In the Name of Inclusion: The Redevelopment of Urban Villages and its Implications on Citizenship in China (New Perspectives on Chinese Politics and Society) 9813361190, 9789813361195

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NEW PERSPECTIVES ON CHINESE POLITICS AND SOCIETY

In the Name of Inclusion The Redevelopment of Urban Villages and its Implications on Citizenship in China Xiaoqing Zhang

New Perspectives on Chinese Politics and Society

Series Editor Yang Zhong Shanghai Jiao Tong University Shanghai, China

Rapid growth has posed new challenges for sustainable political and ­economic development in China. This series is dedicated to the study of modern Chinese politics and society, drawing on case studies, field work, surveys, and quantitative analysis. In addition to its empirical focus, this series will endeavour to provide unique perspectives and insights by publishing research from scholars based in China and the region. Forthcoming titles in this series will cover political culture, civil society, political economy and governance. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14734

Xiaoqing Zhang

In the Name of Inclusion The Redevelopment of Urban Villages and its Implications on Citizenship in China

Xiaoqing Zhang Zhejiang Sci-Tech University Hangzhou, China

New Perspectives on Chinese Politics and Society ISBN 978-981-33-6119-5    ISBN 978-981-33-6120-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6120-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Preface

My initial interest in urban villages was triggered by the drastic urban transformation I have witnessed of my Chinese hometown, Xi’an. For me, a girl who was born and raised in a big city, the days I spent in my grandparents’ old house during school summer vacation were always joyful. Their house was located in the suburbs of Xi’an, nestled among several peaceful villages. It was paradise for me to escape from all the hustle and bustle of the big city. The house was old but well-built and preserved, surrounded by cherry and fig trees. Frogs jumped out of the small pond near cherries, singing happily in the rain. Neighbours were friendly and cared for the community. At that time, cities were not as aggressive as they are today. Nowadays in that area of China, big cities have become saturated with concrete, emotionless skyscrapers surrounded by dizzying streetlights, gigantic overpasses and roaring vehicles days and nights. The city sprawls at an out-of-control speed. In the last 20 years, Xi’an has expanded to become more than three times bigger than it is used to be, and the villages where I used to spend my summer vacations have been turned into chaotic urban villages that are simply waiting for demolition. These days I see villagers confront the local government and developers, trying to protest against displacement or striving for higher compensation. I started my research with a kind of cynical and complex feeling. On the one hand, China presents a perplexing set of contradictions. v

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A collectivist command-and-control economy that has been opened to market forces. A centralist government experiments with decentralisation and democratic participation. A unitary regime with a certain level of political rights that tries to seek a Chinese version of citizenship among the Western-dominated ideologies. On the other hand, as a Chinese citizen I feel that the country is somehow moving forward positively. However, the profound question “Where China is going and How” frequently concerns me as everything in China happens against the background of a country with the fastest rates of economic development, as well as the largest migration movements and fastest urbanisation rates in human history. Nevertheless, the practical training in the process of fieldwork has taught me to remain neutral and critical in my research. I also get to know how to balance between academic theories and realities, and to apply the theories on the ground based on local context. This book is an attempt to provide a wider theoretical and practical implication on citizenship in China. It argues that in dealing with China’ s rapid urbanisation, different understandings on the meaning of urban citizenship are at play. From the perspective of local authorities, urban citizenship remains at a narrow definition that implies membership identity with associated benefits. Populace’s understanding, however, broadly expend the notion of citizenship from a passive and static status on membership identity to the active process of realising that identity. The discrepancy between different understandings of citizenship is a major potential for triggering conflicts in urban redevelopment projects. In dealing with conflicts, this book suggests that cultivating a participatory environment and assisting a mature development of neighbourhood self-­ governance would contribute a stable and harmonious urbanisation process in the future. Hangzhou, China

Xiaoqing Zhang

Acknowledgements

In the course of research and writing-up I accumulated enormous personal debts of gratitude to many people. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Prof. Nick Gallent and Dr. Sonia Arbaci for always providing me with constructive and insightful suggestions. I was also fortunate to have relatives and friends in Xi’an, without whose helps in providing interpersonal relationships and social connections with the local authorities and villagers, my study would have seen no way out. Finally, my special thanks go to my parents and my husband Kun Fang for always being supportive. To them all, I offer my most sincere thanks.

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Contents

1 Urban Village Redevelopment: The Paradox of Social Inclusion  1 2 From Social Exclusion to Social Inclusion: Where Does Citizenship Fit In? 39 3 Government’s Understanding of Social Inclusion 79 4 Villagers’ Understanding of Social Inclusion113 5 Making a Difference: Inclusion Through Active Participation143 6 Conclusion: Social Inclusion, Citizenship, and Beyond171 Appendix A: Questionnaire (English Translation)183 Appendix B: List of Interviewee195

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R  eferences197 Index213

Acronyms

ETDZ HIDZ HRS IOSCPRC XCHB XCPB XMDRC XMG XMPSB XULFB XURCC XURO

Economic and Technological Development Zone Hi-tech Industries Development Zone Household Responsibility System Information Office of the State Council, The People’s Republic of China Xi’an Cultural Heritage Bureau Xi’an City Planning Bureau Xi’an Municipal Development and Reform Commission Xi’an Municipal Government Xi’an Municipal Public Security Bureau Xi’an Urban Landscape and Forestry Bureau Xi’an Urban and Rural Construction Commission Xi’an Urban Regeneration Office

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 3.1

Location of Xi’an. (Credit: Author) Living environment in urban villages. (Credit: Author) Location of the studied urban villages. (Credit: Author) The redeveloped area. (Credit: Author. Note: Top photo shows the shopping and entertainment square; bottom photo shows the high-end dwellings stood on the land that used to be part of M village) Fig. 3.2 Emergence of self-constructions and street markets in N1 and N2 after redevelopment. (Credit: Author) Fig. 3.3 Personal occupations of public spaces in N1 and unmanaged facilities in N2. (Credit: Author)

6 12 25

88 99 100

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List of Charts

Chart 3.1 Redevelopment procedures. (Credit: Author) Chart 5.1 Interrelationships of the three key actors in the process of urban village redevelopment. (Credit: Author) Chart 5.2 Traditional approach of urban village redevelopment. (Credit: Author)

86 148 166

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List of Tables

Table 4.1 Information of the studied cases Table 4.2 Socioeconomic information, and level of satisfaction on financial status and living environment Table 4.3 Sense of inclusion and level of satisfaction

115 120 134

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1 Urban Village Redevelopment: The Paradox of Social Inclusion

1.1 Introduction In the summer of 2012, two pieces of news regarding urban village redevelopment in the city of Xi’an in China caught my attention. The first concerned several construction accidents that happened in Nanyaotou village—a village that has been awaiting demolition and will be relocated in the next few years. In pursuit of higher rental incomes and redevelopment compensations, villagers built substandard dwellings on top of their original houses and rented them out. However, the self-built dwellings were not in compliance with building codes, nor did they meet the safety standards. Several dwellings collapsed during construction and sadly caused three deaths, including that of a five-month-old baby. While similar accidents were not rare occurrences in urban villages, the irony was that Nanyaotou village was, in fact, not an urban village by definition. The original village had already been redeveloped in 2003, and the villagers were relocated in well-designed terraced houses with parking garages, a sports ground and a community centre. This was seen as a successful demonstration by the local governments and the official media, as they believed the well-built relocation houses greatly improved © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 X. Zhang, In the Name of Inclusion, New Perspectives on Chinese Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6120-1_1

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villagers’ quality of life, and that the upgraded living environment enhanced villagers’ local identity as urban citizens. Indeed, a local newspaper wrote, “New Nanyaotou village provides a good starting point for Xi’an’s redevelopment strategies of urban villages to embrace a beautifying future. With an upgraded living environment, the village and villagers now have become part of the city.” The second piece of news thrust Xihe, an urban village not far from Nanyaotou, into the spotlight. Xihe village was redeveloped in 2008. It was one of the newly listed “redevelopment demonstrations” that were showcased to special delegations from the Central Government, the National Ministry of Urban-Rural Development, and local governments from more than 150 cities. What the news media wrote about Xihe village was vividly reminiscent of the rhetoric describing Nanyaotou—“Xihe village transformed from a chaotic, underdeveloped urban village into an upscale, modern community that fitted into the city; thousands of villagers waved goodbye to rural lifestyle and live an urban life with elevators, roof garden, community clinic, and community sports field. It sets a good example as Xi’an model of urban villages redevelopment.” The two pieces of news in Xi’an provide us with a complicated vision of different understandings of social inclusion in the redevelopment of urban villages. In both cases, the redeveloped villages are considered successful projects in the short term: housing quality was improved; living environment was beautified; and villagers were described as “living an urban life” and “being part of the city”—all were believed to be positive indications of “social inclusion.” In the long term, however, Nanyaotou village has already passed its glory days and is once again turning into a chaotic living space. Moreover, Nanyaotou is not the only village facing a second round of redevelopment in the near future. During my fieldtrip, I noted that another five redeveloped villages (Nankang village, Dongbali village, Renyi village, Dengdian village, and Bianjia village), of the 39 urban villages redeveloped in 2003, were going through the same steps. With the second redevelopment approaching, the indigenous villagers became increasingly anxious and fretful, or simply got angry; they came together in front of the local government building, protesting against the second

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redevelopment and publicly denouncing incompetent officials or heavy-­ handed redevelopment plans. Facing these cases, I cannot help but wonder on what criteria the local government defines a redeveloped village as a successful one, or in other words, one that achieves social inclusion? What happens during the process of redevelopment which leads to the failure to deliver an inclusive future in urban villages like Nanyaotou and so on? Taking a step further, what makes a difference when it comes to promoting social inclusion in these redeveloped urban villages? Before proceeding to the research questions, background information is first provided in order to facilitate a better understanding of the rest of the book. A briefing on the development of urban villages over the past two decades, and a comparison between Xi’an and other frequently studied cities help to explain exactly why the city is worthy of study. Following this, I contextualise social exclusion/inclusion within urban villages, and justify the use of citizenship as the key concept to understand the exclusionary/inclusionary process of urban village redevelopment. The plan of the book is presented in the last section.

1.2 U  rban Village and Its Development in Xi’an 1.2.1 Making Sense of the Urban Village in China The urban village, which is translated from Chengzhongcun in Chinese, is a burgeoning phenomenon in most of the big cities in China. In extant literature, an urban village is usually defined by its geographic location and the type of landownership within the village community (Tian 2008; Wu 2009). In general, it refers to a former rural village that is deprived of arable lands; its residential lands, however, are left untouched and thus the village is gradually encircled by urban built-up areas in the process of rapid urbanisation. The urban village concept is a reflection of incomplete urbanisation (Xie 2005), which cannot be understood without a

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briefing on the transition of China’s dual systems of land tenure and social management. Before the economic reform in 1978, China, as a socialist country, established a system of public ownership to all land in accordance with its centralised economy. Following the socialist ideology that land should be a means of production to benefit all people, the state’s dominant position in land governance was enshrined in the 1975 Constitution (Deng et al. 2009). In practice, the concepts of urban area and rural area were managed separately. The state ownership of urban land ensured that land could only be transferred and allocated from the empowered ministries to appropriate organisations such as state-owned enterprises, military, and educational establishments (Yeh and Wu 1996). The collative ownership of rural land allowed farmers to secure their livelihoods though arable land and housing base land. The purpose of land use was strictly managed, and lands with different ownerships were not transferable. Meanwhile, population movement between the urban and rural areas was strictly controlled by the residence registration system (hukou). At the start of the 1980s, China’s economic climate became increasingly privatised and diversified with the entrance of private and foreign investments into the market and the establishment of town-village enterprises. Consistent with the market reform, governments perceived an urgent need to liberalise Land use rights in order to generate capital for urban development (Ren 2013). Thus, in 1988, Article 10 of the Constitution Amendment firstly recognised the commercial value of the use of land, stipulating that “the right to the use of land may be transferred according to law” (Deng et al. 2009); this allowed “Land use rights” in urban areas to be leased to investors for a certain period of time. The government placed a great deal of emphasis on urban construction, with a national priority that pinpointed the improvement of living conditions for urban residents (Wang and Hague 1992; Huang 2008). The State Council promulgated a series of regulations on urban planning, such as the Regulation of Urban Planning and the Land Administration Act; of particular note is the enactment of City Planning 1989, which marked the establishment of a comprehensive planning system in urban areas (Yeh and Wu 1999). Since then, Chinese cities have entered an era

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of rapid urbanisation, with a boom in the property market and construction in urban areas (Liu et al. 2003). Compared with the strictly regulated plan for urban land, rural land policies mainly focused on the usage of farmland and forestry, such as the household contracted responsibility, the land transaction among farmers, the ratio of forestland, and the auction of Four Sorts of Barren Land tenure. The commercial values of rural land were not recognised by law, and commercial usage such as real estate development and sale to urban residents was prohibited (Dong 2005). However, as farmland was collectively owned by farmers, local farmers were provided with a relatively flexible environment in which to decide on the use of their collectively owned land.1 During the process of urbanisation, many cities expand beyond their original administrative districts in pursuit of revenues generated by land leasing; farmland in rural area is expropriated and villagers become farmers without farmland; following this, rural villages are gradually encroached and are finally turned into urban villages. Meanwhile, the restriction on rural to urban migration has been relaxed as there is significant demand for labour on urban development projects. Incented by the large influx of mainly rural migrant workers who look for affordable living places, indigenous villagers see the lucrative opportunity of constructing housing extensions on housing base land and renting them out to migrant workers.

1.2.2 Taking Xi’an as the Case Study City My study is set in the local context of Xi’an in China, a city which has been the capital for 16 dynasties. Xi’an is the capital city of Shaanxi province. It is located inland and has long been one of the most popular built-up areas in central-northwest China (Fig. 1.1). With the local government’s endeavour to turn Xi’an into an international metropolis and regional growth pole, the city has been expanding rapidly since the early 1990s (Kang and Jiang 1999). Compared with frequently studied cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, the emergence of urban villages in Xi’an roughly goes through the

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Fig. 1.1  Location of Xi’an. (Credit: Author)

same trajectory. However, the city itself, as well as the urban villages in Xi’an, exhibits different economic and social characteristics. It must first be noted that the boom of Xi’an as a big city in recent years is a result of not only market forces, but also strong state intervention in the economy (Jaros 2013). Generally speaking, China’s central

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and local government usually intervenes in urban development by controlling land use quotas, offering preferential policies, and channelling financial resources. In cities like Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, the market forces driving urban expansion are unleashed by economic reform and local autonomy. As direct-controlled municipalities or state-­ designated Special Economic Zones, these cities have been given priority in economic development since Deng’s Open Door Policy in 1978, and the local authorities are given much wider power in terms of economic and urban management than elsewhere. Therefore, these cities usually attract more migration and investments, as well as property market booms in response to investment interests and increased population. In these cities, market forces become the dominant driving force for urban expansions (Xi and Cho 2007). The urban development in Xi’an, by contrast, is characterised by intensified interventions from the central and local governments in both the urban form and the economy. From the 1960s to the 1990s, the Xi’an Municipal Government put forward three master plans, the first one spanning from 1953 to 1972, the second from 1980, and the third from 1995 (Chen et al. 2003). In the first master plan, Xi’an was designated by the central government as an important base for state-owned and energy-­ based industry such as textiles, electronic instruments, and munitions. At the same time, a higher educational area was formed southwards with the establishment of several colleges, universities, and research institutions. Although the urban planning during this period was turbulent because of Mao’s Great Leap Forward Movement and the Cultural Revolution, the first master plan still set a framework for urban construction and expansion that was inherited by the following master plan (Wang and Hague 1992). As regards the second master plan, industrial development was still very much stressed, and the city positioned itself as “a city of advanced sciences, culture and education with textile and machinery manufacturing industries as the main sectors, with the tourist trade based on the protection of the city’s historical features” (Xi’an City Economic Research Centre 1986; quoted from Wang and Hague 1992: 18). Nevertheless, at the start of the 1990s, Xi’an began to adapt itself to a more dynamic economic climate with the proposal of the third master plan; the idea was to

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restructure its industrial layout, emphasising the development of both hi-tech and tourism industries. As a result, the Economic and Technological Development Zone (ETDZ) and the Hi-tech Industries Development Zone (HIDZ) were planned to promote the software and aerospace industries, and Qujiang new district was also developed to create a better city image and to boost tourism. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, China’s central government launched a national-level programme of Xibu Kaifa (development of western regions). The fourth master plan, carried out in 2008, demonstrated the local government’s efforts to make Xi’an a regional economic engine and showcase. The local government launched a series of programmes to enlarge Xi’an’s market size and upgrade the quality of investment climate. In 2002, the nearby city Changan was integrated, both economically and spatially (Shaanxi Provincial Government 2001). In 2009, a programme that decided to connect another nearby city, Xi’anyang, with Xi’an fostered the XiXi’an New District between the two cities to attract hi-tech, low-carbon industries, and financial magnates (Shaanxi Provincial Government 2010). In the following year, the reply from the state council officially acknowledged the 40 years of long-term programme to build Xi’an into an “international metropolis” (Shaanxi Provincial Government 2011). In general, the Xi’an urban expansion has been strongly spurred on by powerful state intervention in forming and restructuring urban spaces. It is in this setting that Xi’an’s urban sprawl ate away at farmland and encircled urban villages; indeed, most of the urban villages studied in my thesis have been redeveloped in association with these state-led, large-scaled programmes. Second, the social networks in Xi’an’s urban villages exhibit different characteristics when compared to cities like Beijing and Guangzhou. With regard to the indigenous villagers, many urban villages in Guangzhou are found to have a social network of patriarchal clans, which can be traced back centuries when northern family clans moved there and settled down (Faure 2007). To date, patriarchal clans still have an unceasing influence on the development and management of Guangzhou’s urban villages, and this clannish network lays a foundation on which villagers operate their social and economic lives (Li 2004). In most cities in

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northern China, however, family clans are disrupted by wars and the movement of the political centre from north to south during ancient dynasties (Wang 2006). There is rarely any literature indicating a similarly strong patriarchal network in urban villages in Xi’an. Regarding the urban village tenants, studies have shown that in cities like Shenzhen and Beijing, rural migrants constitute the majority of the tenants, and the rural migrants from the same place of origin tend to concentrate in the same or places, or close by (Ma and Xiang 1998). This is a common characteristic of immigrants in various countries, where immigrants tend to be geographically concentrated and take advantage of the established social networks (for immigrants’ location choice in the U.S., see Chiswick and Miller 2004; for location impacts on the patterns of neighbourhood poverty and residential segregation in England, see Garner and Bhattacharyya 2011). The tenants in Xi’an’s urban villages vary significantly across different districts. For example, young graduates and college students are found to be the major tenants in the urban villages near universities; migrant workers, most of whom work for the construction of new urban areas, and start-up business owners whose businesses are based in urban villages, represent the majority populations of the urban villages near ETDZ and HIDZ (XOC 2007). Although urban villages are rural migrants’ major residential choice, there is little in the way of literature to indicate a spatial concentration of people from the same place of origin; moreover, it was reported that nearly half of them live with spouses and kids (Zhou 2011). Third, while some local governments take the initiative to regularise and upgrade urban villages, the Xi’an government has scheduled a wholesale demolition. For example, and as previously mentioned by Guangzhou and Shenzhen, urban villages managed by the people who share consanguinity function like a company when it comes to collecting wealth and capital (Li 2002). Many of them are strong economic entities with thousands of village households. These villages are financially competent and capable of funding themselves during urban village redevelopment. They are familiar with redevelopment policies and the resources they can use to negotiate with local authorities and developers. As such, an optimal solution is likely to be achieved by the different stakeholders, and the urban villages there have the potential to be upgraded rather than demolished

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(Zhuang 2014; Tao et al. 2015). The urban villages in Xi’an, however, face an inevitable destiny of being demolished and relocated, especially the small-to-medium-sized ones that fall within the scope of state-led programmes (XURO 2013). Over the past 20 years, studies on urban village redevelopment in China’s first-tier cities2 have been prominent. Although the local economy in China’s second-tier cities has begun to take off in recent years, studies in these cities are, in comparison, limited in number and scope. This book hopes to contribute to projects concerning urban villages in the less-studied, inland cities. As a typical inland city, Xi’an shares some features with other inland, second-tier cities: a state-led urban expansion spurred on by large-scaled programmes, small-to-medium-sized urban villages with relatively weak social networks and limited economic capabilities, and a government-dominated redevelopment process, allowing for a limited level of democratic participation. Since the urban villages in Xi’an are being demolished and relocated at an overwhelming speed, it is equally urgent to understand the processes and consequences of these redevelopment projects.

1.3 U  rban Village Redevelopment: From Exclusion to Inclusion 1.3.1 Urban Village and Inclusion After looking at the worldwide context, the Chinese phenomenon of urban village does not seem unusual. In other counties with different political and economic contexts, it is also referred to as slum, ghetto, shantytown, self-help housing, or arrival city. In essence, it is a form of informal settlement (Cenzatti 2014). Informal settlements are considered a normal phenomenon in the processes of globalisation and urbanisation; they differ from the formal settlements in terms of physical environment and legal status (Dicken 1998). They are residential settlements where buildings are built on land to which the occupants have no illegal claim, or unplanned areas without abiding by the land use and zoning

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regulations (Zhang 2011). However, unlike the self-help settlements in other developing counties, urban villages are not constructed by the “migrant arrivals” but by the “original villagers” (Wu 2002). In the Chinese case, urban villages are referred to as informal settlements mainly resulting from property rights ambiguity (Wu et  al. 2013). Wu et  al. argued that the ambiguity originates in the juxtaposition of four issues in China’s urban land management: “dualistic and fragmented landownership,” “lax land management and development control,” “informal service provision and management,” and “marginal and ambiguous status of village governance.” These issues create a grey area in urban villages where villagers can bypass planning regulations that target urban land, and extract profits from building extensions, transacting lands, and providing substandard services (rental flats, street venders, unregistered restaurants, shabby hotels, etc.). Although some researches call for the cautious use of negative concepts similar to slums and ghettos in order to avoid stigmatising urban villages and labelling the people who live there (Wu 2012), urban villages do exhibit the characteristics shared by other informal settlements: inadequate infrastructure, insecure land tenure, high crime rate, high construction density, and social exclusion problems (Gilbert and Gugler 1987). Although urban villages are situated in urban areas, the residents in urban villages are generally excluded from urban resources such as municipal services and urban welfares due to their hukou status. Besides this, the physical environment within village communities is extremely deprived (Fig. 1.2). Through bypassing development control, housing projects are saving on cost by not complying with safety building codes. There is a huge overlap of residential and commercial uses of houses. Alleyways are so narrow that it is impossible for vehicles such as fire engines to enter. Electricity and telecommunication wires are unsafely intertwined. Piles of garbage create a potential hygienic hazard. Open spaces and public services are extremely scarce. The problems of gambling and gangsterdom are not uncommon, and have negative impacts on both villagers and the future generations growing up there. These negative images create an anomaly in the whole fabric of the city. Taken all together, a need for improvement is urgent.

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Fig. 1.2  Living environment in urban villages. (Credit: Author)

China’s nationwide action of urban village redevelopment was triggered in response to UN-Habitat’s (2003) agenda for “cities without slum,” with the targets being to beautify urbanscape and to improve the living conditions of the marginalised urban villagers. In 2005, the Xi’an government authorities officially set “social inclusion” as one of the major targets for urban village redevelopment. Since then, expressions such as “villagers being part of the society” and “villagers being included” have appeared frequently in official reports. For example, the 2012 report reaffirmed the positive social outcome of redevelopment, as in “[…] the process of urban village redevelopment improves villagers’ living conditions, includes them into the urban social security system, provides free job

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trainings, brings [them] substantial financial growth […] indigenous villagers are gradually included into the society’ (XURO 2012: 3–5). It is an interesting starting point, as the term social inclusion usually appears with its twin concept social exclusion, both of which have a European origin. The term first appeared in China’s academia in the late 1990s. However, due to the government authorities’ concerns over its political connotations, the concept did not attract a great deal of attention from scholars and policy makers at the time (Tang 2002). At this point, the question must be asked: Why did the government authorities in Xi’an use the inclusion term when commenting on urban village redevelopments? Social exclusion is generally defined as a disadvantage and as a process of deprivation of participating economically, socially, or politically in the life of society. More importantly, exclusion usually manifests at a community level in the form of geographic or social groups rather than at the individual level (Atkinson 1998). It is not a newly discovered issue, but has been a long-lasting phenomenon since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In the era of the central planning economy, political factors played a dominant role in discussions of social exclusion. At the time, everyone was labelled based on a political system of class struggle, and one’s connections with the leading class decided his or her political position (Farina 1980). The labels of social class were inherited from parents by their children, and those with a “bad label” were denied the opportunities to attend universities, join work units, or be a communist party member. In urban areas, as the entitlements to welfare such as housing and living subsistence were provided by work units, the political exclusion of certain groups simultaneously kept them out socially and economically (Li 2004). Since the economic reform in 1978, China’s developmental environment has been changing in many ways, and economic factors have begun to play an important role in creating the newly excluded (Li 1994). As China applied a gradual reform starting from the “easy part” of the old economic system, in the early stage of reform, benefits such as housing provision, education, and healthcare were still associated with occupations. Thus, the people who had a secured job in state work units remained as “insiders” (Li 2004). However, with the market-oriented

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reforms gradually moving towards the labour market, housing provision, and the education and healthcare system, more and more people became “outsiders.” They were divided, according to their wealth and income levels, into the groups that could afford them and those that could not. Among the outsiders, laid-off workers and rural migrant workers were thought to be the most excluded, because they were not only economically underprivileged but also institutionally excluded from urban welfare security (Solinger 2006; Liu et al. 2008). These people were described as the ones who were left behind during the fast social and economic development in transitional China (Khan and Riskin 2000). However, when discussing the shift of the source of exclusion from political inequality to economic inequality after the economic reform, it is important to not overlook the fact that the consequences of exclusion can be quite political. In today’s Chinese societies, sharp social and economic inequalities have triggered increasing numbers of contentious actions. Certain groups—whether urban citizens, rural people, or migrant workers—confront certain barriers that could lead to social exclusion. They were reported to account for nearly 50% of more than 100 million contentious collective actions in 2012 according to a report issued by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS 2013). These groups include the absolutely poor, such as laid-off workers from former state-owned work units (Gold et al. 2009), rural farmers and urban residents faced with displacements (Jing 2000; Shin 2013), or relatively affluent people such as some of the indigenous villagers in my study cases. What they strive for is not only a secured and decent livelihood, but also a better political standing in resistance to the encroachments on their rights. Therefore, the rhetoric of social exclusion/inclusion may act as the arch for the excluded to strive for what they need. When it comes to urban village redevelopment, however, the local authorities in Xi’an may refer to social inclusion from a different standpoint. Of particular note here is my interview with an official (O1202, Interview, 03-05-2012) from Xi’an’s planning authorities, who pointed out, China’s social environment is becoming more and more inclusive in recent years […] all the policies [with regard to urban village redevelopment] are

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meant to regulate the process [of redevelopment], to create better living places, and to include the villagers into the society […] we should look ahead to positive strategies, rather than look back and cling on a negative concept.

