly affect urban development. In India, in addition to privately owned land, ­there are at least three types of public land—­owned by the central government, state governments, and municipal governments. The dif­fer­ent forms of public landownership have posed challenges for slum rehabilitation proj­ects. As examined in chapter 4, the airport slum in Mumbai stands on the central government’s land, but the leading agencies in charge of slum rehabilitation are bureaucracies within the state government and the Mumbai Municipal Corporation. Over the years, the state and municipal authorities did not provide infrastructure and ser­vices to the airport slum, partly b­ ecause the community falls in the cracks between vari­ous regulatory bodies. The central government’s landownership thus introduced additional layers of uncertainty for redevelopment, as all major decisions had to go through the bureaucratic chain of command and be approved by the central government first. China’s land owner­ship regime, in contrast to that of India and most of the world, does not allow private owner­ship. Instead, land is divided between urban and rural, with urban land belonging to city governments and state enterprises, and rural land belonging to village collectives. This rather unique dual-­track regime has profoundly ­shaped urban and rural development. First, it gave rise to hybrid informal settlements such as urban villages, which are communities developed on rural land but within the administrative bound­aries of city governments. City governments have neglected the needs of urban villages and other­w ise disregarded t­ hese communities’ lack of amenities and basic

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infrastructure. Second, a huge price gap sets apart urban land zoned for construction from rural land designated for agriculture, and city governments seek to capitalize on the difference by converting more rural land to urban land. As examined in chapter 2, local governments are incentivized to seek municipal status to have rural land reclassified as urban, b­ ecause they stand to collect substantial revenue. Third, China’s land-­based municipal financing system has accelerated the spectacular speed of urban development: city governments can generate revenue by leasing land to the private sector, and this affords Chinese cities a much larger revenue base compared to cities in the rest of the world. Fi­nally, China’s collective rural land owner­ship, a legacy of land reforms from the revolutionary and early socialist eras, has both aided and hindered rural ­house­holds. On the one hand, when faced with de­mo­li­tions, property ­owners in urban villages can be generously compensated. Their collective owner­ship over village land is legitimate, and this puts them in a much more secure position compared to slum dwellers in India. In cases of land acquisition, Chinese farmers can make a strong territorial claim that land is theirs and engage in “rightful re­sis­tance” (O’Brien and Li 2006) to demand protection for their land rights guaranteed by the constitution. This departs from the Indian case, where landless tenants at the forefront of antiacquisition protests cannot make ownership-­based claims for their rights. On the other hand, the collective land owner­ship in China also disadvantages rural families. Rural ­house­holds cannot sell or lease their land on the market and often are excluded from land use decisions, which are usually made by village cadres.

Po­liti­cal Regimes: Electoral Politics versus Single-­Party Rule An obvious difference between the two countries is the presence of electoral politics in India and the absence of it in China. Regime types lead to dif­fer­ent institutional frameworks: single-­party rule is more favorable to territorial forms of governing cities, and multiparty democracy is more conducive to associational forms of urban governance. In India, the subaltern class often reaches out to po­liti­cal parties to gain protection and benefits. From slum eviction to land acquisition, po­liti­cal parties can intervene and decisively change the outcomes, but their actions are often opportunistic. Politicians court slum dwellers through preelection promises that they ­w ill meet residents’ needs and wishes, only to leave the promises unfulfilled a­ fter the elections. In the airport slum case, most po­liti­cal parties opposed the controversial slum survey not to protect residents from eviction but to win residents’ votes. Parties do not have a consistent stance for or against land acquisition, and they take whichever side of the controversy that can improve their chances of winning elections.

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The absence of electoral politics ­under China’s single-­party rule has deep consequences for urban affairs. For example, mi­grant tenants receive no compensation whatsoever for their losses incurred from urban village redevelopment. In addition, rural villa­gers often have no say in the se­lection of their leaders. The central government does allow village-­level elections, but they are often conducted in a nondemo­cratic fashion. And urban residents have no outlet through the ballot box to complain about air quality. Lacking electoral channels, Chinese citizens seek other means to fight for their rights, such as organ­izing street protests, reaching out to the media, and appealing to the central government to intervene and help remove corrupt local officials. Th ­ ese tactics might appear ad hoc and desperate, but they can unnerve local Chinese officials, who are deeply concerned with maintaining social stability and may be willing to broker compromise.

Mobilization by Civil Society Groups The scope of activities by civil society groups is drastically dif­fer­ent in India and China. India has a large civil society sector with more than three million NGOs. Calling it “deep democracy,” Appaduari (2001) explains how housing NGOs in Mumbai have played a pivotal role in protecting slum dwellers’ rights to housing. In the case of the airport slum, multiple NGOs have helped the community negotiate with state government agencies, abort the state government’s attempts at conducting a slum survey, and demand disclosure of specific terms of the rehabilitation plan before any survey can take place. On the environmental front, Delhi’s NGOs have spearheaded the city’s clean air campaign, actively mobilizing the Supreme Court and the media to pressure industries and government regulatory bodies to take steps to control pollution more effectively. In China, mobilization by civil society groups takes dif­fer­ent forms and encounters more constraints u­ nder the Communist Party’s rule. The sphere for NGOs is l­ imited and subject to the whims of government authorities. Few NGOs, for example, work to protect mi­grant workers’ rights to housing in urban villages, and environmental NGOs have to work carefully around the state by assuming a nonconfrontational stance in the government-­led pollution control campaigns. It would be misleading, however, to portray China simply as a case of strong state versus weak society. In some cases, the civil society can rise up and thwart major development proj­ects sponsored by the state. In the case of the urban village Xiancun, for example, over nearly two de­cades the villa­gers staved off repeated attempts at de­mo­li­tion by the city government and developers. The resisters are neither NGOs nor prodemocracy activists but individual villa­gers who demand the punishment of corrupt

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village cadres and fair compensation for their property. This individual-­or family-­based re­sis­tance is significantly dif­fer­ent from NGO-­led mobilization, as it does not strive for collective goals but instead focuses mostly on personal gain through compensation. Nevertheless, it can generate enough pressure to shut down a major redevelopment proj­ect.