It is clear that policy makers attempt to sound positive instead of negative, and pronounce a goal rather than describe a problem. This is, however, an optimistic yet somehow evasive standpoint. The concepts of social inclusion and social exclusion are closely related. As the converse of exclusion, social inclusion is a process of identifying the barriers associated with exclusionary issues and taking a series of affirmative actions to change the circumstances that may cause social exclusion (World Bank 2013). If policy makers set “social inclusion” as one of their major targets for urban village redevelopment, without identifying “Who gets excluded from What and How,” there is little sense in talking about inclusion as remedial intervention.

1.3.2 C  itizenship: An Alternative Approach Beyond Economic Dimension The studies of social exclusion in China started in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In these early studies, social exclusion was used to describe poverty problems, and the discussion was limited to people and households living in long-term poverty (Sun 2002; Tang 2002). As the concept has developed, it has begun to embrace a diversity of economic, political, social and cultural dimensions, because the causes of exclusion can be multidimensional. However, the concept has also been criticised for its multidimensional foci, which can mean many things to many people (Silver 1994; Gregory et al. 2009). As such, it is important to identify the cause of exclusion, so that related actions can be taken to counter exclusionary tendencies. Extant studies on social exclusion and inclusion can be categorised into three genres: the participation-based approach that emphasises access to the labour market and social welfares (Paugam 1996; Burchardt et  al. 1999; Lister 2000), the rights-based approach that emphasises citizenship and citizenship rights (Curran et al.

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2007), and the moral-based approach that emphasises social discrimination and stigma (Estivill 2003; Gough and Eisenschitz 2006). Recent times have seen the concept of citizenship become increasingly popular in policy-making across Europe, with social inclusion strategies tending to focus on new forms of citizenship, such as “active citizenship,” which stresses the responsibilities of local communities (Gregory et al. 2009). My research argues that focusing on citizenship and citizenship rights is also applicable when studying the exclusion/inclusion of urban villagers for three reasons. First, in European literature, “access to labour market” usually has its particularity in measuring social exclusion/inclusion. However, it is not applicable to the studies of urban villagers in China. Extant studies show that most urban villagers do not have formal jobs, either due to their limited professional skills and low educational level, or because of their unwillingness to enter low-paid occupations (Tan 2012; Liu and Liu 2011). In my cases, only 20% of the studied urban villagers have formal jobs. However, this does not mean that they do not work. Many villagers still maintain informal businesses such as street venders, grocers, family restaurants, home inns or online stores. As Labonte (2004) pointed out, although there is no denying the importance of accessing the formal labour market to one’s live in providing social connections, the forms of work are becoming increasingly liberalised and non-standard. “The bleaker side of work: its physical hazards, its psychosocial threats and, subsequent to today’s liberalised capital and episodic encounter with a crisis of over-production, its increasing non-standard form in which regular hours, living wages, extended benefits and longer-term security are being swept away as uncompetitive relics of a bygone era” (Labonte 2004: 119). As villagers’ major income resources are not from formal jobs, “access to labour market” also loses its merit as a decisive remedy for social exclusion. Second, as Silver (1994: 544) pointed out, in day-to-day interactions, “people engage in society through realising various types of rights. Right to property, for instance, has been a historical driver of exclusion.” With urban development witnessing a rapid marketisation process, citizenship and the various rights associated with it have been given more consideration by studies related to exclusion. For example, Wu (2010) argued that

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Chinese citizenship is being increasingly commoditised into property rights, in a way that sees the state retreat from the provision of all-­inclusive entitlements and links them to the market; moreover, the process of marketisation actually constrains marginal people in claiming citizenship rights. Tian (2008) concluded that although economic rights are the primary focus of urban village development, a comprehensive analysis that also includes social and political perspectives is required. However, little research, with the exception of Li’s (2005) study, has probed the application of a fully expended notion of citizenship and citizenship rights in social exclusion studies in China. As such, and in line with the rights-­ based approach, my research will look at various citizenship rights that urban villagers strive for. The third reason lies in Xi’an’s redevelopment policies as they relate to urban villages, with policy makers trying to use “granting the villagers urban citizenship” to promote social inclusion. Looking at citizenship in its broadest sense, it refers to an individual’s membership of a political community that bestows a set of rights and duties (Brown 1994; Leary 2000). Before redevelopment, villagers were living in urban areas but were generally denied the public services and social resources that were enjoyed by urban citizens, thus meaning that their “provincial level of citizenship” did not grant them the associated rights to cities. This was because of their rural hukou status; villagers who held rural hukous were not recognised as members of the “urban community.” Therefore, the urban-rural distinction was considered a major exclusion confronted by urban villagers (Cheng and Seldon 1994), and the hukou system became a key issue during discussions of Chinese citizenship. It was considered a main cause of social inequality that differentiated people by place of origin (Honig 1990; Liu and Wu 2008; Logan 2008; Huang et al. 2010). In China, hukou refers to an official record in a household registration system. To facilitate a better understanding of China’s multi-level citizenship, it is necessary to explain briefly how hukou became the carrier of citizenship in China. In European studies, “multi-level citizenship” refers to citizenship at different polity levels, such as supranational, national and local; it can also mean non-territorial subjects such as faith, religions, and ethnic diasporas (Desforges et  al. 2005). Similarly, citizenship in

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China can be defined at national, provincial and urban-rural levels, all of which are expressed through hukou status. The hukou system was introduced in 1958 under the “Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on Residence Registration” for the purpose of population control and welfare distribution during the command economic era. Hukou was categorised as either “rural” or “urban.” Before the economic reform, different hukou statuses represented a space distinction. Population movements between rural and urban areas were strictly controlled. A person holding a rural hukou lived in a rural village with access to administratively allocated land for residential and agricultural use; a person holding an urban hukou lived in an urban area with access to a secured job, housing and livelihood benefits provided by state-owned work units (Bray 2005). During the 1980s, market-oriented economic reform remoulded the hukou system, making it a more completed scheme rather than a simple representation of space distinction. On the one hand, the hukou is used to label the levels of social benefits and public services that one can enjoy in urban areas. The levels of social security benefits for people with different hukous were different. People registered in economically developed cities enjoyed a higher level of social benefits than those with a hukou in small cities or rural areas. In addition to this, under the State Council’s “Notice on Boosting the Hukou Reform” of 2011, in legal terms people could move freely among different cities and apply for a resident identity card that granted them access to local social benefits. In practical terms, however, a person was required to live in a city and pay taxes for a continuous number of years in order to obtain a resident identity with social benefits. On the other hand, the hukou had gradually become intertwined with not only property rights, but also a series of social rights and political rights. In rural areas, a village was considered a collective economic organisation in possession of administratively allocated land for collective use. Thus, people with a rural hukou might have shares in, and benefits from, collective village assets. Besides this, under the village self-governance scheme, villagers also had the right to participate in decision-making processes and to vote on the village committee. For urban people, a hukou was no longer a guarantee for jobs and housing, but was a channel through which to access social benefits and public services. For example, an urban citizen

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could only receive social benefits, attend public consultations, and register a marriage in his or her hukou-registered place. Moreover, registration as a voter also required a local hukou or the consent of a hukou-registered authority in the case of a migrant. In this sense, hukou became the carrier of the Chinese version of citizenship (Zhang 2015). In the process of urban village redevelopment, villagers were granted urban citizenship according to policies, in the name of social inclusion. In the July of 2014, the Central Government of China promulgated a guideline on hukou reform, and the urban-rural distinction was eliminated. From then on, hukou only differentiated at provincial level. Although the rural-urban differentiation of hukou has been called off, citizenship is more than hukou; it is about membership and identity, rights and obligations, the creation of new rights, and the distribution of existing rights to new sections of the population. Therefore, citizenship as an alternative approach to studying social exclusion/inclusion has the potential to bridge various strands of economic, social and political problems that occur during urban village redevelopments, and helps to understand the behaviours of both villagers and the officials during redevelopments.

1.4 T  he Paradox of Social Inclusion: Some Clarifications Notwithstanding the social inclusion crisis associated with urban village calls for an urgent improvement, the process of redevelopment presents a perplexing set of paradoxes that need to be clarified in the thesis. First, it is important to set a scale within which we talk about inclusion, as individuals and groups can be excluded from one domain but included in others (Jackson 1999). It is worth noting that although the redevelopment of urban villages in Xi’an is promoted in the name of social inclusion, the process of inclusion during redevelopment also runs the risk of being exclusionary itself, because Xi’an’s government’s so-called inclusion strategies only target the original villagers.

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In Xi’an village, residents comprise three main groups: original villagers who are property owners, and rural migrants and young graduates who rent dwellings in urban villages (Xing 2010). The three groups have drastically different interests. Villagers prioritise compensation such as certain amounts of money, relocated housings, and access to the urban welfare system in the process of redevelopment. Therefore, conflicts emerge when the villagers become aware of the high potential value of their housing and land, which leads to their dissatisfactions with low compensation. During my fieldwork, I find that it is always the villagers who organise resistance to the heavy-handed redevelopment plans, or demand fair compensation and participation in the process. With regard to rural migrants and young graduates, urban villages provide them with low-cost living places as part of their living strategies to save money (Zhang et al. 2003; Song et al. 2008; Lian 2009), or to facilitate them in the transitional period when adapting to the host society (Wu 2009). During redevelopment, their tenant/shop leasing contracts (usually oral contracts, not formal written contracts) are simply terminated and they are displaced from urban villages without any compensation. In this way, the process of redevelopment, which attempts to include urban villagers, also comes at the expense of excluding rural migrants and young graduates. Discussion regarding the two groups needs to be set in other domains, such as the newly established council housing schemes. For the purpose of my research, the thesis mainly focuses on the indigenous villagers. Second, both academic studies and mainstream societies seem to have a complicated outlook when referring to urban villagers as the excluded group. On the one hand, there is a consensus that although the villagers are living in urban areas, they are generally excluded from the social services and resources that are enjoyed by urban citizens. Besides this, in some cases they are faced with the displacement forced on them by the harsh tactics of municipal and regional authorities that give rise to humanitarian issues. On the other hand, there is a stereotype whereby urban villagers are considered “windfall pickers,” as the once rural land increases in value. In some cases, villagers gain profits from rent-seeking behaviours, and generate considerable compensation (several relocated apartments and cash compensation) through redevelopment projects.

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They are described as people “who live on rental collection or compensation” and are “unwilling to work in low-paid industries.” Therefore, it seems that urban villagers are usually not considered a typical vulnerable group. However, as pointed out in the World Bank’s report “Inclusion Matters,” poverty and exclusion are not the same, and both rich and poor groups can be ostracised (The World Bank 2013). In my research, the relatively affluent villagers can also experience social exclusion when facing institutional suppressions or rights depravations. Their protests can be fuelled by not only demanding fair compensation, but also striving for democratic participations. Third, although social exclusion and social inclusion appear to be intertwined concepts, the term social inclusion has not been closely integrated into the academic debates. The term is usually defined in an implied, asserted manner in relation to exclusion—“as whatever is not socially excluded” (Cameron 2006: 397). Therefore, the aspect from which the outcomes of social inclusion are analysed can be subtle. In the Xi’an government’s annual reports on urban village redevelopment, the effectiveness of social inclusion is usually shown in figures. This seems reasonable, because it is always clear and easy to assess redevelopment outcomes by physical sphere such as clearance of sites, new buildings and improvement of living environment that can be measured and reported in official statistics. Thus, in these reports, the physical emphasis of redevelopment outcomes has been accentuated: the number of villages that are demolished and relocated, the size, quality and scale of the relocated housing, the number of villagers who change their household registration status, the amount of money that is spent on compensation, and so on. The problem is, however, that by focusing on figures, policy makers assume a direct causal link between the increase of the figures and the improvement of social inclusion. As in the aforementioned cases, judging from the figures, both Nanyaotou and Xihe are identified as “successful case” by the local government after the redevelopment. The realities, however, seem to tell different stories. As little information comes from the villagers’ side, this research will focus on comparing different perspectives, namely the official and the grassroots side.

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1.5 Book Plan 1.5.1 Research Questions It is in light of the above discussions that the research is situated. The main research question is: in the context of the urban village redevelopment, what would citizenship entail in creating social inclusion? In order to answer this question, the research therefore follows two paths in parallel—the up and the down. It studies both the power that dominates urban village developments and the powerless who are displaced during redevelopments, with a focus on the process through which urban villagers are included or excluded. However, the research is neither about redevelopment policies nor about urban villages qua artefact. It looks at the potentials of using citizenship to explain the rationales behind policy-making and villagers’ actions during the process of redevelopments. In other words, the key is not only to get access to the official records and documents, but also to be as close as possible to the people involved in these social settings. Three sets of sub-questions are raised to help organise the rest of the book. The first asks how is social exclusion/inclusion interpreted by policy makers? From the viewpoint of policy makers, where is citizenship situated in shaping social inclusion in the process of urban village redevelopment? These questions try to translate official narratives into the rights language. The focus here is not only to identify the economic, social and political rights related to urban village redevelopments in official documents, but also to understand policy makers’ attitudes towards these rights. Second, how is social exclusion/inclusion interpreted by urban villagers? In comparison with policy makers’ interpretations of social inclusion, what are the implications of villagers’ different interpretations of citizenship? These questions look at urban villagers’ understandings of social inclusion in response to the officials. The major task is to translate people’s actions into the rights language: identifying the various types of rights through which people engage in the redevelopment process. In making rights-claims, different types and forms of rights are identified by scholars. Rights can be claimed to freedom and individualisation in socialisation (Lefebvre 1996[1968]), to political spaces with regard to

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national citizenship (Dikec 2005), to communal goods such as cultural, language and tradition (Malik 1996), to autonomy and geography of occupation (Vasudevan 2014), or to social-economic entitlements such as right to housing, work, education, transportation, and natural resources (Waldron 1993; Phillips and Gilbert 2005; Holston 2008). Therefore, it is worth asking what forms of rights the policy makers and urban villagers imply when they talk about social inclusion. Third, what do villagers strive for during urban village redevelopment? What differences do their efforts make in creating social inclusion? These questions seek to establish connections between the outcome of urban village redevelopments and the rights that villagers strive for during redevelopments. An important reason to look at redevelopment outcomes from the perspective of citizenship and rights is to overcome the dilemma of equality. When looking at the result of social inclusion, there is a confliction between equality of opportunity and the equality of outcome; emphasising on either side would require sacrificing the other to a certain extent (Seidman and Rappaport 1986). If the inclusionary strategies aim to create equality of opportunity for everyone, the outcomes of inclusion could be unequal because of individuals or groups’ different capabilities of utilising resources. For example, during my fieldwork I noticed that two redeveloped urban villages (Renjiakou village and Qiwang village), both of which are allocated with commercial development land (equality of opportunity), have very different results due to their abilities to manage properties (inequality of outcomes). If an analytical framework takes merely the objective outcomes as the measurement threshold, it actually measures social inclusion based on “equality of outcomes,” and thus falls short in the dual dilemma of equality. The perspective of rights, on the other hand, emphasis on equal opportunity by looking at what villagers have/pursue during urban village redevelopments.

1.5.2 Research Methods This research follows a mixed methodology. By combining both qualitative and quantitative methods, it allows researchers to develop creative ways of collecting richer data (Jick 1979) and helps with complementing and

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clarifying the results of one method with the results of the other method (Sechrest and Sidana 1995). Following Bryman’s (2006) instructive questions to clarify the process of a mixed methodology, the resources, collection, interpretation, and use of data on the utilisation of multiple research methods are explained as follows. First of all, which has priority—the quantitative or qualitative data (Bryman 2006: 98)? This research integrates both qualitative and quantitative methods with a qualitatively driven approach, in which the research design is predominantly a qualitative study with quantitative data added to complement clearer explanations to the research questions. At what stage(s) in the research process does multi-strategy research occur? Is there more than one data strand (Bryman 2006: 98)? In order to answer the research questions from the official’s’ and villagers’ perspectives, this research is a multi-strand study that includes archival research, interviews, questionnaires and parallel case studies. The multi-strategy research occurs throughout the stages of data collection and analysis. For the first set of questions that focuses on “the up,” archival study is the key method. Questionnaires are used mainly for the second set of questions to look at the same issues from the villagers’ standpoint. For the third set of questions, case studies provide analyses in depth on what villagers strive for. Interviews are conducted for all questions to elicit more detailed and personal opinions. Are the quantitative and qualitative data collected simultaneously or sequentially (Bryman 2006: 99)? The primary data presented in the thesis were collected from extensive fieldwork in Xi’an from 2012 to 2016, during which I spent a total of eleven months in the field, and the qualitative and quantitative data, were collected simultaneously. First of all, I did archival studies on the redevelopments of the urban villages in Xi’an, based on the six redeveloped urban villages were selected as studied cases. Then questionnaire study was conducted in the six villages to get a preliminary understanding of villagers’ opinions on economic, social, political and psychological inclusions. After that, I started to explore in detail the exclusionary or inclusionary process during the redevelopments of the six urban villages. Interviews with officials and indigenous urban villagers were conducted throughout the fieldwork.

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What is the function of the integration (Bryman 2006: 99)? The quantitative data collected from questionnaires are used for the purposes of complement and triangulation. In Chap. 3 policy makers’ interpretation on social inclusion is discussed based on archival study and interviews. Correspondingly, villagers’ interpretation on the same issues is discussed in Chap. 4 based on the information from both questionnaires and interviews. In Chap. 5, the conclusions found in case studies—the key factors that make a difference in creating social inclusion—are also validated by the results of the questionnaire study.

Case Studies Six urban villages were selected for the purpose of parallel case study (Fig. 1.3): Nanyaotou Village (N1), Nankang Village (N2), Miaopotou Village (M), Wuyi Village (W), and Renjiakou Village (R), all of which were redeveloped between 2003 and 2011. The six villages are located in the old urban areas, including the old city centre, the industrial area, the university area, and the cultural area, and they have different situations in

Fig. 1.3  Location of the studied urban villages. (Credit: Author)

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term of economic strength, village administration, and hukou status after redevelopment (further details in Chap. 4, Sect. 4.1). A village’s economic strength has considerable influence on villagers’ share in and benefits from collective village assets, as well as the types of redevelopment practice. Besides, villagers’ access to social welfares and the ways they manage their villages are closely related to their hukou status. Therefore, the different characteristics of the six villages provide variety of development scenarios enabled me to explore the key factors that influence inclusionary process.

I nterviewing Appendix B shows a list of interviewees. For the purpose of anonymity, the interview codes in this thesis take the form “O/V/IYYXX,” in which O refers to officials, V refers to indigenous villagers from the studied urban villages, and I refers to other interviewees such as the tenants in urban villages or other Xi’an urban citizens; YY is the year the interview was conducted; and XX is the number of the interview in that group. In this research, a total of 44 interviews were conducted from 2012 to 2014, including 35 indigenous villagers and 9 officials. The interviewed officials were from planning authorities at both municipal level and district level, including Xi’an Urban Regeneration Office, Xi’an City Planning Bureau, and Urban Regeneration Offices in Yanta district, Lianhu district, Weiyang district and Beilin district. Another enjoyable yet important part in my fieldwork was speaking to different people besides planning authorities and urban villagers. Although some people I talked to were not the target groups in this research, through frequently asking and getting answers to the questions such as “what do you think about urban villages?” and “in your opinion who benefits and who loses from urban village redevelopment?” I still gained valuable information on their views on urban villager redevelopments. Their comments helped me to better understand villagers’ responses to redevelopment policies. Therefore, I put nine complementary interviewees in the list, including four migrant workers, three young

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graduates, and two urbanites. They were referred to as “other interviewees.” Most interviews were individual, although some of interviews with villagers were collective. These interviews usually lasted for an hour, with exceptional cases up to three hours. The interviews with officials took the form of semi-structured, during which an interview guide was prepared in order to be content-focused. Most of the questions focused on four issues. The first issue was about redevelopment policies—their merits and insufficiencies and plans for further improvement. The second issue focused on their understanding of social inclusion, and the key strategies for creating inclusion. The third issue was their comments on villagers’ participations in the process of redevelopments. The last issue was about conflicts generated in specific redevelopment cases. The interviews with urban villagers were in-depth interviews, which allowed me to focus on villagers’ personal accounts of urban village redevelopment and their perceptions on social inclusion in their own words. The questions I asked were determined by villagers’ responses. However, the guiding questions mostly focused on their experiences before and during redevelopments, as well as their comments on inclusionary strategies in the extant redevelopment policies. Before commencing interviews, I spent about a month as a warm-up period. I walked around different urban villages—not only the six selected cases but also other redeveloped urban villages in general—to observe what happened in villagers’ everyday lives. Additionally, I also attended a village meeting held by the village committee of N1, which was aimed at discussing the second round of redevelopment plan, as well as the relocation ceremony of Qiwang village. This process provided nuanced and valuable information on villagers’ daily lives and the interactions between urban villagers and other urbanites.

Questionnaires As discussed earlier in research design, questionnaires are used for three reasons: providing information to draw a clearer picture of the studied cases, complementing the data from interviewing, and validating the results of case studies.

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The design of questionnaires begins with a fully extended notion of citizenship rights in three domains (civil and political rights such as the rights to life and personal security, to be equal before law, and to free expression, assembly and political participation; economic rights such as the rights to housing and adequate standard of living; social rights such as the rights to education, to social security, and to health and well-being). Each of the three domains is put in the practical context to see if it changed during redevelopment, because my purpose was to explore whether the changes influenced the process of exclusion/inclusion. Then the applicable domains are grouped into four sets of quantitative indicators for questionnaire survey: “financial situations” that helped explain villagers’ rights to property and development, “access to social benefits” that reflected villagers’ social rights, “living environment and facilities” that focused on villagers’ rights to adequate standard of living, and “participation in urban village redevelopment” that represented part of villagers’ political rights. Thus, the questionnaire for the research consisted of six sections (Appendix A): social-demographic characteristics, financial situations, hukou and access to social benefits, living environment and facilities, participation in urban village redevelopment, and sense of inclusion. Social-demographic information help illustrate the social features of the households in selected urban villages. Questions are designed to reflect villagers’ perspectives, and the notion of “feel included” involves villagers’ comparison both with other urban citizens and with themselves at different time points. First, after each set of quantitative indicators, villages are also asked to compare the changes of indicators before and after redevelopment to see whether they feel the changes were positive or negative. This self-comparison before and after redevelopments is for the purpose of overcoming the time limitation of my research. For example, when villagers are asked to compare the economic situations of their families before and after redevelopments, the comparison is not based on figures such as annual household income or bank savings, but rather based on villagers’ perceptions (do they think their families’ economic situations are getting better or worth after redevelopments?). By doing this, villagers subconsciously compare themselves with others—reference groups may be their relatives, neighbours, or other urban citizens—at different time points, and draw the conclusion

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on whether their situations have improved over time. Villagers’ self-­ comparison can be crucial in revealing the process of exclusion/inclusion during urban village redevelopments. Second, this questionnaire design takes citizenship and citizenship rights as starting points, and uses people’s perceptions as a barometer for the effectiveness of policy in achieving social inclusion. Sense of inclusion is interpreted based on social fairness and equality, which involves villagers’ comparison both with other urban citizens and with themselves at different time points. The last part of questionnaires focuses on villagers’ sense of inclusion and asks them direct questions on their “feelings,” and the key point is to explore whether urban villagers feel they are being treated equally compared with other urban citizens. The survey used structured questionnaires. In every selected village, 100 questionnaires were distributed randomly and directly to the indigenous villagers (not tenants) in order to guarantee valid respondents (in W, X, and R households usually got multiple relocated dwellings and would rent out the vacant ones). In total 513 valid questionnaires were collected.

Archival Research All of the selected cases in this research are redeveloped urban villages, thus a key focus of the research design is to retrieve information on the exclusionary/inclusionary process during urban village redevelopments. Both interviewing and questionnaire can provide rich information from villagers’ perspectives. Policy makers’ opinions, on the other hand, can be reflected through a thorough study of related archives complemented by the information from interviews. The archival sources in this research includes both current and non-­ current records from the Xi’an Urban Regeneration Office, Xi’an City Planning Bureau, Shaanxi Urban Construction Archive and Xi’an Archive, but were also extended to include public announcements and internal reports from the Regeneration Office and the Planning Bureau. The collected information focus on three topics. The first is the related laws and Supreme Court’s judicial interpretations, which acknowledge

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people’s variety of citizenship rights, all of which establish the legal foundations and help to understand the legal environment of Chinese citizenship in this research. The second is the policies issued by Xi’an planning authorities on the redevelopment of urban villages. Additionally, as urban village redevelopments have been widely covered by social media, information from newspapers and the Internet were also browsed and collected as complementary data. However, in order to guarantee the credibility of information, sources of social media were carefully selected and limited to official newspapers such as Xi’an Daily, Xi’an Evening News, and Sanqin Daily, as well as the websites of planning authorities.

1.5.3 Book Plan The book is composed of six chapters. Chapter 1 explains why the urban village redevelopment in Xi’an is worthy of study and justifies the use of citizenship as the key concept to study social exclusion/inclusion, followed by the explanation of research design. Chapter 2 starts with the concept of social exclusion, and develops a coherent theoretical framework in which citizenship is situated to explore the exclusionary/inclusionary process of urban village redevelopment. Chapter 3 explores how the notion of inclusion is interpreted by policy makers and the rationales behind their interpretations. Compared with the official interpretations, Chap. 4 explores villagers’ understandings of social inclusion, and explains how their actions towards redevelopment are determined by their different interpretations. Chapter 5 takes a further step to discuss what villagers strive for in achieving social inclusion during urban village redevelopment. Chapter 6 gives an analytical conclusion and provides some reflective thinking.

Notes 1. According to the Land Administration Law, “All units and individuals that need land for construction purposes shall, in accordance with law, apply for the use of State-owned land, with the exception of the collective economic organisations and peasants of such organisations that have lawfully obtained approval of using the land owned by peasant collectives of

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these organisations to build township or town enterprises or to build houses for villagers and the units and individuals that have lawfully obtained approval of using the land owned by peasant collectives to build public utilities or public welfare undertakings of a township (town) or village.” The original text of the Land Administration Law is available at http://www. china.org.cn/china/LegislationsForm2001-­2 010/2011-­0 2/14/content_21917380.htm [Accessed: 8 December 2019]. 2. The tier system of city classification stems from the Chinese government’s classification system. Being without an official acknowledgement, the tier system may seem sketchy by academic standards. However, it is widely used in media, and is broadly interpreted by many economists and business consultants. Thus, the tire system is an effective way to make a reference to Chinese cities based on GDP, geographical scale, impact on regional agglomeration economies, and political positions. According to the latest ranking, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen are first-­ tier cities; Xi’an is one of the second-tier cities.

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2 From Social Exclusion to Social Inclusion: Where Does Citizenship Fit In?

2.1 Introduction In recent years there has been a rising trend among Chinese politicians to attempt to converge China’s values with Western theories in regard to policy-making and the interpretation of social phenomena: the result has been termed “Chinese characteristics” or “the Chinese model.” These attempts emphasise that China’s development process is inherently derived from its long historical experiences and is profoundly influenced by its complicated political and cultural traditions; thus, China is in some way “exceptional” and is building its own road (Perry 2008). However, no matter how many times Western theories have been considered not compatible with China’s social, economic, and political situations, Chinese academia is still characterised by a domination of Western theories (Callahan 2012; Jakimow 2012). In this book, it is acknowledged that both the ideas “social exclusion/inclusion” and “citizenship” have Western roots, but they have been developed to relate to the Chinese context. Originating in policy discourse in France in the mid-1970s, the terms “social exclusion/inclusion” began to make frequent appearances in both © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 X. Zhang, In the Name of Inclusion, New Perspectives on Chinese Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6120-1_2

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European Union reports and academic discourses during the 1980s and 1990s. Debates concerning social exclusion emerged within the historical settings of both the development of the modern welfare state in Europe and political concerns regarding social cohesion in France. As Pierson (1991: 100) indicates, “welfare states tended to emerge in societies in which capitalism and the nation state were both already well-established and these pre-existing economic and state formations have themselves prescribed the limits of subsequent welfare state development.” In the nineteenth century, the modernisation and industrialisation of the capitalist countries resulted in both the accumulated of large amounts of capital and the creation of a new type of the deprived—the working class in capitalist cities (Isin 2000). Soon the social tensions between the rich and the poor, with its increasing threats to the social order, made the state realise the governments’ roles in the protection and promotion of the economic and social well-being of its citizens. Various measures such as the introduction of social insurance, the extension of citizenship in public welfare, the enforcement of factory legislation, and the institutionalisation of industrial relations were adopted with the purpose of raising and redistributing limited funds for the relief of poverty and social tensions (Pierson 1991). Meanwhile, social cohesion has been a major political and cultural concern in France since the Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century—during which the demands for “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” became prominent and were involved with an emphasis on creating social bound between members of society and nation-states (Mathieson et al. 2008). This French concern was reinforced during late-­ twentieth-­century globalisation as a response to the problems of rising unemployment which were created by an institutional shift to privatisation, liberalisation, and a reduction in public services (Bhalla and Lapeyre 2004). It was in this historical and cultural setting that Rene Lenoir coined the term “social exclusion” in 1974. In Lenoir’s policy initiative, those who were considered excluded included a selected range of vulnerable groups that were not protected under social insurance principles, including the “mentally and physically handicapped, suicidal people, aged invalids, abused children, substance abusers, delinquents, single parents, multi-problem households, marginal, asocial persons, and other social ‘misfits’” (Silver 1995: 63). As the

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French government’s social insurance only targeted people who were in paid work or the who were married to such people, Lenoir’s “excluded” constituted the majority of population groups, in France, who were unable to find secure jobs with stable salaries, and were thus limited in, or deprived of, social citizenship rights. A long-term, stable employment status was considered as the foundation of social relations and networks— which not only kept social members out of poverty, but also illuminated their sense of self-respect and dignity (O’Brien and Penna 2008). Following Lenoir’s original idea, the term was then disseminated across European counties as a fashionable “item” of political rhetoric which went along with the European Union’s promotion of anti-poverty programmes from 1975 to 1994 (Room 1995). For example, social exclusion first came to light in the UK Conservative government’s rhetoric, in the 1980s, which addressed the problem of income poverty. In the 1990s, especially after Tony Blair’s New Labour government came into power in 1997, the term was used enthusiastically with its meaning gradually shifting to multi-deprivation (Mathieson et al. 2008). In the meantime, increasingly, academic literature began to contribute the debates on social exclusion, explaining how the EU’s shift from a poverty focus to a social one serves a political purpose (Sen 2000; Walker and Smith 2002; Estivill 2003), and scrutinising the usefulness of the term in relation to both developed and developing countries (Gore and Figueiredo 1997; Saith 2001). The “World Summit for Social Development” held in Copenhagen in 1995 gave social exclusion a broader global context and brought the term to discourses within developing countries, including China. As the United Nations pointed out at the conference, poverty, unemployment and social exclusion affects and hinders social development in almost every country (United Nations 1995). Meanwhile several programmes were lunched with the support of the International Labour Organisation and the International Institute for Labour Studies; these tried to develop a unifying global policy framework. The main conclusions of these programmes affirmed the valuable potential of social exclusion studies in relation to developing countries in an era of globalisation, and recognised the limitations of applying a concept developed in a well-established welfare system to national states with minimal welfare provision and weak governance (Rodgers et al. 1995; IILS 1996, 1998).

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Citizenship is also a concept which has its origins in Western politics and culture. It represents a relationship between the citizen and the state as it has existed in the development of state-society relations in Europe. In Ancient Greece the status of “citizen” was only conferred on certain males. In the modern era, however, the concept has been re-interpreted to resonate with inclusion and universality (Yarwood 2014). Citizenship was once considered as a unique Western concept; and oriental societies like China were too despotic and their populace too servile for this idea to have gestated (Guo 2014). In Aristotle’s discussion on citizenship (1995: 121), it was stated that Asian people in history tended to be obedient to despotic governments, rather than to rebel against them. Weber (1958)’s study attributed the emergence of citizenship to two preconditions: the disruption of clan and taboo barriers, and the formation of fraternal urbanite associations. He pointed out that although oriental counties had large and prosperous cities, the lack of these preconditions made it impossible for them to have a connection with the concept of citizenship. The first turning point was in the early twentieth century, especially after the Chinese Revolution that overthrew the last imperial dynasty in 1911, when the Western concept of citizenship began to be transplanted into China through colonisation (Zarrow 1997). Intellectuals at that time believed that individualism was the foundation of Western citizenship, and that all the social and political achievements in Western societies derived from the pursuit of the individual’s happiness (Guo 2014). Thus they tried to arouse people’s citizen consciousness and establish a Chinese nation-state by advocating the spirit of “self-interest,” “self-­ fulfillment,” and “self-happiness” (ibid.: 16). After the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, China established its social and political structures by following Russia’s example, and Marxism gradually replaced the former intellectuals’ earlier endeavours to cultivate a political environment which would support Western style citizenship. The second turning point was in 1979, when China adopted the Reform of Opening Policy and a market based economy. Since then, China has progressively emerged as a powerful economic force. The change in the economic environment brought “unintended social consequences” such as the establishment of non-governmental and

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non-political organisations (Guo and Guo 2014: 7). Against this background, the practice of citizenship in China—such as participating in elections, petitions, and/or demonstrations had become prominent— and citizenship once more became a heated topic in Chinese social studies (Deng 1992; Yu 1993). Following the foregoing introduction on how the two concepts have been brought to bear on China, this chapter tries to make sense of their uses in a Chinese context. It establishes the theoretical framework by answering two questions: first, in which aspects are the theories of social exclusion and citizenship malleable and capable of being adapted to fit into the Chinese scenario; and second, what is the function of citizenship in creating social inclusion in China?

2.2 The Meanings of Social Exclusion The term “social exclusion” can be defined from either a narrow or a broad perspective. From a narrow perspective, it simply re-labels the concepts of poverty and multi-deprivation, usually taking employment status as a starting point. For example, the Social Exclusion Unit established by the UK New Labour government in 1997 defines social exclusion as “a shorthand for what can happen when people or areas suffer from a combination of linked problems such as unemployment, poor skills, low incomes, poor housing, high crime environments, bad health and family breakdown (SEU 1997, quoted in Jermyn 2001: 2).” Similarly, Whelan and Whelan’s (1995) study focuses on the marginalisation of working-­ class people in terms of material deprivation, such as financial difficulties and the absence of housing facilities. According to this narrow interpretation, the remedial strategies in relation to social exclusion are facilitating participation in the labour market and the promotion of social security schemes (such as the Minimum Income for Social Integration in France, and the Minimum Living Standard Scheme in China). According to a broader interpretation, social exclusion is understood to be the denial of opportunities for social participation and the deprivation of certain types of rights (economic, social and political rights). Mathieson et al. (2008: 86) quote Fraser’s definition of social exclusion as

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“a kind of injustice but not always total economic deprivation that can be remedied with redistribution. On the contrary, the concept is located in the intersection of two dimensions of social injustice: bad distribution and the lack of recognition.” Room (1995: 7) also argues, “where citizens are unable to secure their social rights, they will tend to suffer processes of generalised and persisting disadvantage and their social and occupational participation will be undermined.” Therefore, according to this broad interpretation, an inclusion strategy would inevitably be linked to “empowering the excluded” and “providing inclusive environment for democratic participation.” My intention in this book is not to develop a clear and universal criterion with which to define exclusion, but to comb various definitions in the extant literature via the question: WHO gets excluded from WHAT and HOW? WHO refers to the people who are at risk of being excluded, WHAT refers to the consequences and problems associated to social exclusion, and HOW refers to the structured systems or agents that create social exclusion. By answering the question, I hope to understand systematically the notion of social exclusion; hence, its usefulness in China can be further scrutinised in later sections.

2.2.1 Definitions: Who, What, and How First, who is excluded? The extant literatures indicate that both individuals and groups may be excluded on the basis of their identities. In the definition adopted by the UK Department for International Development (DFID 2005: 3), social exclusion is a process by which “certain groups are systematically disadvantaged because they are discriminated against on the basis of their ethnicity, race, religion, sexual orientation, caste, descent, gender, age, disability, HIV status, migrant status or where they live.” Similarly, Landman (2006: 19) also describes social exclusion as “discrimination against individuals and groups based on one or many different social attributes or elements of social identity.” In recent decades, new groups such as the indigenous facing displacement from their lands, and migrants confronting barriers of integration must be taken into account—with the rapidly increasing trends in urbanisation and

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globalisation, particularly in developing countries (Hall and Patrinos 2006). Besides, taking the protest movements in the Middle East as an example, the World Bank’s (2013) latest report on social exclusion indicates that excluded people are not necessarily socially disadvantage groups who experience financial difficulties. Looking worldwide there are a growing number of middle-class citizens who experience exclusion and demand greater political space and a greater voice in their countries’ decision-­making processes. In general, exclusion can happen at many levels—in households, villages, communities, cities and regions. Second, what are these individuals or groups excluded from? Exclusion based on different social identities can lead to a low social position in terms of financial status, human capital endowment, and political standing. In Silver’s (1994: 541) study, she listed, as indicators, fourteen sets of situations from which people can be excluded; these are “a livelihood; secure, permanent employment; earnings; property; credit, or land; housing; the minimal or prevailing consumption level; education, skills, and cultural capital; the benefits provided by the welfare state; citizenship and equality before the law; participation in the democratic process; public goods; the nation or the dominant race; the family and sociability; humane treatment, respect, personal fulfillment, understanding.” The World Bank (2013) also develops a systematic sets of domains from which people are excluded: markets, services, and spaces. Markets include land, housing, labour and credit, through which people make routine daily interactions in society. Services encompass a wide range of indicators in social and economic lives, as specified in the report: “health and education services enhance human capital. Social protection services cushion vulnerable groups against the effects of shocks and promote their wellbeing. Transport services enhance mobility and connect individuals to opportunities. Water and sanitation are essential for good health. Access to energy is important for livelihoods and for human capital. And information services enhance connectedness and allow individuals to take part in the ‘new economy’” (ibid.: 11). The third domain is that of physical spaces, and the process of exclusion from these is usually solidified by social, political and cultural issues. An overt example illustrated in the report is the places that are only reserved for dominant groups during apartheid.

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In general terms, the situations from which individuals and groups are excluded can be categorised into three domains: citizenship rights, markets, and social arenas. Third, how are people excluded? Social exclusion can be tangible or it can be intangible. It usually plays out in the process of economic transformation, manifests through institutional arrangements, or engrains social norms and beliefs. As the South Australian Labour Party, quoted in Mathieson et al. (2008: 87–88), indicates, social exclusion is “created by harsh and unjust economic conditions compounded by difficult social environments and made worse by insensitive government policies and government neglect.” From the perspectives of economic transformation and globalisation, in the 1970s when the exclusion concept was first coined, the trend towards globalisation brought about drastic economic and social change. On the one hand, the European financial crisis triggered an industrial restructuring—from old established manufacturing methods to new technologies and the opening up of the labour market in tertiary industries; on the other hand, political and financial decentralisation saw a retreat in state-provided welfare and protection (Tsoukalis 1993). It is in this process of economic transformation that groups of people were “forgotten” or “left behind,” and globalisation “proceeds selectively, including and excluding segments of economies and societies in and out of the networks of information, wealth and power that characterise the new dominant system” (Castells 1998:162). Besides, exclusion does not simply happen through economic restructuring but also takes places through formal or informal institutional arrangements. For example, in China there is a proliferation of literature which discusses how different groups—urban migrants, rural migrant workers, or urban residents—are excluded from social services, labour market, social protection schemes, and access to affordable housings based on the legal but inequitable Household Registration System (Wu 2004; Jiang et al. 2008; Zhang and Treiman 2013). Wu’s (2010) study also explores how the new poverty is created by the state’s shift away from all-inclusive public funding and provision of services, to a basic national-­ scale citizenship that is founded on property rights in a minimum form. Furthermore, exclusion can be overlain and reinforced by intangible practices such as social norms and customs. For example, the caste system

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in India is considered as both an institutionalised system and a cultural system of social exclusion and discrimination (Negi 2011; Chaudhry 2013). Also in the cases I have studied, the stereotypes of “lazy” and “not willing to work” stigmatise some of the indigenous villagers involved in the process of urban village redevelopment. In general, social exclusion is understood as an involuntary process which results in the denial of opportunities, as Burchardt et al. (1999: 229) defines it, “An individual is socially excluded if (a) he or she is geographically resident in a society but (b) for reasons beyond his or her control, he or she cannot participate in the normal activities of citizens in that society.” The discussion so far has indicated that social exclusion is a concept loaded with a plethora of definitions. As social exclusion is not a concept which originated in the social sciences, for decades intellectual endeavours have been undertaken by both academics and political actors to influence the development of the concept. Although its usage is criticised for being indeterminate and polysemic (Sen 2000), and the attempts at establishing its typology is inevitably reductionist (Fragonard cited in Silver 1994: 536), still many efforts have been made to find a consensus among the various definitions. Graham Room’s (1992, 1995, 1999) studies on the main features of social exclusion are given the primary credit for developing the concept as “multidimensional, dynamic, and relational.” First, social exclusion is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. It can happen in relation to a variety of dimensions (economic resources, social integration, political participation, cultural discrimination, and personal recognition), and at different levels (individual, household, community, states, and regions). As social exclusion was used, initially, to replace the poverty discourse, its conceptual framework is also structured in relation to a monetary approach to poverty. Room’s conceptual shift from poverty to multi-dimensional disadvantage broadens the notions of social exclusion beyond income poverty. He points out that the problems of people excluded from the labour market or social welfare systems cannot necessarily be solved by monetary compensation (Room 1995). The strength of social exclusion is that it includes deprivation in a number of spheres, and Room looks at the links between the different dimensions that lead

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to multi-deprivation, rather than at the dimensions individually (Clert 1999). Second, social exclusion is a dynamic concept. The merit of the concept of social exclusion is not in counting the numbers nor describing the characteristics of the excluded, but rather in understanding the process of exclusion and identifying the factors that can trigger exclusionary situations (Room 1995). Thus the concept focuses on the exclusionary process over time rather than on the status quo. People are excluded “not just because they are currently without a job or income but because they have little prospects for the future. Assessment of extent of social exclusion has therefore to go beyond current status” (Atkinson 1998: 6). The dynamic notion of social exclusion represents a way of explaining the power relationships underlying and producing inequalities (Mathieson et al. 2008). Third, social exclusion is a relational concept, with its focus shifting from distributional outcomes in poverty to social relationships in exclusionary processes (Saith 2001). Room (1999) argues that exclusion happens when there is a rupture between the excluded and society, because the vulnerability of individuals or households results not only from their own resources (or lack thereof ) but also from their relationship with “outer” resources controlled by family members, communities, or the state. Kronauer (1998) develops similar notions and points out that social exclusion is produced by people’s relationship with markets, institutions, other social groups, cultural standards, and geographical location. Sen’s studies also focus on the relational dimension of social ­exclusion— the comparisons of different persons’ opportunities and the deprivation of opportunities. In his studies, social exclusion is explained in relation to capability deprivation, as “social exclusion can be constitutively a part of capability deprivation as well as instrumentally a cause of diverse capability failures. (Sen 2000: 5)” He indicates that exclusion from social relations, such as exclusion from a community, whose intrinsic nature is a type of capability deprivation, is constitutive deprivation; other forms of social exclusion such as exclusion from credit markets, which is not deprivation in itself but may lead to the deprivation of other opportunities, is instrumental deprivation (Sen 1992, 2000). He thus identifies two types of social exclusion: active exclusion as a direct result of policies and regulations from political authorities and passive exclusion through “social

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processes in which there is no deliberate attempt to exclude (Sen 2000: 15)” such as “isolation generated by a sluggish economy and a consequent accentuation of poverty” (ibid.). His interpretation is closely integrated with the wider debate on social justice and equality, as he argues that individual differences and constraints can affect people’s capabilities, thus enabling people to enhance their capabilities within their environments leads to equality of opportunity (Sen 1990). Based on Room’s studies, Millar (2007: 2) further supplements the consensus on social exclusion. He argues that the agency of exclusion should “lie beyond the narrow responsibility of the individuals.” The excluded should not be blamed. They are excluded by the actions of other individuals and institutions. However, the excluded usually have their own ways of coping with exclusion. While the above studies try to find consensus among the various definitions of social exclusion, Silver’s studies attribute social exclusion to different causes, and sheds light on the understanding of the political roots of the various definitions. Silver (1994, 1995) argues that social exclusion is understood differently depending on the nature of the particular society, or the dominant model of the society from which exclusion occurs: its meanings and usage vary according to national and ideological context. Therefore, she identifies three paradigms—solidarity, specialisation, and monopoly—to distinguish the different political ideologies and national discourses in which social exclusion is grounded. Each paradigm provides “an explanation of multiple forms of social disadvantage—economic, social, political and cultural—and thus encompasses theories of citizenship and racial-ethic inequality as well as poverty and long-term unemployment” (Silver 1994: 539). The “solidarity paradigm” is rooted in the French republican thought that attributes the social exclusion problem to the rupture of the social bond between the individual and society. In this paradigm, society is viewed as something external, normative, and moral, and the solidarity of society is grounded in shared values rather than in individuals’ interests. As Silver notes, “a national consensus, collective conscience, or general will ties the individual to larger society through vertically interrelated mediating institutions” (Silver 1994: 541). Thus the inverse of the

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exclusion is moral integration—a process of assimilation into the dominant culture. The second paradigm is the “specialisation paradigm,” which is rooted in Anglo-Saxon liberal thought. In the liberal tradition, individuals are perceived as equal, rational, and self-determining social actors who differ from each other. The social structure is built around a division of labour and exchange in both the economic and social spheres; social order is conceived as a network, in which individuals are assumed to be able to exchange and move across the economic divisions of labour out of their own interests and motivations voluntarily and freely (Gore 1995: 7). Ideally, social groups are constituted voluntarily, and the shifting among them simply reflects differentiated interests and desires rather than social hierarchy (Silver 1995: 4). In this paradigm, exclusion is a form of discrimination that happens when individuals are denied the freedom to move between spheres, because of unenforced rights and/or market failures. Thus inclusion is through market competition and the liberal state’s protection of individual rights. Finally, the “monopoly paradigm” is rooted in the social democratic idea that views social exclusion as a consequence of group monopoly, with exclusive social entities controlling scarce resources. In this paradigm, social order is viewed as a set of hierarchical power relations, “exclusion entails the interplay of class, status, and political power and serves the interests of the included” (Silver 1995: 6). Inclusion is achieved through “citizenship, and the extension of equal membership and full participation in the community to outsiders” (Silver 1994: 543). It may be difficult to define exclusion universally, because the empirical uses of the term vary in different social and political environments. As Silver (1995: 3) notes, “The concept is not only reflected in such terms as the new poverty, inequality, and the underclass, but also superfluity, irrelevance, marginality, foreignness, alterity, closure, disaffiliation, dispossession, discrimination, deprivation, and destitution.” However, it is the diversity of the concept that makes it malleable for different political environments, and Silver’s studies provide a theoretical underpinning for an understanding of social exclusion which can be adapted for use in China.

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2.2.2 Social Exclusion in China Studies concerning social exclusion in China started in the late 1990s, after the agreement reached at the Copenhagen Conference in 1995. In the early studies, the most widely used concept was the definition from the British Social Exclusion Unit: social exclusion happens “when people or areas suffer from a combination of linked problems such as unemployment, poor skills, low incomes, poor housing, high crime environments, bad health and family breakdown (SEU quoted in Jermyn 2001: 2).” According to Li (2005), the reason for the popularity of this definition in China was that, firstly the definition was practical and indicated specific dimensions which could be used as entry points for research. Second, the definition focused on the social and economic dimensions of exclusion, avoiding political sensitivity in the Chines context. Thus the concept was used merely to re-label poverty issues, and the discussion was limited to people and households suffering from basic poverty (Sun 2002). For example, in Tang’s (2002, translated and quoted by Li 2005: 2) studies he identified the excluded as “living under bare subsistence, not being able to afford healthcare and education, and not being social.” He suggested a wide-coverage, universal social security system to remedy poverty, to establish an inclusionary society, and to develop social solidarity (Tang 2002). As the concept developed in China, the academic focus gradually shifted from poverty to multi-dimensional exclusion. By way of example, Li and Xiong’s study (2006) pointed out that rural migrant workers in urban areas are excluded from public services, formal labour market and social relations; also Sun (2007) concluded that laid-off urban workers not only were faced with economic deprivation and limited social protection, but also experienced self-abasement when attempting to socialise. Tang (2002) focused on the relationship between formal labour markets, public services, and access to social security provisions. He concluded that, with the reform of social and economic structures which had taken place, both urban people and rural-to-urban migrants could experience exclusion from public services and social welfare if they did not enter the formal labour market.