The Rule of Law The rule of law differently shapes urban governance in the two countries. The judicial system in India is more in­de­pen­dent from governmental interference than that in China. But India’s track rec­ord of delivering justice across cities and policy areas has been spotty. Of the three sectors examined in this book—­ housing, land, and environment—­the Supreme Court of India has been more active in ­matters involving environmental protection than in t­ hose related to housing and land. Over the years the Supreme Court has become a major crusader in Delhi’s air pollution control campaign. It has taken suo moto actions to form expert committees and pressured the Delhi government to enforce its environmental regulations more strictly. In ­matters involving land acquisition and slum eviction, the role of the courts has been more mixed. During the decade-­long land strug­gle in Singur, the High Court of Calcutta ruled more than once in ­favor of industrialists and the state government by adopting a broad interpretation of what constitutes public interest. Across the country, the Supreme Court has rarely reversed local high courts’ decisions in ­favor of the dispossessed farmers in land disputes. For slum evictions, the stance of high courts varies from city to city. In Mumbai, housing activists scored a major victory by appealing to the high court to extend eligibility for compensation by moving the cutoff date from January 1, 1995, to January 1, 2000. In Delhi, however, the high court has issued multiple eviction ­orders for slum removal, especially before the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Litigation generally has not been the most efficient way for the subaltern class to get protection, but it remains an option that is open to all. China’ judicial system, comparatively, has played a l­ imited role in protecting citizens’ rights. To divert popu­lar discontent away from the courts, the government has created a parallel extralegal petition system. The system is designed to be inefficient—­local governments set up a special unit to receive petitions from residents, and b­ ecause of e­ ither a lack of capacity or intentional neglect, most cases go unaddressed e­ very year, leaving petitioners in perpetual limbo. The judiciary system is not in­de­pen­dent and ­faces constant interference from local governments. As local governments pay the salaries of judges and court employees, local courts often have to consult with governments first in cases that involve government bureaucracies, and they need to consider

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governments’ opinions while making their judgments. In general, l­ egal actions alone are insufficient to halt de­mo­li­tions and land grabs. In the case of Xiancun’s redevelopment, villa­gers filed dozens of unsuccessful lawsuits against dif­fer­ent departments of the Guangzhou city government, some challenging the legality of the redevelopment proj­ect. Instead of litigation, confrontational street actions, such as squatting and demonstrations, can attract the local authority’s attention and have been more effective. In Wukan, protesting villa­gers filed multiple petitions with the government but received no response; in the end, they or­ga­nized street demonstrations that eventually led to interventions by the provincial government. When it comes to environmental litigation, China falls ­behind India, as the courts do not want to offend local governments by ruling in f­ avor of environmental activists and residents who try to shut down government-­backed polluting factories.

Territorial versus Associational Politics: Implications for Citizens’ Rights Neither territorial nor associational forms of governance can deliver just and equitable urban growth, and both approaches to urban governance deeply affect citizens’ rights. In China, territorial forms of governance have created a cleavage between the urban and rural sectors and led to uneven development across localities. The urban sector historically has been more privileged than its rural counterpart, as seen in the plight of rural mi­grant workers in cities. Moreover, territorial forms of governance have exacerbated uneven development and in­equality across localities. Huge disparities—in terms of access to quality education, health care, and infrastructural facilities—­exist between richer and poorer cities, the coast and inland, as well as the country’s northern and southern regions (Davis and Wang 2013). Intercity or inter-­regional cooperation is rare, as local officials concern themselves only with socioeconomic and environmental per­for­mance within their own jurisdictions. In India, the contingent nature of associational forms of governance, dependent on delicate alliance building that involves multiple stakeholders, has created unpredictability for members of the “civil society” of elites and the ­middle class as well as the “po­liti­cal society” of the subaltern class (Chatterjee 2004). For example, the clean air campaign in Delhi—­predominantly led by the “civil society”—­has not achieved any major breakthrough since the early 2000s. With regulatory power scattered across multiple government bureaucracies, and the Delhi government taking a back seat, even the most resourceful NGOs cannot singlehandedly end the city’s air crisis. The “po­liti­cal society” fares no better; its fate is even more precarious when interacting with the ­limited local state.

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Despite their limitations, China and India can also learn from each other in how they run their cities. China can learn from India how to make space for multiple stakeholders in policy making and implementation, which have been dominated by the government. As in Beijing’s fight over air pollution, citizens and civil society groups have to get involved, as the government cannot singlehandedly solve the prob­lem of pollution, no ­matter how much government funding is allocated. Conversely, India can learn from China that local-­level municipal authorities have to be empowered to make major decisions on critical urban issues such as housing, land, infrastructure, and environment. Relying on co­ali­tion building each time for executing proj­ects and implementing policies is simply too costly and inefficient. As the two countries continue to urbanize, and more ­people move from the countryside to urban areas, how China and India govern their cities w ­ ill affect the lives of hundreds of millions. Cities in the two countries w ­ ill continue to be strategic terrains for citizens to make claims for their rights—to housing, work, amenities, land, and a clean environment. ­These developments and contestations pre­sent huge challenges but also ­great opportunities to develop new forms of governance that can safeguard a more equitable ­future of urban living ­under twenty-­first ­century capitalism.

a pp e n di x

­table 1. The Changing Urban Definition in the Indian Census (1872–2011) Time period

Criteria for classifying places as towns

1872 and before 1881

A population of at least 5,000 A minimum population of 5,000 or urban characteristics as judged by district officers

1891

Municipal: Places u­ nder Municipal Act or Chaukidari Act regardless of their population size Nonmunicipal: A minimum population of 5,000 and urban characteristics as judged by district officers

1901–1951

Municipal: ­Every municipality of what­ever size, all civil lines not included within municipal limits, and ­every cantonment Nonmunicipal: ­Every other continuous collection of ­houses, permanently inhabited by not fewer than 5,000 persons, which the provincial superintendent may decide to treat as a town for census purposes

1961–2011

Municipal: All places with a municipality, municipal corporation, cantonment, or notified town areas Nonmunicipal/census towns: 1. A population of 5,000 2. Population density of 400 per km2 3. 75% of the male population in nonagricultural employment Or any other place that, according to the superintendent of the state, possesses pronounced urban characteristics and amenities

Source: Mitra and Sachdev (1980).

143

144  a p p e n di x ­table 2. The Changing Urban Definition in the Chinese Census, 1953–2010 Census year

Urban definition

1953

Cities and towns that ­were government seats at the county level or above had to have a population of at least 2,000, of which at least 50% was nonagricultural. Exceptions ­were made to include impor­tant manufacturing and mining sites. Urban population included all residents in cities and towns. Cities had to have a population of at least 100,000; towns ­were settlements with a population of more than 3,000, of which at least 75% was nonagricultural. Urban population included residents of cities and towns with nonagricultural hukou. Cities had to have a population of at least 100,000 or command special administrative, strategic, or economic importance. Towns ­were ­either settlements with a population of more than 3,000, of which at least 70% was registered as nonagricultural, or settlements with a population ranging from 2,500 to 3,000, of which more than 85% was registered as nonagricultural. Urban areas included (1) urban districts in provincial and prefectural-­level cities and (2) the areas ­under the jurisdiction of “streets” (jiedao) in county-­level cities and towns. Urban population included residents with local hukou (both agricultural and nonagricultural) and ­those with nonlocal hukou who had more than one year of residency. Urban areas included (1) city districts with population density over 1,500 persons per km2; for areas with lower density, it included (2) jiedao, towns, and townships where district, city, or town governments ­were located. The urban population included residents with local hukou (both agricultural and nonagricultural) in urban areas, as well as residents with nonlocal hukou who had at least six months of residency. Urban population includes all urban residents meeting the criterion defined by the National Bureau of Statistics of China in 2008—­i.e., residents meeting the criteria used in the 2000 census plus residents living in villages or towns in outer urban and suburban areas that are directly connected to municipal infrastructure and that receive public ser­vices from urban municipalities.