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Liu et al.’s study (2008) looked at the dynamic and relational dimensions of social exclusion. By exploring the exclusionary process affecting the new urban poor and poor rural-to-urban migrants during the development of urbanisation and social transformation, they concluded that the two groups were faced with different types of exclusions. The urban poor experienced market exclusion and welfare deficiency because they were left behind in the transition from a planned to a market economy; the poor rural migrants were excluded from welfare, public services, and urban society due to the institutional arrangement of the rural-urban division. They stressed that “providing equal development chances, especially equal opportunities for education and employment” should be the priority when attempting to create social inclusion. As discussed previously, the extant social exclusion studies all follow one or more of three approaches: the morality-based approach that emphasises discrimination, stigma, and human rights (Estivill 2003; Gough and Eisenschitz 2006); the participation-based approach that emphasises access to market or society (Paugam 1996; Burchardt et al. 1999); and the citizenship-based approach that emphasises the citizenship rights of citizens or members of political groups or communities (Curran et al. 2007). These three approaches are not completely independent. For example, the individuals or groups who are denied citizenship or access to citizenship rights tend to suffer from the results of the processes of marginalisation in terms of economic, social or market participation; and their low economic, social or political standings can also be overlain and reinforced by cultural and symbolic process which further differentiate them from other citizens (Room 1995; Estivill 2003). Many aforementioned studies on exclusion in China follow a participation-­ based approach. Solinger’s (1999) study—“Contesting Citizen in Urban China”—marked the beginning of the linking of citizenship with social exclusion in China. She argued that the phenomenon and identity of rural-to-urban migrant workers were produced by institutional arrangements to do with citizenship division, in which migrant workers were treated as second-class citizens who are locked out of full citizenship status in urban areas. Li’s (2005, 2006) series of studies were the earliest to adopt the citizenship-based approach as such, using the definition developed by the United Nations Development Programme:

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“Social exclusion is defined as lack of recognition of rights, or where there is recognition, lack of access to political and legal systems necessary to realise the rights” (Li 2005: 3). An analytical framework was developed to encompass the political, economic, and social dimensions of social exclusion, based on which she demonstrated to be the variety of exclusions that were faced by rural-to-urban migrants: including (1) lack of citizen’s rights and voicelessness—identification, eviction and a lack of support, discrimination from other people and institutions, low political standing; (2) economic opportunities—lack of work permissions and financial losses, lack of access to labour markets, unequal treatment in work; and (3) social protection and vulnerability—housing conditions, working conditions, contractual conditions, union protection, social protection, child education. She concluded that social exclusion in China not only reflected economic disadvantages, but rather was a result of rights deprivation. Therefore, in order to combat social exclusion, it is almost impossible to avoid the political connotations that are embedded in the concept (Li 2005: 30). As discussed in the introduction, before the economic reforms, China’s political system was based on class contradiction and struggle, and everyone’s political standing was closely related to his or her connections with the working class. After the economic reforms, political differentiation was at once weakened due to increasing economic mobility among the different classes. Some people made use of the opportunities, or even loopholes that were available during the period of economic escalation, and became part of the dominant class by accumulating wealth and hence political standing. This situation, however, changed during the late 1990s when the legal and economic system in China gradually became more structured, and new social classes were formed on the basis of the new socioeconomic system (Huang 2006). Social groups were classified into five social classes, with upper and middle-upper classes controlling and enjoying more economic, organisational, and social resources (Lu 2002). Class divisions were gradually reinforced, as opposed to social and economic developments, with limited mobility occurring among different social groups (Li 2007). The root of the new class divisions in contemporary China, according to several studies (Lu 2002; Li 2007), was the lack of mechanisms whereby the lower classes could voice needs or make

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complaints, while the more privileged groups could impose a strong influence on the decision-making processes—out of their own interests. The discussions so far indicate that rural-to-urban migrants have been the main focus in social exclusion studies because of the numerous forms of exclusions that they face. However, in recent years, studies on social exclusion in China have been extended to different types of people besides rural-to-urban migrants: these include the incapacitated, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, women, the homeless, the elderly, college graduate, and so on (Xue 2009; Kennett and Mizuuchi 2010; He 2011; Wang 2011; Xu and Xiong 2011). Most of these studies also focus on social and economic dimensions such as exclusion from the labour market, housing, education, and public services, as well as the experience of discrimination from other people or institutions. The indigenous urban villagers, however, are underrepresented in exclusion studies. Although the social and economic problems faced by villagers are pointed out in most urban village studies (Xie 2005; Song et al. 2008; Xing 2010; Tan et al. 2012), such as deteriorating housing and living conditions, and the lack of social protection, the indigenous villagers have not typically been considered as an excluded group in the academic literature—mainly due to their economic situation. Villagers are considered as a rent-seeking group who take advantage of the increasing value of their land, often located in prime urban areas, who receive large compensation payments in the process of urban village redevelopment (Tian 2008). In extreme cases, a villager has been reported to have obtained tens of relocated departments and become quite rich (China Youth Daily 2015). Compared with the rural migrants who live in urban villages and who are driven away as a result of redevelopment without any compensation, urban villagers are considered not completely dispossessed. Thus studies tend to focus on how urban villagers utilise their property to negotiate with governments and developers during redevelopment (Tian 2008; Shin 2013). As discussed in the introduction, however, most studies concentrate on the urban village redevelopments in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou; the political and economic environment in these developed metropolitan cities are different from those of the less-developed inland cities, the villagers in the more developed areas may have greater influence within the decision-making

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processes during redevelopments. Therefore, it is the urban villagers in the less-developed, inland cities that are underrepresented in academic literature. In my study, for example, I show that such villagers in some cases are faced with displacement and also with multiple exclusion as a result of the redevelopment process. As Li (2005, 2006) argues in her studies, the problems of social exclusion in China embed in various legal but unequal social policies, which institutionally exclude certain groups of people from the processes involved in urban development; also she argues that combating social exclusion is not a task that only involves taking one or two measures. It is necessary to look at social exclusion from a holistic point of view. Silver (1994: 37) also points out that, whether the causes of exclusion root in any of the three paradigms, nevertheless “exclusion may be seen as an expression of incomplete citizenship.” This research will adopt the citizenship-­based approach, and develop an analytical framework that examines the multiple dimensions of social exclusion.

2.3 The Meanings of Citizenship 2.3.1 Citizenship as a Western Conception Defined in its broadest sense, citizenship “refers to an individual’s membership of a political unit, often the nation-state, and the rights and duties that come with that relationship” (Yarwood 2014: 1). In general terms, citizenship carries rights and responsibilities for both the nation-­ state and the individual. The nation-state shall ensure a more equal environment for all citizens; the individual enjoys the rights embedded in the citizenship of that nation-state, but must, as well, fulfil her/his responsibilities. In citizenship studies, liberal citizenship has been the mainstream paradigm since Marshall’s influential work “Citizenship and Social Class” (Marshall 1950; Wang 2014). The liberal view is based on individualism, and puts a strong emphasis on needs, entitlements, and the legal protection of the individual. However, as the concept has been developed, other

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traditions have also formed different interpretations of citizenship, such as the civic-republican view that lays emphasis on democratic participation, the social-democratic view that is based on egalitarian participation and balanced rights and obligations, and the communitarian view that emphasises obligations and makes the safeguarding of community welfare the priority (Janoski 1998). Therefore, in order to theorise a Chinese citizenship, it is essential to clarify two important elements of citizenship in this context: the relationship between the individual and the political unit, and the balance between rights and obligations (Beiner 1995; Faulks 2000). In the liberal tradition, citizenship is defined mainly as a set of rights. Marshall (1950) is the first to put rights in centrality and consider them as the fundamental component in understanding modern citizenship. His essay “Citizenship and Social Class” is influential in charting the development of citizenship in line with the growth of civil, political and social rights. According to Marshall (1973), the modern capitalist system and the western notion of citizenship are inherently contradictory: its political system pursuits on egalitarian principles of citizenship whereas its economic system produces irreducible inequalities. In his view, the development of rights can challenge and counteract, although not erase, this capital inequality. A full citizenship includes the universal protection of social security, as well as the provision of welfare benefits, health and education. Three types of rights associated with the evolvement of citizenship are distinguished. First, civil rights are closely related to the judicial system, which ensure people’s physical and mental integrity. These rights are necessary for the individual freedom—the liberty of people, freedom of speech and religion, the right to property, and the right to be equal before laws (Marshall 1950: 10). Second, political rights are associated with central and local governments, including “the right to participate in the exercise of political power, as a member of a body invested with political authority, or as an elector of the members of such as body” (ibid.: 11). Thirdly, social rights are associated with the educational system and with the social services. These cover a wide range of rights from “the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security,” “the right to share to the full in the social heritage,” to “the life of a civilised being according to the

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standards prevailing in the society” (ibid.: 11). He argues that the three types of rights are achieved in an evolutionary way over time. By way of example, in Britain civil rights were achieved with the establishment of justice and employment rights in the eighteenth century; political rights were developed in the nineteenth, characterised by the introduction of an equitable voting system; it was in the twentieth century that fully extended social and economic rights, characterised by the universal provision of education, welfare, and health services, were developed as the fullest expression of citizenship (Marshall 1950, 1973). Although the idea of duty—people’s public duty to improve and civilise themselves by using the provided opportunities—is also recognised in the concept of liberal citizenship, (Marshall 1950: 26), the strongest emphasis is nevertheless put on rights. Ideally, the state should not impede the citizen’s freedom of choice, but rather provide a legal environment which ensures that freedom; people live their lives through making different choices, and rights facilitate choice-making (Castles 2000). However, the liberal tradition presupposes a tension between the individual and the state, and believes that citizens need to be protected from the growing power of the state (Faulks 2000). Thus the possession of rights is considered to provide opportunities for individuals to development their interests, and to protect themselves from interference from political groups and the state. The relationship between the individual and the state is contractual, in which the individual voluntarily gives up some of their freedom in exchange for the security that is provided by the state (Janoski and Gran 2002). Thus, this form of citizenship is described by Faulks (2000: 56) as “thin citizenship” that characterised as “rights privileged, passive, legal, freedom through choice, and state as necessary evil.” There have been critiques concerning the liberal presupposition of the tension between the individual and state, as well as its neglect of responsibilities in citizenship. Faulks (2000: 34) points out that the emphasis liberals place on the individual relates to a suspicion of the notion of community, for fear that “community will seek to impose obligations upon the individual that constrain or contradict his or her self-interest.” In this sense, liberal citizenship tends to be defensive and does little to maintain the political community from which rights are derived.

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Meanwhile, the individual places great expectations on the political community to ensure the rights that facilitate his or her self-interest; this can create incoherence within the framework and can be harmful to the quality of the citizenship facilitated (Lewis 2004). In some states, an active form of citizenship has developed because of the decentralisation of state power, and due to people’s desire for self-­ governance and self-determination (Yarwood 2014). The republican citizenship is a typical active form that emphasises participation. In active citizenship, rights and responsibilities are mutually supportive, people are bound together under a moral consensus in a political community, and it is the broad political community, as represented by, for instance, voluntary groups and religious assemblies, rather than the state, that is considered as the foundation for a flourishing life. This form of citizenship is referred to as “thick citizenship” by Faulks (2000: 56). The notion of citizenship is not confined to European discourses. Because European powers colonised the other parts of the world, Europe’s model of citizenship has become the dominant one, based on which different interpretations have been developed according to different traditions. For example, Turner (1990) proposes four types of citizenship—revolutionary French, liberalist American, passive English, and fascist German—in his study focused on discovering whether citizenship is obtained from “below” the state or from the state. Mann (1996) points out that the trajectories forming different regimes of citizenship, such as America’s liberal, France’s reformist, Japan’s authoritarian monarchist, Nazi Germany’s fascist, and Soviet Russia’s authoritarian socialist, reflect each state’s particular geographical and state histories.

2.3.2 Theorising Chinese Citizenship The study of Chinese citizenship starts with a series of debates on the possibility of establishing Chinese civil society which took place in the early 1990s. Deng (1992) and Yu (1993) explored the relationship between the “individual” and the “state” in China’s social and political context by charting the development of civil society and citizenship in Western democracies. They pointed out that “a well-established civil society” and

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“a fully-extended citizenship” would play a necessary role in the realisation of “harmonious society” in China. Following their studies, some scholars argued that it was still early to talk of a “well-established civil society” and of a “fully-extended citizenship” in China (White 1993; Frolic 1997). According to this view, in contrast to a definition of civil society that emphasised a policy of non-intervention by the state, China’s omnipresent state-power in the social, political and economic realms gives it rather the features of a “semi-civil society” (Yu 2006) or “state-led civil society” (Frolic 1997), under which only “partial citizenship’” could be formed (Pan 2003). After entering the twenty-first century, China’s urbanisation process was buoyed up by rapid urban expansion which created a large number of landless farmers (urban villagers) and rural migrant workers, most of whom were denied access to the package of rights and entitlements associated with legal residency in the city. The inequality embedded in the urban-rural social scheme put urban citizenship and the rights associated with it at the core of Chinese citizenship studies. Special emphasis was put on rural people’s citizenship in relation to the hukou system (Smart and Smart 2001; Liu et al. 2008; Wu 2010; He 2012), for example, by analysing how rural migrant workers were exploited in the process of urbanisation, as they contributed to the construction of new urban areas, but were denied any share of the benefits they created due to this unequal institutional arrangement. Despite the fact that hukou reform has been going on for several years, a poor application of rural migrants’ social and political citizenship rights in urban areas is still being observed by many scholars (Li 2006; Li et al. 2010; Ren 2010; Zhang and Treiman 2013). Since Chinese cities have experienced large inflows of both capital and deprived inhabitants; social struggles aimed at acquiring and expanding rights in cities have been increasing. Scholars have realised that the key issue regarding inclusion is not whether the excluded could obtain urban hukou, but rather what actual rights they can acquire in cities. Therefore, the process of rights extension in cities has become the focus of attention. In line with Lefebvre’s notion of “the right to the city,” three key issues are explored: “whose rights,” “what rights,” and rights to “what city” (Qian and He 2012). Ren (2013) argues that the question “whose rights” relates to the rights of all inhabitants who live and work in the cities—not only

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those who have urban hukou but also those who do not; “what rights” means that these should include civil, political and social rights—that is, fully extended citizenship rights based as per T.H.  Marshall; rights “to what city” means that these should refer to a more just city with democratic and transparent decision-making processes, which should not be controlled by small political elites and/or financial groups. All the discussions above, however, were based on the western ideology of liberalism, which overlook China’s particular cultural setting and the influence of this on the forms that Chinese citizenship may take. In recent years, a number of scholars have realised the need to move away from the Western definitions. Isin initiated the project “Citizenship After Orientalism,” calling for alternative interpretations of citizenship in Eastern countries, based on these countries’ ideologies and national histories (Isin 2000; Guo and Guo 2014). Since then, efforts have been made to try to merge Chinese traditional ideology with the studies on Chinese citizenship. Although Marshall’s work has become the benchmark for modern citizenship studies, the global literature shows that the evolutionary process of rights acquisition does not manifest in the order and to the extent that he described (Turner 2009; Yarwood 2014). By making a cross-national comparison of citizenship rights between China, Western countries (US, Canada, Australia, UK, Sweden, Netherlands, Germany, France), and other Asian countries and regions (Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan), Janoski (2014) concludes that China has shown considerable growth in legal rights such as judicial independence, property protection and police reliability, as well as in social rights, as measured by expenditure on social welfare divided by GDP. Political rights, however, are kept at a low level that does not coordinate with the economic development and improvements in other rights of China. Janoski (2014) also indicates that there are possible pathways towards greater political rights and democracy which result from a gradual expansion of local elections, and the development of the middle classes in China. These possibilities, however, are based on “citizenship with Chinese characteristics” which refers to “the influence of both Confucianism, an emphasis on social justice emanating from Marxism, and a considerable dose of ‘what seems to work’ or Chinese pragmatism”

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(ibid.: 23). From a perspective of rights and duties, the operation of Chinese citizenship, in reality, is close to that of a communitarian approach that makes duties and obligations a priority; this is also compatible with state-directed capitalism and can accommodate a certain level of democracy (Janoski 1998). Wang (2014) further elaborates on how Confucianism can be compatible with, and facilitate the interpretations of, contemporary Chinese citizenship regimes. He establishes a theoretical framework by cross pairing two forms of citizenship (thin and thick), with two forms of Confucianism (liberal and illiberal). As mentioned in the previous section, thin citizenship is a rights-privileged and passive type of citizenship, while thick citizenship emphasises moral consensus and communitarian participation. Confucianism, on the one hand, can be interpreted from a hierarchical and authoritarian perspective, in which the individual’s interests and choices can be sacrificed, to some extent, in order to achieve social harmony (Tu 2011). This perspective is referred to as illiberal Confucianism, and contradicts the democratic notion of citizenship (Wang 2014). On the other hand, Confucianism from the point of view of a liberal interpretation contains ideas such as that individuals must have mutual respect in a ritual-governed community that pursues social equality ultimately (Ames 2013), and everyone deserves the opportunity to be educated and become a sage (Li 1994). These understandings can be integrated with the ideas of “freedom, reason, rule of law, and individuality, which originated in the West and have already become universal values” (Wang 2014: 39). Wang argues that Confucianism and thick citizenship can be reconstructed to form a Chinese citizenship, because both of them “emphasise that rights correspond to responsibilities, that individuals and communities are interdependent, that Confucian self is embedded in social relations and defined by doctrines of benevolence, righteousness, ritual, humanitarian spirit, and responsible ethics” (ibid.: 43). So far these discussions have indicated that the academic studies regarding citizenship in China generally follow Western ideas, but also endeavour to incorporate Chinese ideologies such as Confucianism and Party-influenced pragmatism. The interpretation of “Chinese citizenship” is contested, but still with some consensus that has been helpful in setting up the theoretical framework for this book.

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First, citizenship as a membership identifies the individual as belonging to a political community. This membership can be identified at a variety of levels. Take China for example, one’s passport identifies that one is Chinese, relative to the international community; one’s internal pass for travelling to Hong Kong and Macao identifies that one is mainland Chinese, relative to the citizens for the special administrative regions; one’s national identity card identifies one’s individual relationship to other individuals, in a domestic sense; and one’s hukou identifies an individual’s membership of an administrative locality (Vortherms 2014: 53). Vortherms (2014) also points out that the system of obtaining (the jus sanguinis mechanism) and transferring (family-based immigration and economic immigration) hukou within China works very similar to the international citizenship regime. In this book, the citizenship as membership issue will be looked at in relation to hukou. Second, citizenship is associated with a set of rights and obligations. The general framework of rights is categorised into legal (civil), political, and social (Marshall 1950, 1973; Turner 2009; Janoski 2014). Legal rights refer to access to the judicial system and the protection of rights; these are not tied to an individual’s hukou status and are usually pursued in the location of de facto residence (Vortherms 2014: 56). The interpretations of citizenship in this book will focus, in general, on political and social rights. However, legal rights will be touched on in order to enable a better understanding of the legal environment in which urban villagers pursue their other rights. Another important right that villagers have is the land use right, which is a significant right exclusive to people holding rural hukou. The Land use right is also the focus for both villagers and policy makers during redevelopment. Because for villagers, this right generate economic benefits in the form of dividend distribution (fenhong), which in some cases may account for a majority of the household income. Political rights refer to the rights to participate in political authority (Marshall 1950). Although political rights are limited in the Chinese context, as compared to those exhibited in Western countries (Janoski 2014), they do exist at various local levels—the right to assemble, the right to petition, and the right to vote—and they have an influence on villagers’ political actions in the process of urban village redevelopment. Social rights in this book will focus on government-funded welfare

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benefits, such as old-age pensions, medical insurance, minimum standard of living security, and so on, all of which are involved with changes in villagers’ hukou status. Previous discussions have pointed out that in addition to rights, obligations are also important in Chinese citizenship. The Chinese constitution lists several obligations at the national-level, such as the duty to work (Article 42), to receive education (Article 46), to practice family planning (Article 49), to defend the unity of the country (Article 52), and to pay taxes (Article 56) (Vortherms 2014: 57). However, the Chinese notion of obligations are not only to be interpreted from a legal perspective; they also deeply resonate with the moral consensus embedded in Confucian ideologies, such as the duty to care for the old, to respect the ritual-­ governed community, to educate oneself, and to maintain collective values (Weber 1951; Li 1994; Wang 2014). Further discussions will show that these ideas of obligations have influences on both villagers’ and policy makers’ understandings of inclusion. Thirdly, citizenship is considered as not only a political membership associated with rights and obligations, but also a process of right extension. In Marshall’s framework, the development of rights is described as a top-down process: rights seem to be achieved in line with economic development and are granted by political authorities (Turner 1990, 1992). However, global studies indicate that rights are not just given away but also can be achieved in a bottom-up way through people striving for new rights or for the extension of established rights to new groups. As Isin and Turner (2002: 2) point out, the concept of citizenship “has been contested and broadened to include various political and social struggles of recognition and redistribution as instances of claim-making.” Therefore, this book will focus on the rights that are not only granted to urban villagers, but also strived for by them. Finally, citizenship is considered as an identity, as it identifies someone as belonging to a political community to outsiders. For example, Vortherms (2014) notes that Chinese people with hukou registered in different places are classified into citizens with merits or without, according to their hukou registration, in the process of visa applications. In his view, citizenship as an identity can affect how one is seen by others. Similarly, many studies also indicate that migrants who hold rural hukou

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status are viewed and treated differently by others in society, and this situation is sometimes framed within the rhetoric of discrimination (Li 2006; Ren 2010; Zhou 2011). However, citizenship as an identity affects not only how one is seen by others, but also how one perceives oneself (Jiang et al. 2008). According to Anthony Giddens, self-identity is “constructed as part of a reflexive process of connecting personal and social change,” and it “continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing ‘story’ about the self ” (Giddens 1991: 33; 54). In other words, the perception of self-identity keeps changing as the social and cultural context around the individual changes. In the case of urban village redevelopment, villagers are expected to become urban citizens after redevelopment. Therefore, how villagers perceive their identity, after redevelopment, may have significant implications on their understandings of social inclusion. Generally speaking, the ideas of citizenship applied in this book are Western conceptions, synthesised with Chinese Confucian ideas of obligation and governance.

2.4 From Exclusion to Inclusion 2.4.1 The Importance of Citizenship After a full interpretation of social exclusion and its application to China, finally we come to its twinned concept “social inclusion.” However, a review of the literature available to me suggests that the concept of social inclusion has not been closely integrated into the academic debate, and the term is usually used in a manner which is in relation only to exclusion. For example, Cameron (2006: 397) points out that social inclusion is “defined only negatively—as whatever is not socially excluded. For this reason, much of the discussion of social inclusion is conceptually dominated by exclusion—social exclusion is the datum point against which social inclusion is both empirically measured and conceptually defined.” The definition provided by the World Bank is also quite passive. As the converse of social exclusion, social inclusion is generally defined as “the

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process of improving the ability, opportunity, and dignity of people, disadvantaged on the basis of their identity, to take part in society” through series of affirmative action (The World Bank 2013: 4). The main reason for the lack of a clear and positive definition of social inclusion in its own right may be that inclusion is by nature a practical and relational term. The implication of inclusion is more practical than conceptual because it is a practice and a goal stemming from extant exclusionary problems. Therefore, inclusion and exclusion represent two sides of the same coin; without identifying the object (who), the process (how), and the scale (from what) of exclusion, interpreting inclusion separately can become a process full of ambiguity and uncertainty. For example, by illustrating how exogamous and patrilocal marriage can generate both inclusion and exclusion simultaneously in terms of women’s rights in residential communities, Jackson (1999) argues that individuals and groups can be included in one domain while excluded in others. A similar situation is also observed in my research of urban village regeneration, in which the migrant tenants displaced in the redevelopment process may be included in the newly established council housing scheme—although the inclusiveness of the scheme in itself may also need interrogation. Besides, at what level we talk about inclusion is also a question which creates an inevitable dilemma; that is, inclusion on a small scale may be achieved at the expense of excluding weaker individuals or groups on a larger scale (Silver 1995). Jackson (1999: 135) argues that inclusions can produce exclusions, for example, “the socially mobile poor may position themselves nearer the centre through dissociation from the seriously poor.” Labonte (2004: 119) also calls for the need for a global lens when discussing social inclusion, because “we are at risk, not of redistributing wealth and opportunity, but of redistributing poverty and marginalisation.” He points out that, looking worldwide, the process of including some will almost inevitably result in the exclusion of others as long as the rules of trade and governance do not change globally. Inclusion may be a term which suffers from the lack of a conceptual definition; in practice, however, its value as a framework for social policy cannot be denied. The term may provide a public dialogue that resonates strongly with many people, because “most people can identify on an

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instinctive level” with the idea of being excluded and included (Buckmaster and Thomas 2009: 32). As Goodin (1996: 343) notes, social inclusion “catches much of what is substantially of concern to us”; and the value of the concept lies in “its promise to link together so many of our other social concerns, tracing them to common causes.” Therefore, the definitional vagueness associated with social inclusion raises two important questions: first, is there a way of grounding the idea of inclusion in a policy framework substantially; and second, after setting up a policy framework for combating social exclusion, how does one know when inclusion is achieved? The answer to the first question is where the idea of citizenship may play a useful role. The previous discussions have highlighted Silver’s argument (1994, 1995), that social exclusion can be seen as an expression of incomplete citizenship. As Buckmaster and Thomas (2009: 35) also point out, citizenship provides civil, political, and social resources necessary for membership to participate in society; these resources, in their views, are not granted by the state out of benevolence, but rather are conferred as rights of citizenship. In this respect, inclusion that is based on citizenship framework shifts focus to something bigger than indicators such as access to labour market or social entitlement. In other words, the citizenship-­ based approach overcomes the aforementioned vagueness of inclusion by emphasising on equal membership/relationship within a defining community. It is in this respect that citizenship play a useful role in broadening the scope of social inclusion, by means of putting people at the centre of the policy focus. The idea of active participation is central in achieving social inclusion in a citizenship-based policy framework. The excluded groups are usually portrayed as the victims who are deprived of citizenship rights, and thus are powerless in voice their needs. Many authors have pointed out that the active logic of participation provides opportunities and mechanisms through which people can give expression to their desire for inclusion (Goodin 1996; Abrams et al. 2007; Buckmaster and Thomas 2009). By focusing on participation, the excluded are no longer the victims of exclusionary system, but rather active agents of inclusionary process; they can play an important role in the construction of citizenship by expressing

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their ideas on the kind of rights and the extent of inclusion that they strive for (Jakimow 2014).