1964

1982

1990

2000

2010

Sources: Zhang and Zhao (1998); United Nations (2011).

cities-­leading-­counties] (State Council 1986)

criteria for town designation] (State Council 1984)

Continued on next page

Turning towns into cities: nonagricultural ­labor population over 60,000, GDP over 200 million yuan, and places that have already become regional economic centers Turning counties into cities: 100,000 nonagricultural ­labor population, GDP over 400 million yuan Cities leading counties: nonagricultural ­labor population over 250,000, GDP over 1 billion yuan

国务院批转民政部关于调整市标准和市领导县条件报告的 通知 [Adjusting the criteria for city designation and

1986

Towns: seats of county-­level governments; nonagricultural ­labor population (by occupation) over 2,000

国务院批转民政部关于调整建镇标准的报告 [Adjusting the

1984

Expanding the urban

Cities: minimum population of 100,000 and 80% nonagricultural ­labor population by hukou Towns: minimum population of 3,000 and 70% nonagricultural ­labor population by hukou

for adjusting city/town designation and shrinking suburban areas of cities] (State Council 1963)

国务院关于调整市镇建制，缩小城市郊区的指示 [Directive

Administrative seats of city and town governments Minimum population of 2,000 Exceptions allowed for places strategic for industrialization

Main criteria for urban designation

1963

designation of cities and towns] (State Council 1955a) 国务院关于城乡划分标准的规定 [Stipulations on demarcating urban and rural areas] (State Council 1955b)

国务院关于设置市镇建制的决定 [Decision regarding the

1955

Shrinking the urban

Government documents

Year

­table 3. Adjustments to the Criteria for City and Town Designation in China, 1955–2006

Areas ­under the jurisdiction of city and town governments and street offices Population density of 1,500 per km2 Areas ­under the jurisdiction of residential committees and street offices in cities and towns

关于统计上划分城乡的规定（试行） [Stipulations on

国家统计局关于统计上划分城乡的暂行规定 [Temporary

1999

2006

[Management methods on statistically demarcating cities and towns] (National Bureau of Statistics 2006a)

国家统计局统计上划分城乡工作管理办法的通知

stipulations on statistically demarcating cities and towns] (National Bureau of Statistics 2006b)

statistically demarcating cities and towns] (National Bureau of Statistics 1999)

Places connected by public infrastructure to urban areas

County-­level cities: See t­ able 4 for details. Prefecture-­level cities: nonagricultural ­labor population over 250,000, manufacturing accounting for 80% of total economic output, 2.5 billion yuan in GDP, 200 million yuan in revenues, ­etc.

国务院批转民政部关于调整设市标准的通告 [Adjusting the

1993

criteria for city designation] (State Council 1993)

Main criteria for urban designation

Government documents

Year

­table 3. (continued)

Above 400 persons/km2 100–400 persons/km2 Below 100 persons/km2

N/A

Abolishing counties and establishing county-­level cities (i.e., cities without districts)/撤县设市

Promoting county-­level cities to prefecture-­ level cities (i.e., cities with districts)/

>60,000

>80,000 >200,000

>70,000

>100,000

>250,000

>80,000

>120,000

Nonfarm ­labor population among nonagricultural hukou holders in government seats

N/A

>30% >150,000 >25% >120,000 >20% >100,000

% and number nonagricultural ­labor population in total county population

Note: The adjusted criteria also include requirements for revenue, expenditure, and infrastructure provision.

Source: State Council (1993).

县级市改地级市

Population density

Urban designation criteria

Nonfarm population in county government seats

­table 4. Adjustments to Criteria for Urban Designation in China, 1993

>80% >3 billion yuan

>80% >1.5 billion yuan >70% >1.2 billion yuan >60% >0.8 billion yuan

% and output of manufacturing in total agricultural-­ industrial output

20%

>0.6 billion yuan

>35%

>20%

>0.8 billion yuan

2.5 billion yuan

>20%

>1 billion yuan

GDP

% tertiary industries in GDP

2009 2010 2011

2001 2002 2005 2006 2007 2008

1998 2000

1997

1987 1988 1989 1994 1996

1981 1982 1985 1986

Air Pollution Prevention and Control Act amended; National Ambient Air Quality Standard revised (2nd time); daily API published for major cities Beijing Olympic Action Plan released, including air pollution control mea­sures Blue sky days used for cadre evaluation Capital Steel Com­pany relocated Eleventh FYP released, identifying funding sources for environmental protection WHO report finds 16 out of 20 most polluted cities are in China Beijing Olympics take place; radical mea­sures ­adopted to ensure “blue skies” during the Games U.S. embassy publishes hourly PM2.5 data through Twitter   Twelfth FYP released, “greenest” FYP ever, including ambitious pollution-­ reduction targets

National Ambient Air Quality Standard revised (1st time); PM10 monitoring begins Blue sky campaign launched

Air Pollution Prevention and Control Act passed

National Ambient Air Quality Standard enacted

Beijing

­Table 5. A Chronology of Air Pollution Campaigns in Beijing and Delhi, 1981–2018

PM2.5 included in National Ambient Air Quality Standards Delhi hosts Commonwealth Games

CNG conversion enforced by Delhi government

Supreme Court ­orders polluting industries to be relocated out of Delhi; MoEF releases white paper on air pollution in Delhi Supreme Court ­orders CNG conversion; EPCA constituted PM10 monitoring starts

Activist Mehta files public interest litigation with the Supreme Court Environment Protection Act passed; Supreme Court ­orders Delhi government to set emission standards for vehicles Air Act amended Motor Vehicles Act Central Motor Vehicle Rules National Ambient Air Quality Standards updated CSE launches clean air campaign

Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act passed

Delhi

National Ambient Air Quality Standard revised (3rd time) to include PM2.5; PM2.5 data released for major cities; AQI replaces API “Airpocalypse” in Beijing with PM2.5 at 755 µg/m3; heavy smog affects many cities across the country in January; National Air Pollution Prevention Action Plan announced, setting time-­bound targets for PM2.5 reduction by 2017; Beijing releases Clean Air Action Plan; Beijing city government signs a “responsibility contract” with Ministry of Environmental Protection; central government announces 227 billion USD plan to reduce air pollution; government releases real-­time PM2.5 data for 113 cities in December Environment Protection Law revised; Premier Li Keqiang declares “war on pollution”; new Environmental Protection Law passed; stronger mea­sures ­adopted during APEC (Asia-­Pacific Economic Cooperation) meeting to ensure a blue sky (mocked as “APEC blue” by public) Air Pollution Prevention and Control Act amended; Environment Protection Law amended; National Air Act enacted; nationwide air pollution monitoring network installed, with 1,500 stations in all prefecture-­level cities; public warning system activated; first “red alert” declared on December 6 Heavy smog hits Beijing in December; city government issues highest alert (red), lasting more than 200 hours, spanning new year into 2017; ­lawyers sue Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei governments for failing to protect public health “Antismog police” dispatched; Beijing Education Bureau installs air purifiers in school classrooms; national-­level emission trading starts in selected industries, the first such system in the world State Council releases “2018–2020 Clean Air Action Plan for Winning the Blue Sky War,” specifying an 18% PM2.5 reduction target between 2015 and 2020, for cities that do not yet meet national air quality standard Delhi introduces Air Quality Early Warning System; Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change releases draft National Clean Air Program for public consultation