2.4.2 The Importance of “Sense of Inclusion” Regarding the answer to the second question—how does one know when inclusion is achieved, there have been continuous efforts, both from policy makers and from academic researchers, aimed at establishing measurement frameworks to monitor social exclusion and progress towards inclusion, most of which adopt quantitative approaches. For example, in the European Commission’s (2009) latest monitoring system for social inclusion, fourteen key dimensions, relating to income poverty and labour market participation, are set as the dominant indicators. Similarly, the annual reports provided by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (Tinson et al. 2016) on the state of poverty and social exclusion in the UK, are also based on the objective indicators which are considered predominant: income poverty, labour market and access to housing. I do not deny the importance of quantitative approaches and objective indicators, especially in relation to their practicability for cross-county comparisons. However, the objective reports measure the “state of exclusion” rather than the “exclusionary process” (Mathieson et  al. 2008). Furthermore, using objective indicators that overlook the importance of people’s feelings of inclusion/exclusion may create a dilemma in relation to policy implementation and assessment. First of all, the policies and actions delivered by governments—with measurement framework developed by professionals—are meant to create social inclusion. However, when judging the practices involved with, and the outcomes of these policies/actions, usually statistical figures are used to show the improvement or exacerbation of the situation. In this way, the possibility of inclusion is taken for granted, that inclusion is a status that can be achieved naturally with the betterment of objective indicators. I therefore argue that this dilemma can be overcome by taking people’s perception of social inclusion into account. Perceptions matter when judging the outcomes of social inclusion for two reasons. First, perceptions are people’s subjective interpretation of a

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situation, which can show the difference between people’s expectations and the actual outcomes of polices. A higher sense of inclusion reflects a greater degree of congruence between actual conditions and people’s aspirations. As pointed out by the World Bank (2013: 158), perceptions reflect individuals’ or groups’ powerlessness and their frustrations with social and political institutions or society, particularly in societies “where political power is concentrated in the hands of a few, perceptions can be a significant measure of social inclusion.” Therefore in my research, looking at the sense of inclusion experienced helps overcome the aforementioned policy dilemma by illustrating the correlation between subjective and objective conditions: why the redevelopment policies that deliver better objective conditions do not necessarily result in the improvement of villagers’ sense of inclusion. Second, perception can reflect people’s relationships with their surroundings—other people in the same communities, societies, institutions or states, because how people judge their situations is significantly related to the reference groups. For example, in Walker and Smith’s (2002) studies of relative deprivation, households have different perceptions when comparing themselves with different people. In relation to this, focusing on perception in my research helps us to understand how urban villagers perceive their social inclusion when comparing themselves with other urban citizens. In the light of above discussions, the analytical framework in this book will take the villagers’ sense of inclusion as an important dimension when discussing social inclusion.

2.5 Conclusion This chapter discusses how the concepts of social exclusion/inclusion and citizenship can be adapted in China, and where citizenship fits in the discourse of inclusion. The theoretical framework of this book starts with social exclusion. Social exclusion is a multi-dimensional, dynamic, and relational concept that describes the disadvantage experienced by particular individuals or groups. The cause of exclusion varies in different countries. Social

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exclusion in China is more than a matter of economic disadvantages, but is also an expression of incomplete citizenship and rights deprivation. Therefore, this book argues that in order to combat social exclusion, it is necessary to form a citizenship-based framework from a holistic point of view. The concept of citizenship is rooted in Western political ideologies such as liberalism or republicanism. The extant academic studies indicate that Chinese citizenship is a hybrid of Western ideas mainly focus on social rights, Chinese Confucian ideology that emphasis obligation, and a Party-influenced pragmatism that is embedded in the Chinese characteristics. Although the interpretation of Chinese citizenship is still contested, I summarised four aspects that were worthy of further exploration in the book. First, citizenship as membership is closely related to the hukou system in China. This legal but unjust system classifies Chinese citizens based on multi-level citizenship criteria, and it institutionally excludes some groups from political, social, and economic resources. Second, citizenship as rights and obligations in China incorporates a strong sense of Confucianism; it puts socioeconomic rights as a priority, and tends to emphasise duties over rights. Third, citizenship as identity affects not only how one is seen by others, but also how one perceives oneself. This is important in linking the notion of citizenship to an individual’s sense of inclusion. Fourthly, citizenship as the process of right extension is an aspect that is rooted in Western ideas. However, as China’s rapid urbanisation has accumulated a large amount of excluded groups, cities has become the strategic places where the excluded have to struggle to protect their rights. Therefore, it is important to note that rights extension can be achieved not only in a top-down way, which refers to the rights granted by the state to include new groups, but also in a bottom-up way through people striving for recognition of their rights. Furthermore, in a citizenship-­based approach of inclusion, active participation plays an important role in providing opportunities and mechanisms through which people can give expression to their desire for inclusion. Finally, as exclusion is a personal experience, there is a need for the excluded groups to express their opinions—whether in choosing indicators or assessing policy outcomes. As different groups of people have

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different levels of expectation, they may perceive social inclusion differently. Even for the same group, perceptions of exclusion and inclusion may escalate once the basic objective needs are met. Objective indicators can hardly reflect this process. Therefore, this book took the sense of inclusion, in addition to the other three objective dimensions (political, social, and economic dimensions), as an important subjective dimension when discussing social inclusion.

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Yu, K. (1993). Shehui zhuyi shimin shehui: yige xinde yanjiu keti [Civil society under socialist society: a new research topic], Tianjin Social Sciences, 4, 45–48. Yu, K. (2006). Zhongguo gongmin shehui: gainian, fenlei yu zhidu huangjing [Chinese civil society: concept, typology and institutional environment], Zhongguo Shehui Kexue [Social Science in China], 2006(1): 109–122. Zarrow, P. (1997). Imagining the People: Chinese Intellectuals and the Concept of Citizenship, 1890–1920. In Fogel, Joshua A., Zarrow, Peter G. (eds.) Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Zhang, Z. and J.D. Treiman (2013). Social origins, hukou conversion, and the wellbeing of urban residents in contemporary China. Social Science Research, 42:71–89. Zhou, M. (2011). Rongheyu baohu—Xi’an shiqu nongmingong shengcun zhuangkuang diaocha yanjiu [Inclusion and protection—an investigation on the living situation of the rural migrant workers in Xi’an]. Xi’an: Shaanxi Social Sciences Associate.

3 Government’s Understanding of Social Inclusion

3.1 Introduction On the last day of the December 2012, I went to interview an official at the planning authority of Xi’an (XURO), who was in charge of the urban village redevelopment in the city. Our interview took place right after the relocation ceremony of Qiwang village—a ceremony held jointly by the district government, the developer, and the committee of the redeveloped urban village to celebrate villagers’ moving into a newly constructed community. Qiwang village was located just outside the south third ring road. It was demolished in 2009 due to the construction of Ziwu Avenue, which was the main road linking the newly built “University Town” in the southern suburb of Xi’an to the urban area. After spending three years living in rented dwellings or lodging in relatives’ homes, villagers were pleased that the relocated housings were finally completed. A villager told me during the ceremony, that she got two relocated dwellings: a twobedroom flat for her and her husband, and a three-­bedroom flat for her son’s family. She commented, “The downside of this area is that there is no market or grocery shops nearby, but at least housings are not bad.”

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 X. Zhang, In the Name of Inclusion, New Perspectives on Chinese Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6120-1_3

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Similarly, the official from XURO (O1203, 31-­12-­2012) also started our interview with comments on the living environment in Qiwang village, Villagers’ living environment gets better after the redevelopment: the village used to be dirty and chaotic without adequate living facilities, but now it’s with organised and clean modernised buildings. Qiwang village is among the eighteen urban villages that finish relocations this year, and there will be twenty-­­three next year.

He then added, “We understand that the redevelopment of urban village is not only about buildings, but also about people. We focus on villagers—their livelihoods after redevelopments—to help them feel included in the society and become real urban citizens.” This is a thought-­provoking comment, particularly when put together with the other two village cases mentioned at the beginning of the book (N1 and X). Each of the three villages was redeveloped at different stages of the programme of urban village redevelopment programme: N1 was redeveloped during the “beginning phase” in 2002, X at the “exploring phase” in 2005, and Qiwang during the “maturity phase” in 2009. The three stages will be further discussed in Sect. 3.2 to illustrate the evolution of the redevelopment policies, with showed the focus of policy shifted over time at each stage of the programme. Although the official comments on the three cases are from different sources (government reports, official media, and interview), there exist obvious similarities in these comments: the positive tone and the similar rhetoric when describing the outcomes of the three redeveloped cases, with a strong attention on the improvement of villagers’ living environments. The difference, however, lies within O1203’s (31-­12-­2012) additional remarks. At the current stage of the redevelopment programme, he was referring to the local government focused more on people, and has adopted strategies to help villagers become what they refer to as “real urban citizens.” Hence, this raises an important question regarding the official understanding of social inclusion. Why do policy makers consider the shift of policy focus on people as a process of inclusion? Furthermore, what is meant by inclusion in terms of urban citizenship: if they put

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“real” before urban citizens, were there “false” urban citizens at previous stages of redevelopment, or even at the present time? These questions will be answered in the following sections of this chapter. First, an examination on the shift of policy focus provides the basis for questioning the official understanding of social inclusion. In addition to policy analysis, three cases (N1, N2, and M) will be used to illustrate the changes of policy priorities at different stages of urban village redevelopment. Then I explore how the official interpretation of social inclusion is influenced by a Chinese version of citizenship, which focuses on hukou system, puts socioeconomic inclusion at priority, and deeply resonates with the Chinese traditional ideology.

3.2 T  hree Stages of Urban Village Redevelopment The earliest redevelopment projects in Xi’an can be traced back to 1996, when four urban villages (Changyanbao, Xisanyao, Xisanyaobao, and Qinjiapo) in the Yanta district were put on the district government’s redevelopment agenda due to the urban preservation project of Qujiang in the south of Xi’an. According to the Xi’an Urban Regeneration Office (XURO), the redevelopments of urban villages can be divided into three phases: the beginning phase from 1996 to 2005, the exploring phase from 2005 to 2007, and the maturity phase starting from the July of 2007. In the beginning stage (1996–2005), Xi’an’s redevelopments of urban villages were characterised by a functional-­fragmented governance with ambiguous redevelopment measures. The Construction Office in Xi’an Urban and Rural Construction Commission (XURCC) was responsible for the redevelopment and supervision in general. In practice, however, its role was only nominal and was limited to setting the programmatic directions of urban village redevelopment. The power of decision-­making was primarily dispersed among five municipal bureaucracies, which were responsible for different aspects of urban village redevelopments. The Xi’an City Planning Bureau (XCPB) was responsible for designating the

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urban villages to be redeveloped and constructing redevelopment plans. The XURCC was in charge of issuing demolition and construction permits. The Xi’an Municipal Development and Reform Commission (XMDRC) had the power to allocate land for redevelopments. As one the oldest cities in China, Xi’an was the ancient capitals of several important dynasties in Chinese history. Thus, the Xi’an Cultural Heritage Bureau (XCHB) and Xi’an Urban Landscape and Forestry Bureau (XULFB) were also involved when the redevelopments projects were located in heritage sites or preservation districts. These were bureaucracies at the municipal level that issue policies. The practical tasks, however, were carried out by the bureaucracies at the district level, and no normative documents regarding redevelopment approaches had been issued until 2003 (O1203, 31-­12-­2012). The fragmented governance generated two major problems. Firstly, it significantly constrained the interaction and cooperation among different bureaucracies. Different bureaucratic agencies had different specialties, and their interests varied significantly. Although the Construction Office was responsible for redevelopment projects in general, its jurisdiction fell within the XURCC; thus, its power was not strong enough to mediate among different interests efficiently. This ambiguity of jurisdiction could create gaps in policy-­making and implementations: when problems emerged in redevelopments, in order to protect their interests and to avoid violating others’ authority, different government agencies tended to avoid problems rather than to take responsibility (O1202, 4-­12-­2012). Take one of my studied cases, Nankang village (N2), for example. N2 was located in the Economic and Technological Development Zone (ETDZ) within the jurisdiction of Weiyang district. According to the general guidance from the Construction Office, usually district governments were responsible for the redevelopment tasks of the urban villages within their jurisdictions. However, the urban villages within development zones should be redeveloped by the Administration Committees1 of the respective development zones, with the cooperation from the respective district governments within which the redeveloped urban village located. Thus, the Administration Committee of ETDZ should be responsible for the redevelopment task of N2. However, as N2 was

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demolished due to the construction of the freeway overpass near the second ring road, which was a project initiated at municipal level, the redevelopment of N2 was a task that required close cooperation between the district government and the Administration Committee of ETDZ. However, due to inefficient communication, the demolitions promoted by the Administration Committee took place even before the villagers and the district government had reached an agreement on compensations, which certainly triggered intensive conflicts. Then the project had been halted until an agreement was achieved, and the relocation process took six years to complete (O1305, 08-­02-­2013; V1205, 11-­05-­2012; V1206, 12-­05-­2012). The second problem at the beginning stage is that the policies issued by the Construction Office were sometimes inapplicable. For example, the “Interim Measures for the Administration of Urban Village Redevelopment in Xi’an” issued in 2003 stated clearly that a village-­led approach was the first choice of urban village redevelopments, in which redeveloped villages were responsible for raising funds, redevelopment, and relocation (XMG 2003). By adopting this approach, the authorities tried to bypass compensation issues; because once villagers knew that their villages might be put on the redevelopment agenda, they tried to maximise floor spaces by building on top of their original houses in order to get more compensations. In the village-­led approach of redevelopment, however, villagers became shareholders of the redevelopment project and their housing base land were their investments. The amount of compensation that a household received was not determined by the floor space of the original house, but rather the size of the households housing base land. The case of Wuyi village (W), for example, adopted a village-­ led approach, and every household was assigned apartments with a floor space equal to four times the size of their housing base land (O1201, 03-­11-­2012). However, in practice only villages with strong collective economy (such as W) had the ability to raise sufficient finances for redevelopments. The majority of urban villages had problems in raising funds and finally the local governments had to step in to provide financial support. Nanyaotou village (N1) was one of those that firstly targeted at self-­ redevelopment but ended up with adopting government-­led approach.

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Until 2005, 57 urban villages had been developed, among which only seven villages adopted the village-­led approach, and the rest of the projects were either government-­led or market-­led (O1203, 31-­12-­2012; V1201, 03-­05-­2012). The second phases started in August 2005. The Xi’an Municipal Government issued “Advices of Xi’an Municipal Government on Accelerating the Redevelopment of Urban Villages,” and this official document marked the beginning of the “exploring stage” that characterised by the market-­­led redevelopment approach (XMG 2005c). At the “beginning stage,” although the local government could provide financial support for the redeveloped projects, a lack of financial resources was still the major concern, especially for the projects located in central business districts that required funds beyond the local government’s capacity. Therefore, private developers began to be involved in the projects near district centres to diversify the financial resources, and the so-­called market-­led approach began to prevail. By adopting this approach, the local government usually played a role of guiding and supervising redevelopment projects, while private developers and the redeveloped villages were in charge of the redevelopment process, of negotiating on compensations, site clearance, constructions, and relocations. In some cases, where developers were attracted by the potential profits but were concerned with the problems of compensations, the local government usually provided preferential policies such as reducing the land transaction fees, exempting urban maintenance and construction tax, or expanding rebuild plot ratio to enable higher profits for developers. For example, the initial plan of the redevelopment of Renjiakou village (R) was proposed by the Lianhu district government in 2002. However, due to a lack of financial resources the process had been halted until 2007, when Yuyuan Real Estate Development Ltd. stepped in. After three rounds of negotiations, the redevelopment of R finally took place in 2008 (O1407, 16-­03-­2014; V1428, 15-­01-­2014). The establishment of the XURO in July 2007 marked the beginning of the “maturity stage” of the urban village redevelopments in Xi’an. In September 2007, the municipal government issued “Measures for the Administration of Urban Village Redevelopment in Xi’an” to replace the “Interim Measures” issued in 2003 (XMG 2003), and set up a clear governance system. In order to facilitate the collaboration between different

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bureaucratic agencies, the municipal government established XURO, which was headed by the deputy director of XCPB and consisted of officials from all the relevant municipal bureaucracies. In each district government, special offices were created under the administration of XURO to handle the redevelopment tasks of the urban villages that located within their jurisdictions. The XURO set up a comprehensive guidance on the redevelopment process, and required every redevelopment project to adhere the procedure shown in Chart 3.1 strictly (O1407, 16-­03-­2014). Because the local authorities realised that negotiating on compensations and relocations was the most controversial step in the process of redevelopments that could easily generate conflicts, it also required that in every redevelopment project, compensations should be firstly dealt with and settled before moving on to the rest of the project.

3.3 F rom Buildings to People: What Is Inclusion? During my interviews with the policy makers in Xi’an, the term “immaterial transformation” was frequently mentioned—almost by every interviewed official—as a benchmark for the change of policy priorities “from buildings to people.” In order to understand what they mean by “immaterial transformation,” it is essential to identify the changes of policy priority in the past two decades. In general, the purposes of urban village redevelopment in Xi’an are threefold: promoting economic growth, creating better images for the city, and increasing social inclusion. However, the policies at different stages have different priorities. The purpose of “re-­imaging urban environment” and “promoting economic growth” has been accentuated in all the stages. The first sentences of both the “Interim Measures” and the “Measures” for the “Administration of Urban Village Redevelopment in Xi’an” issued by the municipal government in 2003 and 2007 are exactly the same. It clearly states the purpose of urban village redevelopment: “In order to improve the physical environment within urban villages, to enhance urban villagers’ standard of live, and to smooth the process of urban construction, Xi’an will carry

Step 1

20 working days

Land Conversion

Development Land

Public Biding on

(20 working days)

Relocation Land Approval

(10 working days)

Construction Permission

(20 working days)

Permission

Construction Planning

(20 working days)

Bureaucracies

Supervision by Relevant

Supervise and Manage Constructions

Step 6

Issue

Step 7

days

working

10

by XURO

Approval

Ownership Cert

Issue of Property

15 working days

of Commodity Housing

Apply for Presale Permits

Apply for Presale Permits and Property Ownership es

Reserve 10 working days

Spared Land for Land

Expropriation of the

10 working days

Relocation

Site Clearance and

Funds Supervision

Evaluation by XURO

10 working days

Land Registration and n

Step 4 Decide redevelopment plans

Site Clearance and Relocation

15 working days

Redevelopment Plans

Land Assignment

10 working days

Planning Scheme

Form

Demonstration

me

Program

Chart 3.1  Redevelopment procedures. (Credit: Author)

(3 months)

Land Conversion Approval

15 working days

Demolition Permit

Approval

Construction Formalities

Developers15 working days

Step 5

(Regulatory

detailed planning)

15 working days

Preliminary Evaluation

Step 3 Evaluate redevelopment plans

Step 2 Form redevelopment plans

Site Selection

Approve Formalities

Public Biding and Decision on

(10 working days)

the District Level

s at

Propose redevelopments

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out a comprehensive redevelopment programme of urban villages within the urban built-­up area” (XMG 2003, 2007b: article 1). Although the municipal government officially set “including urban villagers into the society” as one of the main priorities in 2005 (XMG 2005c), in reality the redevelopment of urban villages is meant to give way to large-­scaled urban beatifying projects, with the official slogan “Improving Living Environment, Upgrading Urban Style” always seen on the walls or publicity boards erected outside of the redevelopment projects. In general, urban villages that fall within business districts, planned industrial and economic development zones, and nearby to main roads and transportation stops (subway and railway stations) will be listed as the “key urban villages” that need to be developed first (O1406, 04-­03-­2014). The redevelopment of M and the urban villages around it provide a good example of urban villages giving way to the Qujiang new district that increases the property values of the area and attracts tourism and high-­end residential housings. As the ancient capitals of several important dynasties in Chinese history, especially the Tang dynasty (618AD–907AD), which is considered as the peak era of the imperial China in regard to its prosperity of economics, great cultural influences, and strong political powers, Xi’an has been trying to restore its glory city image since the 1990s. Thus in recent years, a very interesting yet controversial trend of urban development, not only in Xi’an but also in other old Chinese cities, was the production of nostalgia of the ancient dynasties in urban space as a modernising technique. Against this background, Qujiang’s new district, which covered more than 40  square kilometres and consisted of the commercial centre, the cultural designation area, and the natural landscape reservation area, was initiated by the municipal government in the late 1990s to reconstruct the urban landscape of the Tang dynasty. The case of M, with other four urban villages around it (Dayanta village, Changyan village, Chunlin village, and Lujiazhai village) (O1304, 06-­01-­2013), located in the commercial area of Qujiang, was displaced in 2004. The Administration Committee of the Qujiang new district was in charge of the redevelopment. The commercial area consisted of three parts. The first part was a pedestrian-­only street leading to two well-­preserved ancient buildings:

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the Big Wilde Goose Pagoda and the Dacien Temple, with sculptures and wall paintings demonstrating the Tang cultural. The second part was two public squares along the pedestrian street for shopping and

Fig. 3.1  The redeveloped area. (Credit: Author. Note: Top photo shows the shopping and entertainment square; bottom photo shows the high-­end dwellings stood on the land that used to be part of M village)

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entertainment. The last part was the office buildings and high-­end dwellings surrounding the squares (Fig. 3.1). The place where M used to be before the displacement was turned into part of the square on the east side of the pedestrian street and the villas named Qujiang mansion. However, this planning and design had not been confirmed until 2005 (O1304, 06-­01-­2013). Although there was no consensus on the detailed plan before 2005, M and the other villages around it were still demolished in the name of “municipal construction,” which were usually referred to as public works such as transport infrastructures, and public buildings and spaces (O1304, 06-­01-­2013; V1207, 15-­05-­2012): “They (the officials in the Administration Committee of Qujiang) should’ve had a detailed plan before demolishing our village.” V1315 (15-­05-­2012) said, “Because according to the Demolition Law, the amount of our compensations is relevant to the type of land use after demolition. Our village was expropriated for the purpose of municipal construction, but now the place is (built on with) villas … I feel like they lied to us only in order to legitimate their demolition and reduce the cost of relocation” (refer to the Article 47 in Land Administration Law, 2004, “Land expropriated shall be compensated for on the basis of its original purpose of use”). The officials of the Qujiang Administration Committee did not comment on this issue. Instead, as O1304 emphasised (06-­01-­2013): The relocated housings we provided were in extremely good quality. Everything in the relocated community was in compliance with the building codes and planning regulations … some were even above the standards. For example, the standard anti-­­seismic design of commercial residential buildings at that time was 7 magnitudes; our relocated housings were 8.

Later on, he added, “Now every project we developed follows the normative procedures issued by XURO, which requires us to settle the compensations and relocations first before carrying out the rest of the commercial part.” Indeed, from O1304’s responses and other aforementioned official comments on N1, it was clear that in the past the local authorities did not have a definition on what they mean by inclusion. They only considered

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providing relocated buildings in good quality as the benchmark for “doing good for the villagers” (O1305, 08-­02-­2013). This focus seemed to shift in 2005 with the issue of several official documents addressing villagers’ social welfares and livelihoods after redevelopment (XMG 2005a, b). The XURO embarked on a programme to change urban villagers’ hukou from rural to urban status, granting villagers’ access to social welfares and benefits that were enjoyed by urban citizens. At the same time, it required relevant municipal bureaucracies to establish the social security system for landless farmers in the process of urban village redevelopment, and villagers who transferred their hukou from rural to urban status were granted access to the Old-­Age Pensions, the Minimum Standard of Living Scheme, and the Medical Care Insurance that originally was targeted at urban citizens. Additionally, in order to help villagers to maintain their livelihood after redevelopment, the commercial banks in Xi’an were encouraged to provide personal loan services to the villagers who wished to establish small businesses (O1408, 01-­04-­2014). However, these favourable policies were provided on the condition that villagers’ hukou transferred from rural to urban status during the process of redevelopment. In 2006, the municipal government and XURO began to incorporate the “change of hukou status” into the urban village redevelopment, which was referred to as the “immaterial transformation.” It is stressed in several official notices (XURO 2005; XMG 2006, 2007b) that villagers are included in the society from two spheres. The first is the material transformation that refers to improvement of living environment and housing facilities, as well as the way of life from rural to urban style. The second is the immaterial transformation that refers to the change of hukou from rural to urban status, with access to social welfares that are enjoyed by urban people. An official from the XURO (O1202, 4-­12-­2012) explained: We used to pay a strong attention on the material sphere in redevelopment projects such as good relocated housings and good living facilities. But now it’s more comprehensive and it’s about people—the villagers—and their lives after redevelopments … This (the material transformation combined with immaterial transformation) is an effective mechanism of social inclusion … villagers will be the same as other urban citizens.

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It is clear that the Xi’an local authorities now have a specific definition on what they mean by “social inclusion”—a good relocated housing and an urban hukou with access to social welfares. However, if their interpretations are translated into the language of citizenship, there are apparent fallacies: the approach of fixating on hukou system and binding social welfares together with redevelopment projects is still development-­driven. In this aspect, urban membership and its associated benefits are considered by policy makers as a form of compensation, if not incentive for villagers, to promote redevelopments. By putting government’s interpretations into citizenship-­based discourse, in the following sections I discuss how this political understanding of social inclusion is influenced by the Chinese traditional philosophies that are inherent in the central government’s political statecraft.