Delhi releases Graded Response Action Plan, listing emergency mea­sures to be taken on heavi­ly polluted days

Prime Minister Modi launches India’s first AQI for 10 pi­lot cities; CSE releases Delhi Clean Air Action Plan; Times of India launches Let Delhi Breathe campaign; 11 PM2.5 monitoring stations set up in Delhi Delhi experiments with odd-­even scheme to reduce traffic; EPCA reconstituted by Supreme Court order

WHO releases report showing Delhi’s air is worse than Beijing’s; CSE conducts individual air pollution exposure study in Delhi

Central Pollution Control Board releases report on air pollution in 35 cities; PM2.5 monitoring starts at selected locations in Delhi “Airpocalypse” in Delhi, as PM2.5 spikes to more than 500 µg/m3 at least 15 times

Note: MoEF = Ministry of Environment and Forests (renamed the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change in 2014); EPCA = Environmental Pollution and Control Authority for the Capital Region; API = air pollution index; FYP = five-­year plan; AQI = air quality index; CSE = Centre for Science and Environment; CNG = compressed natu­ral gas.

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

150  a p p e n di x ­table 6. Air Quality Index Scores and Qualitative Descriptions: China, India, and the United States AQI Score

China

India

United States

0–50 51–100 101–200 101–150

Excellent Good Slightly polluted N/A

Good Satisfactory Moderately polluted N/A

151–200 201–300 301–400 401–500

N/A Moderately polluted Heavi­ly polluted N/A

N/A Poor Very poor Severe

Good Moderate N/A Unhealthy for sensitive groups Unhealthy Very unhealthy Hazardous N/A

Sources: Ministry of Environment (China); Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (India); and Environmental Protection Agency (U.S.).

a p p e n di x  

151

­table 7. Descriptive Air Quality Assessments Based on Twenty-­four-­hour Average PM2.5 Levels: A Comparison of China, India, and the United States PM2.5 (µg/m3) 10 20

China (µg/m3) Excellent (250.5)

no t e s

Chapter 1. Introduction 1. No official statistics are available on the population of urban villages in Guangzhou. Most population estimates are from media sources. 2. For Chinese-­language publications, a title keyword search on urban villages (chengzhongcun) in the database of Wanfang Data: China Online Journals found 3,604 articles published between 1998 and 2018. Examples of English-­language publications on urban villages include Wang, Wang, and Wu (2009), Chung (2010), Liu et al. (2010), Zhang (2011), Li and Li (2011), Wu, Zhang, and Webster (2013), Chung and Zhou (2011), Liu et al. (2014), and Kochan (2015). Edited books and sole-­authored monographs include De Meulder, Lin, and Shannon (2014), Al (2014), and Bandurski (2016). 3. Throughout the book, I use “local state” in a pragmatic sense to refer to governments at the municipal level or below. For China, this includes municipal, district, town, township, and village governments; for India, it refers in most cases to municipal authorities. I use “state government” to refer to the regional state-­level authorities. A larger lit­er­a­ture uses the term “local state” to represent a more complex notion, emphasizing the right to the city and contestation by community and civil society groups over the growing influence of the state in local affairs (Kirby 1993; Keil 1998; Magnusson 1985, 2015). 4. The term “territorial politics” has been used by China specialists to refer to other state orga­nizational strategies. For example, Sheng (2010) uses “territorial politics” to refer to the ability of the Chinese central government to appoint, remove, and transfer provincial leaders, and to extract revenue from wealthier regions and redistribute resources to poorer regions. Hsing (2010), Rithmire (2013), and Smith (2018) use the term to describe conflicts over land among local governments, state enterprises, and residents. 5. Liu, Shih, and Zhang (2018) trace the origins of decentralization in the reform era back to the Cultural Revolution, pointing out that the composition of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution favored local interests more than central ministries.

Chapter 2. What Is Urban about Urban China and India? 1. Despite antiurban sentiments among national leaders, industrial policies in the postin­de­ pen­dent era in both China and India still favored cities over the countryside. 2. See details at Smart Cities Mission, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India, accessed November 1, 2019, http://­smartcities​.­gov​.­in. 153

154  Note s to Ch a p t e r   2 3. In-­situ urbanization refers to changes in local economies from agriculture to manufacturing and ser­vices. 4. Countering the planetary urbanization thesis, postcolonial scholars point out the incompleteness of urbanization, citing examples of rural areas with economic activities and governing arrangements dif­fer­ent from t­ hose of metropolitan regions (Roy 2016). 5. For the Chinese census, scholars have suggested a uniform definition and recalculated the urbanization rates accordingly; see Zhang and Zhao (1998), Zhou and Ma (2003), Huang and Qian (2004), and Xu and Zhu (2011). For the Indian census, see discussions on alternative urban definitions in Denis and Marius-­Gnanou (2010), Denis, Mukhopadhyay, and Zerah (2012), Pradhan (2013), and World Bank (2013). 6. Angel et al. (2012, 2016) mea­sure four key attributes of urban expansion—­urban land extent (mea­sured by the total built-up area), population density, fragmentation (scattered development) and compactness (defined as the degree to which the overall shape of the city footprint approximates a circle). They use the same metrics for a global sample of two hundred cities in the period 1990–2014 to compare their urban expansion. 7. Civil lines refer to residential neighborhoods where se­nior officials of the colonial administration resided; cantonments ­were stations of the British Indian Army. 8. For the “city” category, the government made exceptions for manufacturing and mining sites, seats of provincial-­level government organ­izations, large-­scale logistics centers, and military posts in border regions. For the “town” category, the government made exceptions for ethnic minority areas, where places that w ­ ere not government seats and did not meet the population threshold could be classified as towns (State Council 1955a, 1955b). 9. For t­ hese places, the thresholds to become urban ­were significantly lowered. They could be designated as “urban residential areas” (chengzhenxing juminqu) if they had one thousand inhabitants, and 75  ­p ercent of the residents ­w ere engaged in nonagricultural occupations. 10. According to Li (1999), the rest was due to administrative reclassification of rural places as urban (6%) as well as natu­ral population growth (26%). 11. Local governments w ­ ere ordered to inspect each city and send surplus workers back to the countryside. If the remaining population was u­ nder one hundred thousand, then the place would be downgraded from a city to a county or a town. 12. The proportion of rural population (i.e., agricultural hukou holders) in the city’s total population was not allowed to exceed 20 ­percent; if it did, the extras needed to be cut (i.e., classified as rural population). When “shrinking” jiaoqu and agricultural hukou population, local governments w ­ ere ordered to ensure food supplies to urban residents, and if the remaining jiaoqu could not guarantee adequate food supplies, support from the surrounding rural counties was needed. ­These instructions show that grain supply to urban residents continued to be the primary concern in the 1960s. 13. The new standard raised the minimum population requirement from two thousand to three thousand and the ratio of nonagricultural population from 50 to 70 ­percent (State Council 1963). 14. In 1984 the State Council lowered to 10 ­percent the percentage of nonagricultural population required for a township (xiang) to be designated as a town (zhen). That figure in 1963 was 70 ­percent.

Note s to Ch a p t e r   3   155 15. Exceptions are allowed for places that do not meet t­ hese criteria, such as small towns in ethnic minority areas and in remote regions, manufacturing and mining sites, university and research institutions, tourist resorts, transportation hubs, and border trade centers. 16. The term “county-­level cities” (xianjishi) was used for the first time in 1983. Since then, it has been frequently used in government documents. It refers to cities without subordinate districts. Cities with districts are referred to as “prefecture-­level cities” (dijishi). 17. The new mea­sures include the percentage of manufacturing in total economic output; the percentage of tertiary industries in GDP; annual revenue and expenditures; and the condition of infrastructure such as tap ­water, paved roads, and sewerage networks.

Chapter 3. Land Grabs and Protests from Wukan to Singur 1. The petition system (xinfang) is separate from the court system. Local governments set up petition bureaus to address citizens’ complaints. The system is inefficient, as local governments let many citizens wait for years in limbo without addressing their petitions (Minzner 2006). 2. Collective owner­ship of rural land had existed in China long before socialism. Communal land in Chinese villages before 1949 was called “clan land” (zutian), or “public land” (gongtian). Local gentries managed the communal land on behalf of villa­gers, and a portion of its yields was used for public welfare through educational, cultural, and religious activities (Lin 2000). 3. The Land Administration Law was updated in 2019, and one of the major changes is to offer better compensation to the affected rural h­ ouse­holds to ensure that their standard of living ­will not decline ­after land acquisition (State Council 2019). 4. Interview with Zhang Jiancheng, Wukan, September 3, 2014. His estimate of 7,000 yuan per month, however, might be higher than the average cost of living of the families in the village. 5. The statistics on land acquisition in Wukan in this chapter are cited from Zeng (2013). 6. Xue Chang (a leader of the Xue clan) was the village head in Wukan for many years u­ ntil he was ousted by protesters. He transferred large tracts of land to private investors. See Mattingly (2016) for a general discussion on how lineage group leaders became village officials and used their social and po­liti­cal influence to confiscate land from villa­gers. 7. Zhang Jiancheng interview. 8. Interview with Zhang Jianxing, a younger ­brother of Zhang Jiancheng, Wukan, September 2, 2014. 9. The government and villa­gers could not agree on the a­ ctual amount of land belonging to Wukan village, and this is a major cause of disputes. Using Google Earth and also help from village elders, villa­gers estimated that Wukan owned about 25,000 mu of land. (Mu is a Chinese mea­sure­ment unit, and 1 mu is about 0.66 hectare.) But according to government rec­ords, Wukan owns only about 6,000 mu of land, of which the government says 3,396 mu has already been returned (Zhang and Zeng 2013). 10. Land politics in India varies widely across states, as land falls u­ nder the jurisdiction of state governments. In federalist India e­ very state can devise its own policies regarding land acquisition. Some states, such as Gujarat, have ­adopted more market-­friendly land policies, while ­others, such as West Bengal, have not much liberalized their land market. Government

156  Note s to Ch a p t e r   4 responses to land protests also vary from state to state: the state governments have cracked down violently on oppositions in Odisha and West Bengal, offered incentives to defuse opposition in Rajasthan, manipulated l­ egal and procedural pro­cesses to facilitate land deals in Gujarat and Maharashtra, co-­opted re­sis­tance in Goa, and not responded at all in Karnataka (Bedi and Tillin 2015). See Cai (2003, 2010) for discussions on regional variations in land-­related rural protests in China. 11. This legislation includes the 1950 Bargadars Act, the 1953 Estates Acquisition Act, and the 1955 Land Reforms Act (amended in 1970, 1971, and 1977). 12. Many sharecroppers are still not registered t­ oday, fearing that registration may harm their relationships with landowners (Roy 2014). 13. The five affected villages are Gopalnagar, Bajemelia, Beraberi, Khaserbheri, and Sinherbheri (Banerjee 2006). 14. Majumder (2010) examines how the Tata proj­ect divided the Singur villa­gers into two groups—­the pro-­and anti-­land-­acquisition groups—­cutting across caste and party lines. The pro-­land-­acquisition group included many middle-­caste small entrepreneurs who hoped that the factory would bring jobs. The anti-­land-­acquisition group included small landowners who feared losing land, entrepreneurs who had other business ideas in mind, and sharecroppers whose livelihood largely depended on agriculture. 15. Interview with Rabindranath Bhattacharya, Singur, August 18, 2014. 16. Modi won the general election in 2014 to become the prime minister of India, and he had overwhelming support from rural voters as he promised higher income and quality of life in rural areas. 17. See Jenkins, Kennedy, and Mukhopadhyay (2014) on dif­fer­ent outcomes of interventions in land protests by po­liti­cal parties across states. 18. Bhattacharya interview.

Chapter 4. Urban Redevelopment in Guangzhou and Mumbai 1. In the 1990s and the first de­cade of this ­century, redevelopment proj­ects in China could begin before residents gave their consent, and developers could start de­mo­li­tions as soon as they obtained permission from local governments (Zhang 2001; He and Wu 2005; Ren 2008; Shao 2013). Developers often cut off ­water and electricity and, in some cases, hired thugs to intimidate residents. 2. The 2011 policy, however, applies only to neighborhoods on state-­owned urban land and not to urban villages on collectively owned rural land. That distinction explains why crackdowns on urban villages can take place without notice. In 2017, for instance, the Beijing city government carried out a massive eviction campaign and demolished a dozen urban villages to get rid of mi­grant workers living ­there (Wong, Tang, and Liu 2018). 3. A rough estimate from media sources places the urban village population in Guangzhou at 5–6 million. The estimate for Mumbai’s slum population comes from India’s 2011 census, which shows that at least 41 ­percent of Mumbai’s 12 million residents—­roughly 5 million ­people—­lived in slums. See Government of India (2011). 4. The Guangzhou city government proposed two models of urban village redevelopment in 2009—­removal and upgrading. Removal was suggested for the fifty-­two urban villages in