3.4 Citizenship as Membership: Gongmin, Renmin, Jumin, or Shimin? As mentioned previously, recent years have seen a rising trend of “Chinese model.” Some scholars have identified that the rise of China’s ideologies began in 2005 with the popularity of the official “hexie (harmonious) society” rhetoric (Zhang 2011). However, when looking back at the Chinese political rhetoric, from the “xiaokang (economic comfort) society” during the 1980s and 1990s, the “hexie society” in the 2000s, to the recent “xingfu (happiness) society” in the 2010s, there is a coherent traditional Chinese vision originating in this rhetoric. In this section, I revisit some Chinese traditional ethics and philosophies, because the terms used in the contemporary Chinese politics in relation to citizens and rights have an ancient lineage that can be traced back to more than two millenniums ago. I believe these traditional ideologies still provide some telling clues on the rationales behind the contemporary Chinese political understanding (and the Xi’an planning authorities’ understanding) of social inclusion. What do the Chinese policy makers mean when they mention the term citizen? In Chinese vocabulary, there are four frequently mentioned

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terms—gongmin, renmin, jumin, and shimin, which can be linked to citizens yet with different emphasis. Gongmin (public people) is a word that was brought about by the Chinese Revolution in the early nineteen-­twenties. As stated in Article 33 of the Constitution of China, “All persons holding the nationality of the People’s Republic of China are gongmin of the People’s Republic of China.” The word in this context places an emphasis on the nationality as a Chinese and carries both the rights conferred by the laws of the country and the corresponding obligations. Theoretically speaking, gongmin is the most appropriate translation for citizens, as the word is “a core of the notion for citizenship (gongminquan)” (Jakimow 2012: 663); it is a production of democracy and embodies justice, equality and the principle of freedom (Perry 2008). Renmin (the people) is a word originated from the Chinese political leader Mao Zedong who came into power during the mid-­twentieth century. It stresses the working masses as the basic elements of society. This word has a very strong Mao-­socialist and patriotic sense in terms of political inclusion of all the people, not only working masses, but also peasants, the bourgeois, and other patriotic people who support socialism and the reunification of China (Mao 1972). Jumin (residents) is based on residency. It refers to people who are living in a particular place and are subject to local regulations and who come under the jurisdiction of the local government. The last word, shimin, according to Harris (2002), originated from the growth of the city associates’ self-­ government in the Republican era with a declining central government. As the word evolves, today it has a narrower meaning that refers to urban residents, or to be more specific, the urban hukou holders. As shown in the previous interviews, when the policy makers mentioned “citizen,” they clearly meant the last term shimin, which put a strong emphasis on urban residents and hukou status. This can also be demonstrated vividly by the use of a buzzword called shiminhua. Shiminhua in Chinese means “the process of turning rural migrants into urban citizens” (Cai 2008: 69). This has been advocated by the Chinese central government since the early 2000s as the key to promoting urbanisation; it is based on this idea that the officials in the Xi’an planning authorities develop and interpret their “immaterial transformation”—in practice, the change of hukou from rural to urban status with the

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attainment of urban citizenship rights (Zhang 2015). However, this word is laden with problematic assumptions and elite prejudice, which pervasively understands citizenship as an urban privilege and differentiates between “those who deserve to be identified as ‘citizens’ and those who do not” (Jakimow 2012: 664). As I mentioned in Chap. 1, before China’s economic reform (1980s), a rural hukou gave one the access to administratively allocated land for the residential and agricultural use, and an urban hukou gave one the access to a job, housing and social welfares. After the economic reforms, although the social security and welfare system for the rural people was set up gradually, the level of benefits they received was still lower than that received by the urban people. An extreme example was that, according to the notice on personal injury compensation issued by the Chines Supreme Court in 2004, the people holding rural hukou would get less amount of compensation than the people holding urban hukou, even if they received the same degree of injury.2 Therefore, from the government’s point of view, bridging the gap between rural and urban hukou is a process of endowing rural people the “urban citizenship rights” and the “social services that the urban people get.” In this way, shimin is interpreted by the government as a privileged group in terms of rights, status, and identity; and that is the reason that the local officials in Xi’an pay a strong attention on hukou, and the social welfares associated with it when addressing social inclusion. It is undeniable that the government has developed a positive attitude and effort to eliminate the inequality between the rural and the urban. I argue that this interpretation is legitimacy-­driven, and leads to the political statecraft that focus on social stability. To understand the legitimacy-­driven rationale behind this approach, we need to return to the four terms—gongmin, renmin, jumin, and shimin. All the four terms have the same part min (common people), which is a word rooted in the writings of the philosopher Confucius (600–500 BC) and Mencius’s (400–300 BC) political thought minben— “people as the basis” and “people as the basis of the authority of a ruler” (Harris 2002: 187). In the history of the Chinese Communist Party, this idea was vividly reminiscent of almost every political leader’s discourse: Mao Zedong’s “serving the people wholeheartedly and never for a

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moment divorce ourselves (CCP) from the masses” in 1944,3 Deng Xiaoping’s “the people’s interests are the starting point and the destination” in 1982,4 Jiang Zemin’s “CCP represent the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people” in 2002,5 Hu Jintao’s “people-centred leadership—building a government that serves the interests of the people” in 2011,6 and Xi Jinping’s recent speech “insisting on staying with the interests of people.”7 They all believed that people’s support is the foundation that underpins a political party or a government’s rise and fall. Interestingly, if we look back to Confucius and Mencius’s ideologies, as well as other important works that are inherent from them, there is a striking similarity on this point. Confucius’s minben was adopted as early as more than 2600 years ago, in a historian work commenting on ruler’s political achievement—“when a State is about to flourish, its ruler receives his lessons from the people” (Zuo Qiuming, n.d.: Book 3, Chapter 32); and when a king asked Mencius how to keep his “royal sway,” Mencius answered, “To love and protection of the people; with this there is no power which can prevent a ruler from attaining to it” (Mencius, n.d.: Book 1, Part 1, Chapter 7). There is no doubt that stressing the minben idea helped the Xi’an government’s political shifts from buildings to the people in the process of urban village redevelopment. However, this idea is based on the purist view of the leader’s legitimacy and social stability—building a unified and harmonious society. Thus in practice, the government’s political shift is in relation to a certain social group’s threat to social stability. Again, if we take Xi’an for example in the process of urban village development, changing villager’s hukou status is considered as the key strategy for promoting social inclusion by the local government. In the early stage of redevelopment, villagers usually got compensations in the form of cash or replaced house without changing hukou status from rural to urban status, because the local government did not have the money nor the incentive to include villagers in urban social benefits schemes. However, as urban villages grew in size and in urban areas, and the inequalities in terms of social welfares and benefits between the urban villagers and the urban people increased unprecedentedly, the contentious collective actions emerging in redevelopments projects were considered as a threat to social stability and urban development (O1203,

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31-­12-­2012; O1409, 02-­04-­2014). Thus, under the urge of the central government, the Xi’an Municipal Government had raised financial subsidies since 2005 and proposed several schemes to promote the inclusion of the urban villagers (O1201, 03-­11-­2012). In each district, special personnel were set up to facilitate a smooth process in redevelopment projects, tasks including propaganda during demolition, coordination among different stakeholders, and mediation conflicts and confrontations. A district official reveals the process of setting up the special personnel as follows (O1409, 02-­04-­2014): In the early stage (of urban village redevelopment) many projects were halted because of the conflicts raised during the process of demolitions. They (villagers in the redeveloped urban villages) sometimes blocked the main road near the municipal government buildings for days. It seriously affected the traffics and the ordinary citizens’ daily lives, and caused negative social influences … the government was under great pressures to solve these conflicts.

She also comments on her work, “we (the district government) can’t afford a rising number of conflicts in the process of redevelopments. The progress of projects would be dragged behind schedules … On the one hand, we need to keep up with the redevelopment schedule to finish the demolition as soon as possible. On the other hand, we are under pressures from the authorities at the higher level to ensure a smooth redevelopment process without negative social effects.” The interview reveals that the inclusion strategies adopted by the planning authorities in Xi’an is actually for the purpose of promoting demolition. It shows the incremental nature of the policy shift from buildings to the people is, to some extent, because of the central government’s call for a harmonious society and the people-­centred (minben) political statecraft. As Schneider and Ingram wrote in their paper, “Policy designs signal whether politics is a game of self-­interest or a process of deliberation through which broader, collective interests are served” (Schneider and Ingram 1997: 101). In this way, although the planning authorities describe the policy shift to promoting social inclusion as “fundamental” and “humanistic” (O1203, 31-­12-­2012), the reasons behind the urban

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village redevelopment is still the same as they were in the early stage— “promoting economic growth and urban development.” Thus urban villagers’ rights that are recognised by the local government, are somehow limited, and based on avoiding conflicts in the redevelopments.

3.5 C  itizenship as Rights, or as Compensations? If the citizenship as membership is understood by the governments as shimin (urban resident), then what types of rights are recognised to associate with shiminhua (being turned into urban people) in the process of urban village redevelopment? In China, there has been a long tradition whereby political leaders put socioeconomic rights as a priority. Going back to Chinese traditional political thought of Confucianism, the relationship between economic welfare and legitimate rule was elaborated clearly—“people have a just claim to a decent livelihood and a state’s legitimacy depends upon satisfying this claim” (Perry 2008: 38). This elaboration, in combination with the minben idea, laid the foundation for the contemporary understanding of citizenship rights. To quote directly from the White Papers of “Progress in China’s Human Rights” published by the Information Office of the State Council, the People’s Republic of China (IOSCPRC): The Chinese government continues to put the safeguarding and the promotion of people’s rights to subsistence and development on the top of its agenda. (IOSCPRC 2001, emphasis added) Persisting in taking economic construction as its central task, and striving for the coordinated development of material, political and spiritual civilizations, it achieved new breakthroughs in its reform, opening-­­up and modernization efforts. (IOSCPRC 2004, emphasis added) China has a population of over 1.3 billion. For such a populous country, it would be impossible to protect the people’s rights and interests without first developing the economy to feed and clothe the people. Development is the

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key to solving all existing problems and facilitating progress of human rights in China. Only by pursuing healthy and sustainable economic development, can China consolidate the material foundation for the people’s happiness and wellbeing, and protect their rights to subsistence and development. (IOSCPRC 2013, emphasis added)

These quotes clearly show that the central government’s interest has been fixating on promoting socioeconomic development consistently. In this way, it is not difficult to understand why the Xi’an Municipal Government has been using urban village redevelopment as a tool to promote economic growth. In general, three categories of rights were recognised by the Xi’an Municipal Government in the process of urban village redevelopment: individuals’ and the collective rights to property in order to secure a decent livelihood, the rights to economic welfares and social security, and villagers’ rights to development in order to improve their livelihood after redevelopments. Furthermore, as discussed previously these rights are bound closely with hukou status. To illustrate how the limited rights, and the associated economic and legitimacy-­driven purpose behind social inclusion, have generated problems in urban village redevelopment, I will return to the stories of N1 and N2 to see what happened after their redevelopments. The stories of N1 and N2 after the redevelopments were strikingly similar. After the villagers of N1 moving into the new community, at first they were quite content with the improvement of living environment and housing quality. The relocated community of N1 covered 0.04  square kilometres, including green spaces, sports ground, garbage disposal area, a nursery school and an elementary school. New houses were five-­ bedroomed, three-­storied terrace houses with garages on the ground floor. Buildings and roads within the new village were constructed in compliance with building codes and planning regulations with water and gas supplied. With the development of HIDZ, the area had formed a completed public transport network and convenient public facilities. A villager in N2 gave a similar description (V1206, 12-­05-­2012):

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Although it took a long time (six years) before moving here (the relocated community), I still felt kind of comforted when I saw the new houses—at least the new place looked better than our old one. Before the redevelopment, there were no supplies of central heating, tap water or gas … Now we have green spaces, sports facilities in the public space, a nursery school, and an entertainment centre for the aged people … supermarket and farm market within walking distance.

However, the living environments in the both villages began to decline again about three years after the redevelopments. With regard to N1, during the relocation the local authority allocated 0.01 square kilometres of economic development land8 to the village, on which the village committee could have established village enterprises. However, because the villagers had doubts about the village committee’s capabilities of running and managing business, the land was sold (back to the government) for a lump sum price of 58.5 million yuan (5.85 million pounds) in 2003 without any construction, and the money was distributed to all the villagers (V1201, 03-­05-­2012; V1202, 03-­05-­2012). With regard to N2, villagers simply got a relocated community without any economic development land. Therefore, villagers in both N1 and N2 again built extensions on top of their relocated houses and relied on rental collections as their major income resource. The only difference was that after the redevelopments, villagers could raise the rents because of better living amenities; and the tenants were no longer rural migrant workers, but residents from other urban places who could afford rooms at higher prices.9 For example, the tenants in N1 after the redevelopment gradually changed to workers in HIDZ and office clerks early in their careers; and the majority of the tenants in N2 changed to young graduates (V1204, 08-­05-­2012; V1318, 15-­01-­2013). Some villagers also refurbished their houses and turned them into hostels, grocery shops or small restaurants. Informal street markets emerged along the main roads near the village entrances, with villagers selling fresh vegetables, fruits, and homemade snacks (Fig. 3.2). Another problem was the village management after redevelopments. In N1 and N2. Without economic development lands, the village committees did not have income resources and thus were unable to manage

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Fig. 3.2  Emergence of self-­constructions and street markets in N1 and N2 after redevelopment. (Credit: Author)

and maintain the public spaces and facilities. As Fig. 3.3 shows, in N1 personal occupations on public spaces were quite usual. Green spaces became small plots of farmland for growing vegetables, and public pedestrians were turned into personal storage places. In N2 the public sports facilities were left in a poor state, and dumping of construction waste was found in many public spaces. At the time that I did my fieldwork, N1 and N2 had once again turned into “new urban villages,” the chaotic places they used to be before the redevelopments. The descriptions above show that in general villagers are compensated with decent homes in the process of redevelopment, which is based on the recognition on villagers’ legal property rights. However, the irony is that the process of recognising villagers’ property rights is also the process of violating them somehow. Theoretically, property rights are constructed as a bundle of economic rights for using, earning income from, and transferring the economic good, as well as the right to enforcement of property rights (Klein and Robinson 2011). As discussed in Chap. 1, in China villagers’ property rights are limited to using and earning income

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Fig. 3.3  Personal occupations of public spaces in N1 and unmanaged facilities in N2. (Credit: Author)

from their housing base and arable land. According to the Land Administration Law (2004: Article 47), the relocation compensation should include compensation for land (calculated based on the average annual output of the farmland), resettlement subsides (calculation based on the time between demolition and relocation and the number of people in a household), and property compensation (details determined by the local government). In practice, as urban villagers usually do not have arable lands that are already been expropriated during urban expansion, they get compensations for their formal rights to using residential lands and housings (as legal residences); but their rights to earning income from the owned-­properties (informal rental collections) are ignored. This left villagers in a disadvantaged position, because for most villagers it is their rights to rental income that supported their families before the redevelopments. The Xi’an planning authorities realised the problems and tried to remedy it by bringing in changes to the second round of redevelopment to N1 and N2. This time they claimed to be “focusing on

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people” by promising villagers the social rights to welfares, and to improving their livelihood after redevelopment. According to the new proposals, in 2012 the hukou status of the villagers in N1 and N2 has already been changed into urban hukou with access to old age pensions, medical insurance, and the Minimum Standard Living Scheme. The villagers would be moved into high-­rise buildings in order to spare land for economic development land for constructed commercial properties, from which the villagers can receive a share of future revenues. An official from the district planning authority described the new redevelopment proposal as follows (O1409, 02-­04-­2014): As the village (N1) was developed in the beginning stage of the redevelopment programme, the relevant policies were incomplete at that time … as same as the economic reform in China; we should allow approaches with trial-­­and-­­error in the early stage. Now we have formed comprehensive redevelopment policies and try to make it up … by getting urban hukou they are secured with a basic livelihood.

O1409 (02-­04-­2014) also explains that in the second redevelopment, compensations will include relocated dwellings and commercial properties. Most of the households can get three to four apartments in different sizes that based on the floor spaces of the villagers’ housings in the first redevelopment. Thus the unused apartments can be rented out. Regarding to the allocation of economic development land, in the second redevelopment commercial construction will take place firstly, before transferring to and being managed by the village. In this way each household can be compensated with certain amount of floor spaces in the form of commercial property, which can generate consistent income flow after the redevelopment. As Xi’an is still expanding its built-­up urban areas quickly, I raised questions on whether the issues like the second round of redevelopment that faced by N1 and N2 may happen in other emerging urban villages. A municipal official responded in confidence (O1203, 31-­12-­2012), “There will be no urban villages in future. In the early stage, only arable lands were acquired, and villagers’ housing-­ based lands were left untouched to avoid extra cost on land exasperations …. In the future

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urbanisation process when we need to acquire villagers’ arable lands for urban construction, their housing base land will also be acquired at the same time and they will become urban citizens by transferring hukou status.” The above descriptions show how the citizenship (being a Xi’an urban citizen), and associated with it the rights to a decent livelihood, and to social and economic entitlements, is used as compensation by the planning authorities in the urban village redevelopment. Although policy makers consider the current policy as a people-­centred approach to promote social inclusion, I would refer to these policies as “trade-­off policies,” with which the governors try to use granting citizenship with certain social and economic rights in exchange of obtaining villagers’ property rights.

3.6 C  itizenship as the Process of Struggle for Rights, or as Benevolence? From the previous sections, an important issue may be observed: although the local government is trying to “make it up” for villagers, and the policies described above seem to be for the benefit of the villagers, in practice everything has been decided with very limited room for villagers to negotiate. Here I reflect this issue to the Chinese traditional ethics once more. In Confucianism, a moral community (Great Harmony) exists to include everyone in the society, and it stresses that good government achieves when all the relevant groups fulfil their responsibilities and maintain their duties (Janoski 2014). In the book of “Confucian Analects,” when a governor asked Confucius about government, he replied, “There is government, when the prince is prince, and the minister is minister; when the father is father, and the son is son” (Confucius, n.d.: Book 7, Part 12, Chapter 11). The core of this Confucian political value lay in “Benevolence,” which required governors to nurture caring though for the people, while people were required to follow certain etiquettes and rites, these being obedience and not involved in decision-­making on

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issues regarding the state (Weber 1951). Although this political theory, which was developed more than 2000 years ago, may not noteworthy in China today, the notion of benevolence, however, seems to be kept inherently in today’s political practice. This is apparent from an official comment on the second redevelopment of N1 and N2 (O1203, 31-­12-­2012): If everything is compensated in the form of cash, villagers do not know how to manage such a large amount of money: some of them just squander the money and get deprived again.

He also added, “Some decisions made by the villagers (he refers to N1’s selling economic redevelopment land in the first redevelopment) were not actually wise. So this time with a professional plan we help them to improve their living in the second redevelopment.” This benevolence idea, however, also allows for a certain degree of villagers’ participation. A popular statement made by the Chinese government, with a certain degree of truth, is that the situation of public participation in China has never been better; and China continues to “expand citizens’ orderly participation” and “ensure citizens’ democratic rights” by establishing a “socialist political system,” which is based on “the realities of China, adapts to the needs of reform and opening up the socialist modernisation drive, epitomises the will the Communist Party of China and the Chinese people” (IOSCPRC 2013). Regarding urban planning, China has a tradition of taking planning issues as government confidentialities. A Xi’an municipal official recalled that thirty years ago, when he just graduated from university and started working in a government agency (O1408, 01-­04-­2014), “On the first day of working, I was given a manual of guideline on confidentialities, which required all the data related to urban planning should be only circulated within the government.” In recent years, however, with China’s strategic planning becoming more market-­led and participatory, there are an increasing number of ordinary people who get involved in the process of urban development on issues like environmental impact assessment and policy-­making on sustainable urbanisation in accordance with the relative laws and regulations (Enserink and Koppenjan 2007; Tang et al. 2008).

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From the legislative aspect, the updated “Regulation of the People’s Republic of China on the Disclosure of Government Information” (2007), “Urban and Rural Planning Law” (2007), “Regulations of Xi’an Municipality on Rural Village Planning and Construction” (2009), and “Regulations of Xi’an Municipality on Urban and Rural Planning” (2010) confer villagers the rights to information and participation in the process of urban development and redevelopment. The official documents (XMG 2005b, 2007a; XMPSB 2005) issued by the Xi’an planning authorities also point out that villagers have the rights to information, decision-­making, participation, and supervision in the process of redevelopment; and villagers’ democratic life should not be affected by redevelopment. In reality, however, participation during redevelopment is still limited and subject to the will of district governors. A common concern from the local authorities is villagers’ lack of knowledge and capacities to participate in decision-­making process. Besides, local authorities often assume that villagers’ involvement tend to delay the redevelopment process, and their strategies to get more compensation can trigger conflicts. For example, when asked about the villagers’ participation, a municipal official comments (O1203, 31-­12-­2012), Situations can be complicated. And people from the same village can also have conflictual interests … Some people don’t want to move at first. But with financial impetus (in order to speed up demolition, cash rewards are sometimes provided, by developers or governments depending on who lead the redevelopment, to the villagers who move in the early stage of demolition), the people who refuse to move in the first place can fight against the other nail-­­households (dingzihu in Chinese describes the household who refuse to move in the process of demolition like nails sticking into land), as the nail-­­households hold back the relocation process … Villagers are not professionals; they may not know how to reach a good solution.

The case of M is another example. In this redevelopment, the district authorities took a strong initiative to propel the project, as the redevelopment of M was closely associated with the construction of the Qujiang

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new district. Although the detailed redevelopment plan was not confirmed until 2005, the demolition was still pushed forward in order to keep up with the proposed construction schedule for the “Everbrite City.” No villagers in M were invited to participate in the decision-­making process; furthermore, they were informed only several months before the demolition, and were given very little time to negotiate with the authorities on compensations (V1208, 15-­ 05-­ 2012; V1315, 05-­ 01-­ 2013). When the demolition was carried out, the district government demolished each house as soon as the residents signed the agreement and moved out in order to speed up the process. In this way, the residents who refused to sign the agreement were finally forced to move out because their daily lives were severely affected by the demolished area around their homes. A villager reveals some details of the demolition process (V1208, 15-­05-­2012): I was forced to move … we were told in May (in 2004) that our village would be demolished because it was in the planned area of Qujiang project … Until the October, only several households had signed the agreements. Most of us were not satisfied with the compensation. But they (the district authorities) started demolition anyway, firstly from the ones who signed the agreements, then to the ones who didn’t. Finally, they put up an announcement in the village and said they would carry out site clearance in December … It was until some of us appealing to the municipal government should we know that the district authorities changed our compensation without even telling us. We should’ve had allocated economic development land, but they transferred the land to developers and gave each of us villagers 50,000 yuan (5000 pounds) more for compensation.

The case of M shows that how seriously the villagers’ rights to information and participation in redevelopments can be subject to manipulation. The legislative provisions that confer villagers’ rights for public participation are abstract without detailed procedures; they provide little help to villagers’ participation in urban village redevelopment. In the cases of W and X, villagers had more opportunities to participate in the redevelopment. Although the reasons behind were complex (the model of redevelopment, the role of the village committee, village’s

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strong economic strength, etc., as discussed in Chap. 5), one of the major reasons was that the redevelopments in the both cases were not associated with any government-­promoted, large-­scaled projects. In these cases, the district governments only became involved in bureaucratic procedures such as issuing permissions on land transfer and construction, or supervising the change of hukou status. Thus, although the redevelopments were still proposed by the local government, without development and economic-­driven pressures behind it, the villagers in W and X were given a relatively longer time to take initiatives. They organised several rounds of public discussion and votes regarding the redevelopment and relocation plans before starting the negotiations with the local government and developers. Furthermore, they also elected villager representatives to supervise the whole development process from the demolition, the construction, to the relocation (V1310, 03-­01-­2013; V1312, 04-­01-­2013; V1311, 05-­01-­2013; V1313, 04-­01-­2013). When reflecting on these cases, together with the cases of N1 and N2, it is clear that whether villagers can be actively involved in the redevelopment process is subject to the manipulations of the district governors. When the governors have no intention to push the redevelopment project, as was the case with the W and X, villagers were left more room for the involvement in the redevelopment process. However, if the governors have concerns regarding villagers’ lack of knowledge and capabilities, they tend to ignore villagers’ rights to participation, and to decide everything on behalf of villagers (and in their words “for the benefits of villagers”), which proved to be the case with N1 and N2. In even worse scenarios, such as M, not only villagers’ rights to participation, but also their basic rights to a decent livelihood and being protected by laws, can be severely undermined by manipulative governors.

3.7 Conclusion This chapter has explored how the notion of social inclusion is understood by the government in Xi’an and its implications on citizenship as membership, as rights, and as the process of struggle for rights.

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From the perspective of the local government, social inclusion is achieved on the basis of two dimensions. The first is “material inclusion,” which refers to the improvement of living environment and housing conditions. The second is “immaterial inclusion,” which refers to the change of hukou status from rural to urban, and getting access to the benefits associated with urban hukou. Policy makers believe that shiminhua—the process of turning rural people to urban people—is an efficient strategy for social inclusion that is characterised by the shift of policy focus from buildings to people. My first argument is that the rationale behind this urban-­citizenship-­oriented interpretation is influenced by the Chinese traditional philosophies that are inherent in the central government’s political statecraft. Influenced by the traditional ideologies on governance, the process of urban village redevelopment in Xi’an manifest two significant features. First, it is development and legitimacy driven. In this aspect, urban membership and its associated benefits are considered by policy makers as a form of incentive to promote redevelopments. Therefore, although the political focus of urban village redevelopment seems to have shifted from buildings to people in pursuit of the governmental legitimacy, in practice this shift does not necessarily change the nature of the development-­ driven redevelopment. Second, it is a top-­down approach that consider villagers as passive actors who receive benefits out of governors’ benevolence. In this aspect, policy makers tend to focus on maintaining social harmony and stability, which may hinder villagers’ active participation to defend their property rights in the process of redevelopment. Therefore, my second argument is that the redevelopment policy actually implied a trade-­off, by which villagers were made to compromise on property rights in exchange for social rights (Zhang 2015). From a Chinese citizenship perspective, the trade-­off between social benefits and property implied by redevelopment policy actually deprives villagers of their property rights and defines their struggles for a decent livelihood in a new urban context (further discussions in Chap. 4).

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Notes 1. Development zones may locate within a certain district or cover areas of several districts. For example, ETDZ is located within Weiyang district and HTDZ covers part of Yanta district and part of Changan district. Thus, the Administration Committees are not subordinate to district governments. They are special bureaucratic agencies set up by the Xi’an Municipal Government to administrate the development zones. At the beginning stage of urban village regeneration, there were four Administration Committees that were responsible for the redevelopment tasks within their development zones: Administration Committees of ETDZ, of HTDZ, of Qujiang new district, and of Chanba Ecological District. 2. According to “Explanation on the application of laws on personal injury compensation cases” issued by the Chinese Supreme People’s Court, the calculation of compensation for death is based on the average annual income of urban residents or the average net income of rural residents. Because rural people’s annual income is usually less than that of urban people, the compensation for rural people can be significantly reduced. 3. “Serve the People” was a speech made by Mao Zedong at the memorial meeting for a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member in 1944. Following the speech, several articles were published with regard to the topic. See the study “Serve the People” reprinted from Peking Review for a full discussion. Available at: http://www.massline.org/PekingReview/ PR1967/PR1967-­­02e.htm [Accessed: 26-­09-­2019] 4. See Li and Tian’s (2014) book for the discussion on Mao and Deng’s “Mass Line” idea: Li, X. and Tian X. (eds) (2014), Evolution of Power. UK: Lexington Books. 5. The idea is a part of the guiding socio-­political theory “Three Represents” that was proposed by Jiang Zemin at the Sixteenth Party Congress in 2002. For a full explanation see http://english.cpc.people.com. cn/66739/4521344.html [Accessed: 26-­09-­2019] 6. For a discussion on Hu Jintao’s idea of people-­centred leadership, see Huang, S. (2014), Hu Jintao’s rhetoric on building a modern humane government. In X.  Li and X.  Tian (eds), Evolution of Power. UK: Lexington Books. 7. The idea “insisting on staying with the interests of people” is from a speech made by Xi Jingpin in Oct. 2014. In this speech, Xi proposed eight

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important things on which the CCP should insist in order to develop and keep its legitimacy. For an official comment on the speech, http://opinion.people.com.cn/n/2014/1002/c1003-­­25772201.html [Accessed: 15-­10-­2019] 8. In the process of urban village redevelopment, the compensations should consist of three parts. The first part was in the form of subsidy, including the money helping with households’ livelihood during the “gap years” between demolition and relocation, and the amount of money that equivalent to households’ demolished properties; however, if villagers chose to move in the relocated housings, a certain sum would be cut from the subsidy. The second part was the so-­called economic development land, on which the village committees usually constructed commercial properties such as office buildings, markets or shops and rented them out; the indigenous villagers could have share in these commercial properties and thus get benefits from them after redevelopments. The third part was the access to social welfares and security system to help with villagers’ livelihoods after redevelopments (XMG 2005b, 2007a, b). 9. The urban residents in a city can be categorised into four types on the basis of hukou status: local urban people who possess local urban hukou, local rural people who possess local rural hukou (in this book they are urban villagers), people from other urban places who possess urban hukou from other cities, and rural migrants who possess rural hukou from other cities (in this book they are rural migrant workers).

References Cai, J. (2008). Nongmingong shiminhua cujin chengshi hexie [Turning migrant workers into urban citizens promotes social harmony]. Journal of Hubei Education, 25(4): 68–70. Enserink, B. and J. Koppenjan (2007). Public participation in China: sustainable urbanisation and governance. Management of Environmental Quality: An International Journal, 18(4): 459–474. Harris, P. (2002). The origins of modern citizenship in China. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 43(2): 181–203. IOSCPRC (2001). Progress in China’s human rights in 2000. The Information Office of the State Council, The People’s Republic of China, May 2001.

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Available at www.gov.cn/english/official/2005-­07/27/content_17730.htm [Accessed: 24-10-2019] IOSCPRC (2004). Progress in China’s human rights in 2003. The Information Office of the State Council, The peoples’ Republic of China, May 2004. Available at chinadaily.com.cn/60th/2005-­04/13/content_8635857_7.htm [Accessed: 24-10-2019] IOSCPRC (2013). Progress in China’s human rights in 2012. The Information Office of the State Council, The peoples’ Republic of China, May 2013. Available at. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2014-­05/27/content_17542627.htm [Accessed: 24-10-2019] Jakimow, M. (2012). Chinese citizenship “after orientalism”: academic narratives on internal migrants in China. Citizenship Studies, 16(5–6): 657–671. Janoski, T. (2014). Citizenship in China: a comparison of rights with the east and west. In Z.  Guo and S.  Guo (eds.), Theorizing Chinese Citizenship. New York and London: Lexington Books. Klein, D.B. and J. Robinson (2011). Property: a bundle of rights? Econ Journal Watch, 8(3): 193–204. Mao, Z. (1972). Selected readings from the works of Mao Tsetung. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Perry, E. J. (2008). Chinese Conceptions of “Rights”: From Mencius to Mao— and Now. Perspectives on Politics, 6(1): 37–50. Schneider A.L. and H.M. Ingram (1997). Policy Design for Democracy. Kansas: University Press of Kansas. Tang, B., S. Wong and M.C. Lau (2008). Social impact assessment and public participation in China: a case study of land requisition in Guangzhou. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 28(2): 57–72. Weber, M. (1951). The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. Hans H. Gerth (trans.) Glencoe: Ress Press. XMG (2003). Xianshi Chengzhongcun Gaizao Jianshe Guanli Zanxing Banfa [Interim Measures for the Administration of Urban Village Regeneration in Xi’an]. Xi’an: Shizhengfa (2003), No. 43. XMG (2005a). Xianshi Jianli Beizhengdi Nongmin Jiuye he Shehui Baozhang Zhidu de Ruoan Yijian [The advice on establishing the employment and social security system for the landless farmers in Xi’an]. Xi’an: Shizhengfa (2005), No. 45. XMG (2005b). Xianshi Jianli Beizhengdi Nongmin zhuan Jumin Renyuan Zuidi Shenghuo Baozhang Shishi Banfa [The measures on establishing the Minimum Standard of Living Security Scheme for the villagers who transfer to urban residences in Xi’an]. Xi’an: Shizhengfa (2005), No. 114.

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XMG (2005c). Xianshi Renmin Zhengfu Guanyu Jiakuai Chengzhoncun Gaizao Gongzuo de Yijian [Advices of Xi’an Municipal Government on Accelerating the Redevelopment of Urban Villages]. Xi’an:Shizhengfa (2005), No. 92. XMG (2006). Xianshi Wuxing Gaizao Gongzuo Fangan [The programme on the immaterial transformation in urban village regeneration in Xi’an]. Xi’an: Shizhengbanfa (2006), No. 99. XMG (2007a). Xianshi Chengzhongcun Gaizao Jianshe Guanli Banfa [Measures for the Administration of Urban Village Regeneration in Xi’an]. Xi’an: Shizhengfa (2007), No. 129. XMG (2007b). Chengzhongcun Wuxing Gaizao Youguan Wenti de Tongzhi [Notice on the immaterial transformation of urban villages in Xi’an]. Xi’an: Shizhengfa (2007), No. 157. XMPSB (2005). Beizhengdi Nongmin Zhuanwei Chengzhen Jumin Hukou Gongzuo Shishi Fangan [The implementation on the programme of transferring the landless villagers’ hukou from rural to urban status]. Xi’an: Shigongzhifa (2005), No. 41. XURO (2005). Annual report on urban village redevelopment in Xi’an, 2005. Xi’an: Xi’an Office of Urban Regeneration. Zhang, L. (2011). The political economy of informal settlements in post-­socialist China: the case of Chengzhongcun(s). Geoforum, 42, 473–483. Zhang, X.Q. (2015). In the name of inclusion: citizenship conflicts in the redevelopment of urban villages in Xi’an, China. In Gualini E., J.M.Mourato and M.  Allegra (eds.), Conflict in the City: Contested Urban Spaces and Local Democracy. Berlin: JOVIS.

4 Villagers’ Understanding of Social Inclusion

4.1 Introduction The previous chapter explored how the notion of inclusion is interpreted by policy makers in Xi’an and the rationale behind their interpretations. Although the planning authorities endeavoured to transfer villagers to Xi’an shimin (urban citizens), rarely were villagers’ feelings taken into account. The process of shiminhua (turning villagers into urban people) was a top-down, imposed strategy, and most of the redevelopment projects were proposed by either the municipal government or the district government rather than villagers’ initiatives. Villagers were given limited opportunities to participate the process only after the decisions of redevelopment were made by the authorities. In this way, villagers may have different attitudes towards the process of “being turned into shimin.” Therefore, it was equally important to look at villagers’ attitudes and their differing responses to the government’s top-down strategies. In comparison with the official interpretations in Chap. 3, this chapter explores villagers’ understandings of social inclusion based on their identity and the process of struggle for rights, and explains how villagers’ actions towards redevelopment are determined by their different © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 X. Zhang, In the Name of Inclusion, New Perspectives on Chinese Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6120-1_4

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interpretations. First, I sketch out a general socioeconomic picture of the six redeveloped urban villages based on the quantitative information from the questionnaire survey, and compare villagers’ situations with other Xi’an urban citizens. This comparison facilitates a better understanding of the following discussions on villagers’ attitude towards government’s hukou-oriented redevelopment approach. Then I discuss how villagers look at themselves as being urban citizens based on their self-­ identity. Finally, a study on the process of villagers’ struggle for rights demonstrates that villagers’ active participation plays an important role in increasing their sense of inclusion.

4.2 B  eing Urban Citizen: A Socioeconomic Comparison 4.2.1 B  ackground Information of the Studied Urban Villages Table 4.1 shows the basic information of the selected urban villages, followed by a brief introduction on each of the villages. A clarification with the case selection is that with eight years’ time span, some quantitative information may not be comparable. Take villages’ economic strengths, for example. As aforementioned in Chap. 1, because of the dual landownership and administration system in China, villagers retain property rights over their houses and their housing plots, which provide them a relatively flexible environment to decide on the use of their collectively owned land. For a village, these lands are referred to as “collective assets,” and villagers adopt the “joint-stock system” to manage the collective assets. In this way, the villagers become shareholders and have a share in, and benefit from these lands. In order to benefit from the ownership of these properties, villages usually lease the collectively owned land to peasant entrepreneurs to establish township and village enterprises. Some villages may also set up their own village enterprises such as warehouses, hotels, factories, restaurants, and commercial housing (for comprehensive discussions on the emergence and evolution of township and village

2011 2014 Maturity

State-owned Rural Village Committee

State-owned Urban Property Management Company

State-owned Urban Property Management Company

2009 2013 Exploring

1857 Strong Collective-­ owned Rural + urban Village Committee

State-owned Rural Village Committee

2007 2010 Exploring

2002 2006 Beginning

1382 Strong Collective-­ owned Rural + urban Village Committee

599

X

Market-led

1628 Medium Collective-­ owned Rural Village Committee

1560 Weak Collective-­ owned Rural Village Committee

870

W

Government-­ Government-­ Village-led led led

450

M

366

N2

Source: Data collected from Village Committees, XURO, and Xi’an Land Reserve Centre

Before redevelopment Number of 968 households Population 3790 Economic strength Medium Land ownership Collective-­ owned Hukou status Rural Village managed Village by Committee Redevelopment Years: from 2005 Years: to 2008 Stages of Beginning redevelopments Type of Government-­ redevelopment led After redevelopment Land ownership State-owned Hukou status Rural Village managed Village by Committee

N1

Table 4.1  Information of the studied cases

State-owned Urban Property Management Company

Market-led

2010 2018 Maturity

936 Medium Collective-­ owned Rural + urban Village Committee

310

R

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enterprises, see Kung and Lin 2007; Xu and Zhang 2009). Before being redeveloped, the fixed assets of N1 was valued at ¥70 million CNY (£7 million GBP), which generated an annual income of around ¥17 million CNY (£1.7 million GBP) in 2001; the fixed assets of R were valued at ¥120 million CNY with a ¥50 million CNY of income in 2007. When taking the time, cost and inflation rate into account, apparently the economic strengths of N1 and R cannot be compared by these figures. However, the descriptions of “weak, medium, or strong” in the Table below is not based on the comparison among the six villages; they are given by the village committees in a descriptive way to indicate the economic strengths of the six villages compared with other urban villages at their respective time points before redevelopments. The choice of the six cases provides different redevelopment scenarios. N1 and N2 went through the similar steps in the process of redevelopment. First, both of them are redeveloped in the early stage of urban village redevelopment. Second, the redevelopments are government-led, during which the Xi’an local government is responsible to promote and subside the projects. Third, both N1 and N2 are faced with another round of redevelopment in the near future, and the process of the second redevelopment has already caused backlashes and confrontations, thus they represent cases that raise concerns regarding high social/economic costs. An in-depth investigation of the two cases helps to explore both policy makers’ and urban villagers’ changing understandings of social inclusion. N1 was located in the Hi-tech Industries Development Zone (HIDZ) within the jurisdiction of Yanta district in southwest of Xi’an. Before redevelopment, the village had around two square kilometres of farmland and an indigenous population of 3790 in 968 households. In 1991, the developmental plan of HIDZ was approved as part of the urban development and economic booming strategies in Xi’an. Since then the expansion of HIDZ had quickly encroached on the farmland in N village further towards the southwest. Without farmland, the villagers started to construct sub-standard dwellings and rented apartments for the migrant workers who were working for the construction of HIDZ. According to the village committee, around 30000 migrants had moved into the village by 2001. In 2002, the village was put on the

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redevelopment agenda by the local municipality due to the expansion of HIDZ. Compensations were offered in two ways: property exchange or money compensation. The villagers could either choose to move to the new houses provided by the local authority or choose to receive the amount of money equivalent to the value of their demolished properties. After negotiations, all the villagers chose property exchange, and the whole village was relocated 2 miles west away from its original place in June 2003. N2 was located in the Economic and Technological Development Zone (ETDZ) within the jurisdiction of Weiyang district in north of Xi’an. Before the redevelopment, this village had 366 households with a population of 1560 and 1.5 square kilometres of farmland. However, the farmland had been gradually expropriated since 1996 for the expansion of ETDZ. The remaining yields from traditional vegetable farming were not sufficient in keeping families out of poverty, thus many young villagers became migrant worker themselves, and some villagers also adapted their housing to accommodate the migrants from other cities. In 1998, the whole village was demolished due to the construction of the freeway overpass near the second ring road. Compensations were in the form of property exchange. The relocated housing, however, took six years to finish and the village moved to its current location in 2003. The redevelopments of M and W both started in 2004, which occurred soon after the Xi’an local government officially set “promoting social inclusion” as one of its major targets in urban village redevelopment, and began to focus on villagers’ hukou statuses. During the redevelopments, villagers’ hukou status in W changed from rural to urban, while the villagers in M retained rural hukou, with the village committee remaining as the representatives of the village collective, being responsible for managing the new villages. Thus, a special focus on the two villages may help to understand villagers’ opinions on hukou status. M was a village located in the newly developed Qujiang district, with a population of 1628 in 450 households. Before the redevelopment, due to village’s proximity to the university area, it was a popular choice for the college students and graduates who were seeking cheap rental apartments. The process of relocation took three years, and it was the first time that the compensations consisted of social welfares such as old age pensions

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and medical insurance besides money compensation and relocated housings. W was located in the old urban area in Lianhu district with a rural population of 1382  in 870 households. The village also had a large amount of urban population (1485 in 175 households), who were previously the indigenous villagers but transferred their hukou during the 1990s, because the village was very close to the urban centre and urban hukou used to be quite attractive to rural villagers. It was one of the first villages that established township and village enterprises during the early 1990s in Xi’an. In 2003, the village had an annual income of ¥130 million, and its businesses covered real estate, tools and hardware, and printing. W’s strong economic strength enabled it to lead in the redevelopment, which means the village itself set up a development company and was responsible for the whole process from raising funds to governance. In this type of development practice, the local government acted only as a regulator, providing guidance or preferential policies. Similarly, social welfare projects were also included in the compensation package during the redevelopment. Finally, the cases of X and R complemented the other four cases, and help with identifying the key issues that facilitate an inclusionary process. The developments of the both villages were led by private developers under negotiations with the villagers. X was located in the Beilin district near the south second ring road and had a rural population of 1897 in 599 households. Similar to W, it established village enterprises—a construction materials market and some office buildings—in the early 1990s. Due to its good location, the land value increased drastically in the 2000s. Before the redevelopment its collective assets were valued at more than ¥260 million CNY (£26 million GBP) in 2004. The compensations were offered in the form of property exchange, and villagers’ hukou were converted from rural to urban status. R was a relatively small village with a population of 936. It was located in the west of Lianhu district, which is the industrial area and logistics distribution centre in Xi’an. Actually, in 2002 the village was already on the government’s redevelopment list. However, the redevelopment had not taken placed until 2007 because of the district government’s financial burdens.

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In general, the redevelopment of urban villages presents a complicated picture with different stakeholders involved and different issues/conflicts generated over time. Therefore, with a careful selection of studied urban villages, I hope to reveal the complex stories of social inclusion/exclusion behind urban village redevelopments.

4.2.2 Financial Status and Living Environments Financial Status of Urban Villagers Table 4.2 shows the socioeconomic information of the villagers in the six redeveloped urban villages. The household heads tend to be a married male, and most of them (80%) do not work. Among the six villages, N1 and N2 show an obvious characteristic of an aging community. The reason may be that the replaced dwellings are terraced houses or detached houses, which are large enough to accommodate a family of three generations. This explanation is also supported by the number of relocated dwellings and the number of children in their families: the villagers in N1 and N2 only get one relocated houses, but the number of families with children is approximate to the number in other villages. Regarding educational attainments, the majority of villagers (51%) have received only a primary level education or below. The low educational attainments are concentrated in N1 and N2 with relatively older household heads1. In other cases, where the relocated dwellings are usually two to three bedroom flats, there is a rise of the percentages for higher educational levels (senior secondary and above) with the increasing number of younger household heads. Regarding the change of income resources in the six villages before and after redevelopment. Before redevelopment, most of the villagers’ main income resources are from rental income and the benefits of village enterprises. Some villagers also run informal businesses such as grocery shops, hostels, barbershops, or small restaurants. These businesses were characterised as “informal” or home-based businesses because they were located in the building extensions that villagers constructed on their housing base land. In doing this, villagers bypassed the formal procedures of applying

Household head age 0–29 30–60 Above 60 HH gender Male Female Marriage Single Married Widowed Educational level Primary and below Junior secondary Senior secondary and above With children or not None 1 and above With jobs or not Yes No Number of relocated dwellings

9% 64% 27%

48% 52%

3% 95% 2%

62% 13% 5%

47% 53%

11% 89%

9 64 27

48 52

3 95 2

62 33 5

47 53

11 89

N1 N = 100

9 91

44 56

69 29 2

9 88 3

56 44

3 63 34

9% 91%

44% 56%

69% 29% 2%

9% 88% 3%

56% 44%

3% 63% 34%

N2 N = 100

15 82

61 36

45 36 16

16 80 1

51 46

11 66 20

15% 85%

63% 37%

46% 37% 17%

17% 82% 1%

53% 47%

11% 68% 21%

M N = 97

17 69

34 52

37 40 9

13 73 0

59 27

12 59 15

20% 80%

40% 60%

43% 47% 10%

15% 85% 0%

69% 31%

14% 69% 17%

W N = 86

30 43

35 38

17 42 14

12 60 1

51 22

17 53 3

X N = 73

41% 59%

48% 52%

23% 57% 20%

17% 82% 1%

70% 30%

23% 73% 4%

21 36

26 31

20 25 12

6 51 0

37 20

15 40 2

R N = 57

37% 63%

46% 54%

44% 35% 21%

11% 89% 0%

65% 35%

26% 70% 4%

Table 4.2  Socioeconomic information, and level of satisfaction on financial status and living environment

103 410

247 266

255 200 58

59 447 7

299 214

67 345 101

20% 80%

48% 52%

51% 38% 11%

12% 87% 1%

58% 42%

13% 67% 20%

Total N = 513

120  X. Zhang

Floor space per capita Score-financial status Score-living environment

1 2 3 and above Major income resources after redevelopments (multiple-choice question) Rents Work (include other family members) Business Village benefits Others Monthly income per capita 500–2000 2000–3500 3500 and above

(+) 3.08

50% 48% 2%

(+) 3.33

50 48 2

2% 0% 1%

(–) 2.48

16% 79% 5%

16 79 5

2 0 1

80% 46%

(–) 2.87

11% 0% 3%

11 0 3

80 46

100% 0% 0%

48 m2

72% 9%

72 9

100 0 0

51 m2

100% 0% 0%

100 0 0

74% 25% 1%

5% 0 13%

11% 45%

86% 14% 0%

(+) 3.03

(–) 2.24

31 m2

73 24 1

5 0 13

11 44

83 14 0

33% 63% 4%

13% 37% 14%

66% 12%

15% 48% 37%

(+) 3.13

(+) 3.40

53 m2

28 54 4

11 32 12

57 10

13 41 32

3% 73% 24%

16% 44% 21%

63% 3%

11% 33% 56%

(+) 3.34

(+) 3.26

44 m2

2 53 18

12 32 15

46 2

8 24 41

26% 58% 16%

9% 37% 33%

63% 9%

7% 46% 47%

(+) 3.08

(+) 3.14

41 m2

15 33 9

5 21 19

36 5

4 26 27

–

–

–

184 291 39

46 85 63

302 116

308 105 100

36% 57% 7%

9% 17% 12%

59% 23%

60% 21% 19%

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for a business license. In some households in the villages N2 and M, family members’ work income can also have distinct contributions. They worked as taxi drivers, construction workers, sales staff, and so on, or engaged in migrant work in other cities. In general, the major income resource for most of the families (59%) after the redevelopments is still rental income, with M being the only exception and seeing work income as the dominant resource. This is because of the number of relocated dwellings and the different types of relocated buildings in the six villages. For villagers in N1 and N2, building extensions on top of their terraced houses or detached houses enables them to acquire more floor spaces to rent-out; most of the villagers in W, X, and R get more than two relocated flats in high-rise residential buildings, which means they can rent out the unused ones. Most of the villagers in M (86%), however, only get one relocated flat in a six-storey building, so their rental incomes significantly decrease after the redevelopment. Furthermore, after redevelopment W, X and R still hold village enterprises, which can generate future revenues for the villagers who are shareholders. N1, N2, and M have no economic development land left after redevelopment, and thus the villagers in these three cases see a sharp decrease of the incomes from village benefits after redevelopments. A significant increase of “other incomes” in the villages of M, W, X, and R is an interesting phenomenon, as it shows how urban villagers adapt and make a living in an Internet era. With the increasing prevalence of Internet trading platforms and social network services, urban villagers, especially the younger generations, are beginning to take advantage of the Internet resources. They usually open personal online shops on Taobao (the Chinese version of EBay), or sell clothes, bags, and cosmetics on their WeChat and Weibo accounts (the Chinese version of Twitter and Facebook). This is an emerging form of new informal business in my studied urban villages, and can sometimes bring considerable incomes for the households. For example, a villager in X (V1435, 24-01-2014), a 33-year-old female, quit her job as an office clerk in a private company and hired an assistant to help her sell children’s garments on Taobao. Finally, although many villagers do not have formal occupations, their incomes are not lower than the income of the ordinary Xi’an urban

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people. According to the Xi’an Statistic Bureau (2014), in 2013, the monthly income per person for the urban people in Xi’an was ¥2758; the minimum wage was ¥1150 per month; and the minimum standard of living allowance for the urban poor was ¥480 per month. In the studied cases, the majority (57% in general) of the families’ monthly income per person falls within the scale of ¥2000–¥3500. The two exceptions are N2 and M, with the majority here falling below ¥2000, but was still higher than the monthly minimum wage. A Study on the Housing Affordability Index in thirty-five Chinese cities (Zhang and Feng 2011) shows that, Xi’an ranked 18th in terms of urban residents’ purchasing power, with a significant feature of rising housing prices and low-income levels in comparison with other cities. Thus, even for people with an average monthly income, Xi’an may still be an expensive city to live in if paying a mortgage is part of his or her monthly spending. In this way, looking at villagers’ expenditure may help better understand their economic profile. Unlike urban residents, most of the villagers in my survey do not have the burden of a housing mortgage. Instead, with regard to major spending, the top three frequent choices are day-to-day expenses such as spending on markets, transportation, restaurants, clothing, leisure, utilities, and so on (348 out of 513, 68%), supporting parents (211 out of 513, 41%), and raising and educating children (189 out of 513, 37%). Regarding the expected spending in ten years, families with old people tend to choose medical care and health (83 out of 101, 82%), while families with children tend to choose children’s education and marriage (189 out of 266, 71%). In the questionnaire survey, villagers were asked to give scores on three questions regarding the change of their financial situation during redevelopment. The scores for each question ranged from 1 being very negative to 5 being very positive. In this way, villagers’ scores illustrate whether the redevelopment brought a positive or a negative change of their financial status (Table  4.2). It is clear from the results that although villagers’ income level is similar to ordinary urban people, not all villagers are satisfied with it. The villages with a decrease of rental income (N1, N2, and M) show a negative change (score below 3). M has an extremely low score, because as mentioned previously, the villagers’ chance of getting

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rental income has been hindered by the number and the type of the relocated dwellings. Based on the socioeconomic profile, I selected six typical families to present a general picture in the six redeveloped villages: The household head (V1209, 17-05-2012) in N1 is a 46-year-old male. After redevelopment, he lived with his wife and mother, as well as his son who studied in a Xi’an university. One year after the redevelopment, he refurbished the garage on the ground floor and opened a grocery store. However, with the child studying in college and his mother being ill, he felt substantial financial pressures. Thus, he started to build extensions on top of his house and rented out vacant rooms. Now his house has been turned into a six-storey building with seven single rooms available for rent. The monthly income per person in his family is ¥2132. The old couple (V1317, 15-02-2013) in N2 are in their fifties and living with their two grandchildren. Their son and daughter-in-law are working in another city and only come back home twice a year. They have separated the large room on the third floor into two small rooms, and have been renting out the two vacant rooms since 2006. The rent is part of their income resources besides the money sent back by their son; their monthly income per person is ¥1240. The couple (V1316, 05-01-2013) in M are in their early forties. Both of them are hired by the village committee and work as cleaners in the community. They are living with their daughter-in-law who just had a baby. Their son is working in another city. With the birth of the baby, they feel that ¥1000 per person is not enough for them. As the new mom holds a junior accountant certificate, she plans to let the couple take care of her baby and try to find a job in the near future. The villager (V1314, 05-01-2013) in W is 39 years old and lives in a four-bedroom flat with her husband who is a taxi driver. She is a member of the village committee and works in the property management office in the relocated community. She also has a daughter and a son who are both senior high students. During the redevelopment, she received two relocated dwellings, and her parents used to live in the other one—a three-­ bedroom flat. After her father passed away, her mother came to live with her, and she began to rent out the vacant flat at a monthly price of ¥3500. Together with her husband’s work income and the benefits from the village enterprises, the monthly income per person in her family equates to ¥2131.