Note s to Ch a p t e r   4   157 central locations, and upgrading was suggested for the rest in less central locations (Guangzhou City Government 2009, 2015). Of the two approaches, the city government devoted more attention to removal, by formulating meticulously detailed guidelines on how it should be carried out. 5. Interview with the deputy director of the Guangzhou Urban Renewal Bureau, Guangzhou, December 29, 2015. 6. The other two types of places targeted for redevelopment are old factories and dilapidated urban neighborhoods. For old factories, developers need to deal only with factory executives, who are often state-­appointed employees and lack any personal stake in redevelopment. For dilapidated urban neighborhoods, most residents are poorly or­ga­nized, and developers can pressure them to relocate. 7. This method of acquisition would be used for two types of situations: the construction of infrastructural proj­ects and the redevelopment of urban villages where a consensus could not be reached. 8. Interview with Mr. He, a se­nior man­ag­er of Poly Group, Guangzhou, January 6, 2016. 9. Before 1949, 1,893 out of 2,093 mu of land in Xiancun was collectively owned by clans; this land was called taigongtian (Lu 2008). According to Xiancun Chronicle, about 100 mu of the remaining land was owned by nine landlord families, and another 100 mu was owned by more than three hundred marginal farmers. Such landholding patterns, with clans owning most of the land, ­were common in south China. 10. In this section, u­ nless other­wise noted, the information on the population, land holdings, construction activities, and village incorporation in Xiancun is obtained from the village chronicle edited by former village party secretary Lu Suigeng in 2008. The village chronicle is cited as Lu (2008). 11. The other villages ­were Liede, Xinqing, Jiazi, and Yumin Xincun. 12. In the early 1980s, Xiancun sought to boost revenue by experimenting with developing Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs). The village council set up a dozen light manufacturing plants, but few of them w ­ ere profitable. Most village factories closed down by 1987, and villa­gers realized that their central location meant that their comparative advantage was not in low-­end manufacturing but in real estate. 13. Not all villa­gers benefited from the real estate boom equally. Some families had more land and ­were able to build more buildings and generate more rental income; a­ fter redevelopment, they also received more compensation than ­others (He et al. 2010). 14. Interview with the director of Tianhe District Development and Reform Commission, Guangzhou, December 21, 2015. 15. The contract, titled “Agreement over de­mo­li­tion compensation for Xiancun redevelopment” (冼村整体改造拆迁补偿安置协议), was obtained from a now-­defunct blog run by Peter Sack, a Fulbright Fellow (2011–12) at Sun Yat-­sen University, https://­x ianvillage​.­wordpress​ .­com, accessed on June 4, 2017. The blog published photo documentation of Xiancun’s redevelopment up to 2012. 16. Between April 2010 and April 2011, 1,141 out of 1,421 families had signed the contract, according to the interview with He. 17. See Bandurski (2016, chapters 8 and 9) for more details on the business ties among the Xiancun village com­pany, Poly Group, and other developers.

158  Note s to Ch a p t e r   4 18. On a separate page, the poster estimates the expected rental income from the new village property in Zone B. The newly constructed ­hotels, with a total area of 30,000 square meters, and 200,000 square meters of under­ground parking, would bring 55 million yuan annually; the planned vegetable and meat market would bring an additional 12 million yuan in rental income annually; and the village would also receive 57 mu of land on the outskirts of the city to build commercial property, which would generate 87 million yuan of annual revenue for the village com­pany. 19. More families left between 2011 and 2014 a­ fter accepting the developer’s compensation package. The motives of the remaining “nail ­house­holds” vary—­some want more compensation, some want their illegal property compensated as well, and o­ thers want to recover their voting rights in village affairs. 20. Tianhe Development and Reform Commission director interview; my translation. 21. Interview with the party secretary of Jiangmen city, about an hour’s drive from Guangzhou, December 22, 2015; my translation. 22. Interview with the deputy director of Tianhe District Urban Renewal Bureau, Guangzhou, December 23, 2015. 23. Village companies’ financial resources vary by region. In southern China, village companies ­were established ­earlier, have more assets, and are more capable of providing welfare (Smith 2014). In northern China, village companies are more recent, and many of them do not have land as an asset, as all land has been acquired by the state. The role of village companies ­there is often reduced to overseeing the distribution of government compensation funds to villa­gers (Tang 2015). 24. The change from rural to urban status, in hukou for example, does not mean that villa­gers immediately enjoy the same benefits as their urban counter­parts. The city government is reluctant to provide benefits, and village companies often have to continue to take care of their villa­gers even though they have urban hukou (Tang 2015; Wong, Tang, and Liu 2018). 25. In 2006, Xiancun had 4,783 community shareholders with 84,491 shares, and 2,288 society shareholders with 31,501 shares (Lu 2008). 26. Research shows that in urban villages where mi­grants have some choices for rental housing, landlords are more willing to share community amenities to court tenants (Wong, Tang, and Liu 2018). 27. Fieldwork and interview with Lao Liu, Xiancun, August 2014. 28. The new scheme increased the standard size of resettlement flats from 225 square feet to 269 square feet. 29. The state government has owner­ship of the cleared land and may also benefit from the taxes and fees paid by the developers. 30. Personal conversation with Liza Weinstein, telephone, November 2, 2018. 31. ­There are also slums sitting on private land. 32. The airport slum has gained some publicity with the publication of the Pulitzer Prize–­ winning book ­Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo (2012). 33. Lakh, an Indian mea­sure­ment unit, is equal to 100,000. 34. Arputham continued the survey by himself and counted about eighty-­nine thousand ­house­holds living in the airport slums. Interview with Jockin Arputham, Dharavi, August 13, 2014.

Not e s to Ch a p t e r   5   159 35. One might assume that the more recent the cutoff date is, the more inclusive the resettlement policy ­will be. But recent experiences in slum rehabilitation in Delhi prove other­w ise. Delhi has recently begun to experiment with in-­situ resettlement, and in a short period, it changed the cutoff date three times, from April 1, 2002, to January 31, 2007, and then to June 4, 2009. Residents are required by the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board to show an income certificate, a voter ID card, and a ration card from the same address to prove their eligibility each time the cutoff date is reset. It is difficult for slum dwellers to assem­ble ­these required documents, and the eligibility rate among slum dwellers in Delhi for qualifying resettlement housing has dipped below 50 ­percent (Sheikh and Banda 2014; Bhan 2017). 36. Arputham interview.

Chapter 5. Airpocalypse in Beijing and Delhi 1. In 2017, a group of Korean residents sued the Beijing city government for polluting the air in Seoul. See Time Staff (2017). Air pollution from China can be detected even in faraway places, such as the west coasts of the United States and Canada (Shapiro 2012). 2. See Cai (2015) for a more detailed discussion on the evaluation and disciplining of local officials. As punishment by the central government can be harsh, local officials do every­thing in their capacity to avoid blame and to cover up wrongdoings. In the case of air pollution, the pressure to improve air quality quickly prompted local officials to falsify air quality data (Chen et al. 2012). 3. The Eu­ro­pean emission standards define the acceptable limits for vehicular emissions by new cars sold in EU member states. Noncompliant vehicles cannot be sold in EU countries. The new standards do not apply to vehicles already on the roads. Other countries such as China and India have been using the Eu­ro­pean emission standards to regulate emission levels for new models of vehicles sold domestically. Dif­fer­ent standards may apply for dif­fer­ent vehicle types. 4. The WHO stipulates that the annual mean level of PM2.5 should not exceed 10 µg/m3, and the twenty-­four-­hour mean should not exceed 25 µg/m3. 5. The interview was quoted in “PM2.5 in China,” Zhehua163 (blog), accessed on November 17, 2015, http://­zhenhua​.­163​.­com​/­14​/­0222​/­11​/­9LMFEVIK000465EV​.­html, republished by Yijiayishi Studio, “How Did ‘PM 2.5’ Enter the ‘Home of Ordinary P ­ eople’?” DJ, November 17, 2016, http://­www​.­djzhj​.­com​/­Item​/­34005​.­aspx. 6. “PM2.5 in China.” 7. China’s air quality index (AQI) follows slightly less strict criteria than the AQI used in the United States and Eu­rope. 8. The pollution control targets are often based not on any scientific research, but rather on consultation with a small and undisclosed group of experts. Interview with Zhu Tong, professor of environmental chemistry and director of CAREBeijing (Campaigns of Air Quality Research in Beijing and Surrounding Regions), a major air pollution research initiative at Peking University, Ann Arbor, Michigan, December 14, 2014. 9. For example, the eleventh Five-­Year Plan (2006–10) mandated that one thousand enterprises, selected by the central government, sign target responsibility contracts with their local governments obligating them to meet certain pollution reduction targets. Provincial, municipal,

160  Not e s to Ch a p t e r   6 and lower-­level governments are responsible for checking on the enterprises within their jurisdictions that are on the one thousand enterprise list. 10. The National Air Pollution Prevention Action Plan presented air pollution as a major security issue that threatened the well-­being of all Chinese ­people, economic growth, the building of a “harmonious society,” and the realization of the “Chinese dream.” 11. Beijing’s Clean Air Action Plan identifies eight specific pollution reduction proj­ects, such as reducing pollution sources, decreasing coal consumption, controlling vehicular emissions, upgrading industrial equipment, increasing forestation, controlling road and construction dust, and installing a public alert system. The plan also appoints a special air pollution prevention task force as the nodal body for coordination. 12. The film is available on YouTube outside China. See Tianyu Fang and Christopher He, directors, Chai Jing’s Review: U ­ nder the Dome—­Investigating China’s Smog, 1:43:55, uploaded by Christopher He, March 1, 2015, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=T ­ 6X2uwlQGQM. 13. Ma Jun, lecture at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Chicago, November 16, 2017. 14. The Ministry of Environment and Forests was renamed the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change in May 2014. The National Clean Air Program was finalized in 2019, including a time-­bound pollution-­reduction target (i.e., bringing down the PM 2.5 level by 20 to 30 ­percent by 2024, compared to 2017 levels) and backed up with government funding (i.e., 42 million USD for the first two years). 15. Interview with Anumita Roychowdhury, Delhi, August 14, 2014. 16. Interview with Anant Sudershan, University of Chicago-­Delhi Center, Delhi, February 17, 2017. 17. Suketa Mehta, “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found,” video recording of pre­sen­ta­ tion at the 26th Annual Chicago Humanities Festival, November 1, 2015, 53:23, uploaded by Chicago Humanities Festival, December 15, 2015, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=5­ Tq5X​ _­YL4Io. 18. See Urban Emissions (blog) home page, Urban Emissions Info, accessed November 1, 2019, http://­www​.­urbanemissions​.­info. 19. Interview with Sarath Guttikunda, telephone, August 11, 2014.

Chapter 6. Territorial and Associational Politics in Historical Perspective 1. The word “zamindar” comes from the Persian language, literally meaning land (zamin) owner (dar). Zamindars w ­ ere the middlemen between peasants (ryots), who raised the crops, and kings, who received the greater part of the surplus produce. 2. It was the British who gradually introduced individual land rights in the eigh­teenth ­century with new revenue legislation, taking into account existing customs and conventions (Roy and Swamy 2016). 3. Sometimes the same village had two types of land, subject, respectively, to zamindari and roytwari forms of revenue collection (Habib 1963). 4. The zamindari system was implemented with the Bengal Permanent Settlement Act, enacted ­under Governor-­General Charles Cornwallis in 1793. Special commissioner Thomas Munro, who gained most of his experience in south India, where the Mughal control was historically weak, promoted the roytwari system. Some scholars argue that the two dif­fer­ent land

Not e s to Ch a p t e r   6   161 revenue systems are the results of the unfamiliarity of the British with local land revenue systems and their biased interpretations of local society (Wilson 2011). Historians point out that the roytwari system did not eliminate intermediaries completely, ­because state agents working within the system ­were often connected with village communities, thus resembling intermediaries (Mukherjee and Frykenberg 1969). 5. Caste associations w ­ ere major blocs of urban governance in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries, but t­ here are competing interpretations of their importance. Cities w ­ ere divided into mohullas (wards), within each of which the residents w ­ ere from the same caste. Based on a study of Banaras, Bernard Cohn underscores the importance of caste in urban governance. During the 1810 ­house tax hartal (or tax re­sis­tance strike), which went on for a month in Banaras, each caste, trade, and profession gathered in a specific corner of the city, and the mohulla committees regulated the be­hav­ior of their members to ensure t­ here was no misconduct (Cohn 1962). Based on a study of Allahabad, however, Christopher Bayly argues that caste-­based institutions ­were less impor­tant in urban governance in the colonial era, as they w ­ ere not connected to the po­liti­cal power of cities (Bayly 1971). 6. Not all groups in “po­liti­cal society” are successful in securing their precarious existence. Chatterjee (2004) gives several examples. Street vendors in Calcutta, for instance, had only partial success in mobilizing po­liti­cal parties to fend off evictions, and ­were eventually dispersed during a campaign to “beautify” the city led by the ruling Communist Party. In the case of the bookbinders’ community, locals w ­ ere poorly or­ga­nized and failed in their collective bargaining with employers for higher pay.

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I n de x

chengzhongcun, 1. See also urban village Chicago School, 20 Chinese census, 21, 27–32 Chinese Communist Party, 37, 138 Chinese revolution, 18, 37, 137 civic association, 130 civil society, 6, 9–10, 55, 76, 89, 93, 102, 104, 114, 130–32, 138–41 clan, 43, 55, 60–62 class strug­gle, 20, 37 clientelist network, 124. See also po­liti­cal patronage climate policy, 92 cluster redevelopment, 76 collective consumption, 20 colonial rule, 18, 36, 48, 125–30 Committee for the Right to Housing, 83, 88 communal riots, 128 Communist Party of India-­Marxist, 37, 49 community shareholder, 71–72 comparison, 7, 8 Confucian gentry, 15, 124, 132 Congress Party, 49–50 constitutional amendment, 12, 47 county-­level cities, 31, 144–47

action plan, 93, 98–101, 109, 113–17 administrative reclassification, 31 affordable housing, 11, 58, 134 agricultural subsidy, 12, 131 air pollution control, 15, 91–101, 105–17 Air Pollution Prevention Action Plan (China), 99–100, 148 Air Quality Index, 92, 94, 109, 149–51 airport slum, 5–7, 13, 74–90 alliance building, 6, 10, 46, 58, 88–92. See also associational politics anticorruption campaign, 68–69 antiurban sentiment, 19 Asian Games, 67 associational politics, 10, 16, 54–55, 86–87, 89–90, 127–33 Baojia, 118–22 Beijing Clean Air Action Plan, 98–102 Beijing Master Plan, 94 BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), 86, 107 blue sky campaign, 94–96 Brahmin priests, 132 cadre evaluation, 9–10, 54 capital accumulation, 8, 20 caste, 15, 22, 26, 50, 124, 127–32 census town, 22–26, 49, 143 central business district, 13, 58, 65 Central Pollution Control Board, 106–7, 111, 149 central-­local relations, 11–12, 76 Centre for Science and Environment, 106, 110–15

danwei, 119, 122–24, 132 deindustrialization, 8 Delhi Development Authority, 108 Delhi Master Plan, 108 demand group, 131 demo­cratic deliberation, 16 Deng Xiaoping, 19, 123 185

186 in de x deregulatory reforms, 10 devolution, 11, 47, 123–24, 132, 136 Dharavi, 85, 88 displacement, 7, 35, 57 electoral politics, 76, 131, 137–38 eligibility, 86–87 environmental justice, 93 environmental NGOs, 103–5, 110–13 epidemics, 129 eviction, 72, 85, 90 ex-­situ resettlement, 75 88 fieldwork, ix, 5–6, 13–14 fiscal policy, 11 five-­year plans, 99, 101 food security, 27–28, 32, 36 Fordism, 8 foreign NGOs, 105 gentrification, 7 global city+B77, 19. See also world-­class city Global South, 8, 59 global urban studies, 8 gram panchayat, 24 ­Great Leap Forward, 28–29 Gujarat, 53, 92 Henri Lefebvre, 20 Hindu nationalism, 75 historical-­comparative analy­sis, 6 Hong Kong, 39, 42, 44, 93 house­hold responsibility system, 38 housing rights NGOs, 5, 14, 58, 84, 87–89 housing shortage, 7, 12, 110, 134 hukou, 9–10, 15, 18, 27–39, 46, 58, 65, 70–72, 90, 119–20, 124 illegal construction, 59, 61, 65 imperial administration, 120–21 in-­situ resettlement, 57, 60, 66 in-­situ urbanization, 24 Indian census, 20–24 Indian Supreme Court, 15, 36, 54, 92

informal settlements, 1, 7, 12–13, 58–59, 90, 134–36 information disclosure, 98, 102–3 Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), 103 Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, 82 jiaoqu, 29 jiedao, 3, 4, 6, 31, 58, 65 Kolkata, xi, 49–51, 53–54, 165 Land Acquisition Act, 36, 48, 52–53 Land Administration Law, 36 land banking, 60 land grabbing, 9 land leasing, 33–38, 42–43, 46, 59–60, 66, 137 land reforms, 19, 37–38, 43, 47–52, 70, 137 landlords, 15, 37, 38, 86, 127 Li Keqiang, 92 Liede village, 60, 63, 66 Ma Jun, 103–4 Maharashtra, 25, 75–77, 79, 84 Mahatma Gandhi, 18 Mamata Banerjee, 52–53 Mao Zedong, 18, 37, 103 mayor, 11, 68, 99 ­middle class, 15, 76, 93, 105, 110, 117, 131, 134, 140 mi­grant tenants, 1, 4–5, 15, 62, 64, 72, 90, 128, 138, 158 migration, 7, 19, 24, 28–29, 128 Mughal state, 22, 124–27, 132 Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority, 80–87 Mumbai Urban Transport Proj­ect, 86 Municipal Corporation of Mumbai, 76–77 municipal designation, 17–18, 22–28, 31–33 municipal finance, 76 nail ­house­hold, 3, 69 Nandigram, 36, 54

in de x   Narendra Modi, 19, 53, 92 National Clean Air Program (India), 109 National ­People’s Congress, 92 National Slum Dwellers Federation, 81–82 neighborhood leadership, 127–28 neoliberalism, 8 new towns, ix, 35 New Urbanization Plan, 19 odd-­even scheme, 92, 96, 108 Olympics, 7, 94–96, 115 one child policy, 32, 122 party secretary, 38, 44, 46, 68–70 Pearl River Delta, 1, 41, 61, 98, 100 PM2.5, 94–98, 100–109, 113–15 po­liti­cal party, 11–13, 18, 26, 37, 45, 49, 52–55, 86, 137–38 po­liti­cal patronage, 26, 127–28, 132 po­liti­cal society, 140 Poly Group, 61, 67–69, 72, 157 postreform China, 9–10, 15, 18, 32 private equity funds, 76 propertied class, 89 public interest litigation, 93, 104–6, 110–11, 116–17, 139 public sphere, 116 Pujing, 120 Qing dynasty, 121 quality of life, 96 Quanzhou, 119–20 rais, 127–29 real estate speculation, 7, 61, 134 regime type, 9, 136 regional in­equality, 93, 140 remote sensing, 21 residents’ committee, 31, 70, 122–23 responsibility contract, 99–100. See also Target Responsibility System revenue generation, 45 rightful re­sis­tance, 137 rights to housing, 89

187 Roytwari, 126 rule of law, 139–40 sanjiu program, 60 Shanghai, 56, 81, 98 shareholding village companies, 60, 70–72 Shenzhen, 10, 39, 41, 123 shequ, 71, 123 Shiv Sena Party, 75–76 single-­party system, 11, 13, 124, 137–38 Singur, 49–54 Slum Redevelopment and Rehabilitation Program, 74–77 Slum Rehabilitation Authority, 58, 75–85 Slum Rehabilitation Scheme, 75–77 slum survey, 82–88, 137–38 smart cities, 19 social media, 67, 96–97, 102–4, 116 social reproduction, 20 society shareholder, 71–72 Song dynasty, 61, 118–19 SPARC, 81, 85–88 special economic zones (SEZ), 11, 19, 35, 39, 123–24 stability maintenance, 104 state capacity, 9 state formation, 131–33 state-­owned enterprise, 28, 63, 71, 92, 99–100 statutory towns, 22 subaltern class, 131, 134, 137–40 subnational institution, 6–10 Target Responsibility System, 92–102 tenure security, 7, 38, 48 territorial politics, 10 Trinamool Congress Party, 37 unitary system, 33 urban definition, 17–27, 31–32 urban expansion, 13, 21, 55, 63 urban master plan, 14, 42, 94, 108 urban poverty, 7

188 in de x urban renewal, 57, 59, 60, 65, 82 urban theory, 8, 20 urban village, 1–7, 59–74 urban-­rural divide, 27–30. See also hukou urbanization rate, 8, 17–24 urbanized society, 20

World Bank, 25 World Health Organ­ization, 91 world-­class city, 65 Wukan, 39–46

village committee, 32, 52, 59, 70 village headmen, 125–26, 132

Yangtze River Delta, 100

Weibo97. See also social media West Bengal, 13, 33, 36, 47–53, 114

Xi Jinping, 19, 68

zamindar, 47, 124–27 zhaijidi, 60 ziliudi, 60

A NO T E ON T H E T Y P E This book has been composed in Arno, an Old-style serif typeface in the classic Venetian tradition, designed by Robert Slimbach at Adobe.