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The villager (V1419, 06-01-2014) in X is a young male who has just got married. His family received three relocated apartments during the redevelopment. Now he and his wife live in one of the apartments; his parents live in another one; and the third apartment is for rent. Besides the rent and the benefits from the village enterprises, he and his three neighbours purchased a shop front (about 200 square meters) together and rented it out as a restaurant. These bring them a monthly income of around ¥2987 per person. The couple (V1429, 15-01-2014) in R, are in their late forties and live with their daughter. They used to run a small bistro before the redevelopment. After the redevelopment, they planned to open a new one near the relocated community at first, but the rent in a proper location is higher than they expected. Furthermore, as everything needs to be “formal” after redevelopment, they need to apply for business license, get a food hygiene certificate, and pay taxes to the local government, all of which they find “unworthy.” Therefore, currently they are still pondering on this plan. The couple has two relocated flats and rents out one at the price of ¥2100 per month. Together with the benefits from the village enterprises, their monthly income per person is ¥2034.

Living Environments and Housing Facilities Table 4.2 shows villagers’ level of satisfaction with their living environments and housing facilities after redevelopment, with positive scores in all of the studied case. However, villagers in M give the lowest score (3.03) among the six cases. As reflected in V1315’s (05-01-2013) comments, when villagers firstly moved to the new place in 2007, there was a lack of living amenities such as grocery shops and convenient public transportation. To date, the available living amenities around M are still the fewest compared with the other five villages in terms of market, hospitals and schools, because its location is near to the Qujiang Relics Park and the large theme park Tang Paradise, which marks the place as a tourist site rather than a residential area. For most of the indigenous villagers, however, the improvement on their living environment has been remarkable during redevelopment. Among the six questions in the survey, the improvement of public security and environmental sanitation received very high scores. A young lady in X (V1419) recalled her days before the redevelopment:

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I was just graduate from a nurse school and worked in a private hospital at that time. Sometimes when I worked late, I just stay over at my friend’s home or at the workplace, the village used to be very chaotic … no, I meant not only the environment—the garbage or clogged sewage—I meant the people. There were thieves and gangster guys; it was not safe. My parents used to open a barbershop, and they got mugged twice in the month before the 2005 Chinese New Year. Now the place is clean and tidy, much safer.

Housing conditions and living amenities are now up to the urban standards. According to the Xi’an Statistical Bureau (2014), in 2013 the average floor space per person for urban residents in Xi’an was 43  square meters. In the redeveloped villages, the average floor space is from the smallest of 31 square meters in M, to the largest of 53 square meters in W; and the figures in N1, N2, W, and X are higher than the urban standard. In terms of housing types and facilities, the relocated dwellings in N1 and N2 are two to three-storey terraced houses and detached houses with water, electricity, bathrooms and kitchens; the relocated dwellings in M are multi-sized-bedroom flats in six-storied buildings with water, electricity, gas, central heating, en-suite bathrooms and kitchens; the dwellings in W, X, and R, are multi-sized-bedroom flats in high rise buildings with all the basic facilities including elevators. M, W, X, and R, are also gated communities with security guards at community entrances. In W and X, automobiles that do not belong to the community residents are charged for entrance and parking. Most of the living amenities in and around the six villages are convenient and walking-friendly (within 20  minutes’ walking distance2). This is especially the cases with N2, W, and X. In N1 and R where there is no market around, although street markets emerge spontaneously along the main road near community entrances. In M there are daily shuttle buses provided by a supermarket about 15 minutes’ drive away. The nearest primary school for M is about 30 minutes’ walk and the nearest hospital is about a 20 minutes’ drive. In R, a community kindergarten within walking-friendly distance is now under construction. If judging from the physical environments, one probably cannot tell

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the differences between the relocated communities and other ordinary residential communities. In general, it can be concluded that the socioeconomic status of the indigenous urban villagers is not lower than the status of ordinary urban people. First, although most of the urban villagers have low educational attainments and are without formal jobs, their average incomes generally reach the urban average. Second, after redevelopment their living environment and housing conditions improved significantly and are now on a par with urban housing standards. Therefore, it seems understandable when the official comments claim, as mentioned in previous chapters, that villagers “are being no difference from other urban citizens.” However, whether villagers take these socioeconomic improvements as inclusion is still subject to further investigation.

4.2.3 U  rban Standards? “Look at What We Had Before Redevelopments” While the governments still take urban citizenship and the access to urban social welfares as an urban privilege, the changing entitlements associated with hukou in the last two decades have had a latent influence on urban villagers’ attitude towards the rural and urban hukou distinction. According to the questionnaire survey, villagers generally have a neutral or negative attitude towards the change of hukou status and access to social benefits after urban village redevelopment. The results showed that among the 216 villagers who have transferred hukou, 27% see a positive impact in terms of getting access to urban welfare and social services; 8% think there is no impact at all while 56% see a negative impact in terms of household incomes. Among the 297 villagers who still have rural hukou, 78% of them think it is unnecessary to change, while 18% are unwilling to change. The following excerpts from my fieldwork dairy may help to illustrate more clearly, what the urban villagers think about rural hukou status and the change of hukou status during redevelopments in a difference way from the local government.

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Excerpt 1: Villager V1431 (22-01-2014) in N1, 68 Years Old How could we not compare with them (the urban people)? Thirty years ago, with an urban hukou you got everything … but we have nothing except the houses we constructed by ourselves and the crops from farmland. We brought food and clothing at higher prices than the urban people did. In the late 1980s, the government began to allow rural people to work in the city, and I went to the Xi’an textile factory and worked as a temporary worker—driving trucks … I worked there for more than 12 years but couldn’t transfer to an official worker, because I’m holding a rural hukou. But the urban people from other cities, for example, a guy from Taiyuan, he transferred to an official worker after he worked there for six years. They (official workers) worked for less hours … they were not worried about being fired; bur we (temporary worker) had to work harder and for longer hours. During the Spring Festival [the Chinese New Year] when the factory distributed welfare such as food, cooking utensils or cloth, they got more while we got less or nothing; and they got better ones.

Excerpt 2: Villager V1427 (12-01-2014) in N2, 51 Years old In the past the urban people looked down upon us (rural people). My younger sister married an urban guy and got an urban hukou. She was very proud of that. But after the economic reform, many urban people lost their official jobs. [The guy] was laid-off … my sister tried everything to get her rural hukou back … At that time, our village started to set up the joint-stock system … Everyone who held a rural hukou in our village could get shares … the central government’s policies were in favour of the rural people. The urban people could only have one child, but we could have two.3 If one had farmland, he got agricultural subsidies; well, we didn’t have farmlands as they were expropriated, but we still had housing base lands. In the last few years, the rural security system was gradually established. We were also entitled to the old age pension and healthcare insurance; the amount of money might be different from the urban people, but I didn’t care—we had become part of the urban area and my housing base land was worth a lot. The rental incomes were enough to give my family a good life.

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Excerpt 3: Villager V1432 (22-01-2014) in N1, 39 Years Old Many urban people’ lives were not better than ours. They might be better if they were doing businesses; but if they were just common labourer, their lives could be much worth. How much could they earn? Perhaps a thousand yuan (yuan means the Chinese currency ¥) per person and a family of three people could get 2000 at maximum. I know some urban people; the couple was both laid-off and they could only live on the state’s minimum standard of living subsidy. At least we got housing base land. Like me, by constructing on my housing base land and rented rooms out, my family could get more than 10,000 a month [he has five family members], and this was the average level in my village. But the urban people, how many urban families could get 10,000 a month at that time (ten years ago before the redevelopment)?

For most of the villagers in the studied cases, holding rural hukou might be a disadvantage in the past. However, with their villages gradually being encircled within the urban built-up areas and their social-­ economic entitlements increasing gradually, rural hukou was no longer a disadvantage but rather a financial instrument, or a carrier of property rights that brought them considerable financial advantages. Their material lives were not lower than the urban standards; and this was one of the major reasons for villagers’ unwillingness to give up their rural hukou. Then how do they consider the improvements of the access to higher standard of social welfare? A villager in M expressed his opinions as follows (V1315, 05-01-2013). Compensations? Look at what we had before redevelopments! In the past the government took advantage of us (rural people): our farmlands were expropriated for urban development, and we were also the cheap labours for urban construction. My son used to be a construction worker and he got injured during work; but the employer only gave him 5000 yuan because he was rural people! … Our lives were finally getting better, but the government took advantage of us again using the lame excuse as “turning us into urban people.” Who got the benefits at last? It was the developers, the government. The best that the ordinary villagers could do was to negotiate on compensations. Even on this we were not given the opportunities.

Another villager from X commented on the change of hukou in a relatively mild manner (V1426, 03-01-2014):

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We deserve all of these (better living environment and social welfare) … It was the urban people who firstly enjoyed the great benefits that brought by China’s economic and social development, and we should also have the right to share the achievements of the economic reform. Besides, it’s not the authorities want to include us as they claim; these things are compensations for the loss of our financial incomes. After redevelopment, I get three relocated flats; but of course, I need to spend money on decoration in order to live in or rent out. Migrant tenants move out; the rents of my rooms are no longer cheap, and they are not always fully occupied as they used to be. I still get benefits from the village collective assets but this doesn’t make much difference … Regarding the access to better social benefits, the healthcare insurance for urban people is higher—that’s an improvement—but I don’t take the old age pension and the access to the Minimum Standard of Living Scheme (MSLS) as compensation. Given the financial situation of our village, we don’t need the MSLS. As for the old age pension, I still need to pay a large amount of money as personal contribution. And this amount of money was deducted directly from my cash compensation during the redevelopment. For example, I’m 52 years old. According to the relevant policy I need to pay a lump sum of 54,600 yuan to join the old-age pension scheme. Do you know how much I can get after I reach 60 years old? It will be only 380 yuan a month (260 from personal contribution and 120 from the state subsidy).

These comments show that for most of urban villagers, the urban hukou is not as attractive as the government expected. The reasons for this are twofold. On the one hand, the improving entitlements associated with rural hukou have changed its potential value to villagers. Rural hukous are no longer considered as a disadvantage, but rather a guarantee for good livelihoods. Although some villagers can maintain the same level of livelihood after redevelopments, the income resources do not change and are not as easy and stable as they used to be. On the other hand, even for the villagers who consider the change of hukou as an improvement, the positive side brought by the change is offset by the negative effect of the low rate of return and the financial loss in the process of urban village redevelopments. Villagers’ responses further demonstrate the aforementioned “trade-off” policies, in which villagers are pushed to compromise on their property rights in exchange for something that they deserve in the first place. Therefore, although hukou is considered by the government as the effective mechanism to promote social inclusion, practically it does not seem to increase the villagers’ sense of inclusion.

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4.3 C  itizenship as Identity: Urbanite, Farmer, Somewhere in Between While the local government tries to include urban villagers, at least, in a tangible way in terms of improved living environment and social benefits, villagers have different interpretations on “being urban people.” After being acquainted with some villagers during the fieldwork, I would ask them questions such as “do you feel that you are still farmers?” and “do you feel being different from urban people?” In answering these questions, urban villagers showed a complicated feeling towards “being Xi’an shimin.” Excerpt 1: Villager V1424 (10-01-2014) in N1, 44 Years Old I know how the urban people look at us. They think that we (urban villagers) are lazy: we get a lot of money from rental income; we get good relocated housings during the redevelopment; we rely on these and don’t want to work. They think that we are greedy: we took the opportunity of redevelopment and all we want is a lot of compensation. But do they understand how we get by in these years? In the early 1990s when our farmlands were expropriated, a lot of the villagers lived on selling vegetables in farm markets or being construction workers and self-employed cargo truck drivers. I used to work in a paper mill—not a place for a human being to stay! I stood for twelve hours a day with only ten minutes’ breaks in the morning and afternoon. The lunch and dinner breaks were around half an hour, but foods were extremely terrible … it was until the mid-to-late 90s that my life started to get better. At that time, a lot of rural migrant workers moved in the village, and everyone was constructing on their housing base lands. I didn’t have enough money, but I’d got to keep up. I borrowed some from friends and relatives, built houses, rented out, repaid back the money. All these took me five years and many efforts. But only three years later the redevelopment started … I didn’t want to move, but who cared? All I could do was to ask for more compensation … The redevelopment didn’t make much difference; now I’m still living on rental income … Find a job? We don’t have skills; our educational levels are low. Nowadays the employment market is so competitive even for a college graduate or a skilled worker, not to mention us. And why should I be called lazy for not getting a low-paid job like I used to do, considering on my current income and savings? I don’t think they (urban people) would do it (get a job) if they were in my situation.

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Excerpt 2: Villager V1425 (11-01-2014) in X, 35 Years Old “I don’t think I’m a farmer, but I still feel different to some extent. This feeling is especially obvious when I communicate with urban people. Their educational backgrounds, the environments they grow up are different from ours. They’re more open-minded. They get better overall suzhi (A Chinese frequently used term that means human quality, including education, sophistication, and nobility etc.) You know, today if you want to be rich and successful, you’ve got to have the brain, the knowledge and vision to do business or investment. That’s maybe what we lack.” He also asked me, “You’re a female; why do you want to get a doctoral degree?” Before I could response, he kept on talking, “Well, if my children want to get a master or doctor degree, I will also support them.”

Excerpt 3: Villager V1312 (04-01-2013) in W, 46 Years Old I always call myself, as well as the indigenous people from W, villagers. Not because we’re still farmers, we were no longer famers on the day our farmlands were acquired … I call myself villager because we are different from other urban residents in our community.4 For example, we get benefits from the village collective assets, but they don’t. We pay less for car-parking spaces than they do. We like to visit each other and being close with our neighbours, I mean, with the villagers. My mother likes sitting on the bench in the yard chatting with her friends from the village. But some old urban residents I know, they go to the nearby school for the elderly where they learn Chines history, painting, calligraphy, cooking and so on. We villagers prepare performance and organise social event to celebrate Chinese New Year. But the urban residents are usually mind their own business and do not take part in us. If you ask if I see myself as an urban people? Well, yes. I mean besides the things I mentioned, I don’t see any other differences.

These excerpts show that the villagers’ perceptions on the differences between farmers and urban residents result from two viewpoints. One is based on tangible standards—financial situations and socioeconomic entitlements. The villagers used to put urban citizens in a superior position, because the discriminated institutional arrangement prevents them from the welfare system and fair working. However, as their financial

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situations get stronger and the entitlements associated with rural hukou get better, they begin to take the rural identity as a privilege because of the considerable rental income generated from their informal rights to housings and the land they occupy. From this perspective, villagers with better financial status (such as in cases of W and X) tend to consider themselves superior to the ordinary urban people in terms of quality of life. On the other hand, however, they feel self-abased in terms of the overall lower suzhi. Although most of the household heads have low educational attainments, they realise the importance of knowledge and education, and take their children or grandchildren’s suzhi seriously. Many villagers express their willingness to support their children to do college and postgraduate study. The children, especially the ones in W, X, and R where the households tend to be younger, were also encouraged to learn specialties such as musical instruments and martial arts. Some villagers (V1310, 03-01-2013; V1425, 11-01-2014; V1428, 15-01-2014) even mentioned that they sent their children abroad for studies. Regarding villagers’ self-identity, their perceptions represent a set of contradictions. First, compared with farmers, they consider themselves as urban people because of their urbanised living environment and quality of life. Compared with other urban people, however, they stress their identity of rural people to show their weak standings against authorities during redevelopment, to argue that they deserve what they have today, and to express their grievances towards the discriminations and stereotypes from urban people. Secondly, in China the terms “villager” and “farmer” are usually used interchangeably to describe the people who hold rural hukou status, live in rural areas, or work on farmland. The urban villagers call themselves “villagers” rather than “farmers” because they consider themselves different from the farmers who still live on agriculture. Meanwhile they also differentiate themselves from the urban residences in their communities in terms of “village privileges,” living habits and social networking. However, these differentiations are perceived by the villagers from a neutral, if not positive, standing point. As V1312 (04-01-2013) said, “We don’t have to live their way in order to become urban people.” In other words, they do not consider the differences of living habits and social networking as barriers for them to feel “being urban people.” This point

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Table 4.3  Sense of inclusion and level of satisfaction Scores Sense of inclusion Financial status Social benefits Living environment Active participation

N1 (N = 100)

N2 (N = 100)

M (N = 97)

W (N = 86)

X R (N = 73) (N = 57)

(–) 2.93

(–) 2.64

(–) 2.76

(+) 3.35

(+) 3.28

(+) 3.05

(–) 2.87 (+) 3.01 (+) 3.33

(–) 2.48 (–) 2.94 (+) 3.08

(–) 2.24 (+) 3.04 (+) 3.03

(+) 3.40 (–) 2.92 (+) 3.13

(+) 3.26 (+) 3.02 (+) 3.34

(+) 3.14 (–) 2.99 (+) 3.08

(–) 2.84

(–) 2.53

(–) 2.31

(+) 3.31

(+) 3.25

(–) 2.86

is also demonstrated by the data from questionnaire survey that shows villagers’ sense of inclusion (Table  4.3). Villagers’ sense of inclusion in N1, N2, and M is lower than that in W, X, and R, which is generally in line with villagers’ satisfaction on financial situations. Among them N2 scores the lowest (2.64) and W scores the highest (3.35). So, the next question is that, is there something else, besides villagers’ financial status, that contributes to villagers’ feeling of “being urban people”? The scores on participation provide some traceable clues. They reflect what villagers have experienced in the process of redevelopment. The redevelopments of N1, N2, and M are full of conflicts, and villagers’ active participation was seriously hindered due to local authorities’ heavy-­ handed redevelopment plan. Furthermore, although villagers’ sense of inclusion in R is positive, the score is significantly lower than W and X, which may be influenced by a low level of participation in the redevelopment process. This case will be examined further in Chap. 5.

4.4 B  eing Urban Citizen: What the Villagers Strive For? Villagers’ participation in the process of urban village redevelopment can be categorised into two types. The first is in a form of active participation, including organised and peaceful involvements such as village meeting, public discussion and voting, questionnaire survey, and so on. This type is usually used for regular participations through the whole process of a

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redevelopment project. The second is in a form of contentious actions, including their participation in a more intensive way, such as public gathering and protests, petitions, and getting media exposure to generate public pressure. These measures are used by villagers to put forward their claims to rights when conflicts arise. For example, the questionnaires showed that regarding the “measures of participation” in the cases of N1, N2, and M where conflicts arise, the percentages of people who choose the latter type of participation are much higher than the percentages in W, X, and R. This section focuses on villagers’ experiences on conflicts and compromises in the cases of N1, N2, and M, and explores villagers’ process of struggle for rights as being Xi’an shimin. In the process of redevelopment, conflicts tend to emerge in two phases. The first phase is before the decision of redevelopment is made, during which villagers try to change the course of demolition and protect their right to the place and housing. The second one is during the process of demolition, during which villagers try to protect their rights (formal and informal) to rental income and a decent livelihood. When asked about the attitude towards urbanisation and urban village regeneration, most of the villagers gave negative answers. According to the questionnaires, the percentages of the negative answers given by the villagers in N1(25 out of 100, 25%), N2(43 out of 100, 43%) and M(69 out of 97, 71%) who saw a decrease of financial status after redevelopments were much higher than the percentages in W, X, and R. Regarding the most concerned issue, almost every interviewed villager mentioned the compensations and a decent livelihood after redevelopments. Even though the majority of villagers in W (58 out of 86, 67%), X (55 out of 75, 75%), and R (35 out of 57, 62%) considered their incomes was same as before, they were still reluctant to move in the first place. Because after redevelopments although the incomes were roughly the same, the amount of incomes were often fixed, and many villagers lost the flexibly to raise rentals by building extensions. However, the reasons for the reluctance to move were not only financial but also emotional. During my fieldtrip, many times I heard the villagers mention the Chinese term “genmai (root or origin).” Many people in the north of China, especially the rural people, believe that a kind of spiritual link can be established between the residential place and the old

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people who lived there for many years. The old people believe they can live a long life because he or she gets the supportive energies from that place though the link of genmai. Thus, for the benefit of the old people, they should avoid moving away from home. A villager (V1420, 06-01-2014) in N2 told me: It’s not good for the old people to move home, because moving home hurts their genmai. My father is 71 years old. He got sick for a very long time the first time our village was redeveloped. And several old people in the village passed away during the years when they waited for relocated houses … the village is going to be redeveloped again in the near future, and I’m very worried about my father.

While this reason might sound superstitious, it did reflect the villagers’ emotional attachment to the place where they lived for many years. With the second round of redevelopment approaching, villagers in both N1 and N2 tried to fight for keeping their villages at first. In 2011 when my research first started, the proposals for the both villages’ second redevelopment had not been confirmed. There was grapevine news circulating among the villagers about the district government’s drafting and discussing the possibility (V1203, 07-05-2012; V1206, 12-05-2012). With increasing anxieties, villagers in N2 began their public protests in late June. About 300 villagers gathered together, sitting outside the district government for three days with posters that read, “Only seven years after the first redevelopment, we don’t need another one” and “we want our homes, we don’t want to be displaced again” (V1317, 15-02-2013). The protest attracted the local public media’s attention, and on 12th July, the local government announced that the government respected villagers’ will. The story did not end up with the local government’s promise. Three months later, a demolition office operated by the head of the village committee and staff from the street office was set up in N2, hanging up posters and propagating the benefits of redevelopment. The villagers became furious and started seeking help from the municipal government. Indeed, 71% of the villagers signed a petition letter, criticising the cahoots of the village committee and the district government. Soon after, the municipal government stepped in, and the demolition

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office was shut down. However, the intensified atmosphere did not ease, as the drafting proposal was still underway, and the local authorities would not give up the opportunity of the second redevelopment (V1420, 06-01-2014; V1422, 08-01-2014; V1423, 08-01-2014). Finally, a redevelopment proposal was confirmed two years later in 2013, and the master plan for that area received permission from municipal planning authorities (O1305, 08-02-2013). V1420 (06-01-2014) reveals some details: After our petition, the local official news began to report that the environment in our village was dangerous, something like in 2011 there were more than twenty robbery cases. But what was the number in previous years? What was the average number in that area in 2011? There must be something unspoken going underneath. It was all about the profits they (the local authorities) could get … Our village may look chaotic, but it is not a home for crime or drugs or anything like that … They have been exaggerating it in order to promote demolition. Before the first redevelopment, I had lived there since I was born, more than 40 years. That place was my origin. But I knew this reason doesn’t actually work. If I told them (the officials in planning authorities), they would take it as my excuse to ask for more compensation. I know our village is going to be demolished again, but still don’t know when the project will start. What can I do? The only thing I can do is to fight for more compensation to secure my family’s livelihood after the redevelopment.

Similar story happened in N1 as well. The villagers in N1 (around 700 out of the 968 households) started to protest against another displacement in 2012. They contacted journalist, posted on Internet forums, and organised gatherings in order to attract public attentions. Their efforts, however, were mostly in vain, as the local government seemed to be more interested in the potential value of that area in HIDZ. The local government took a quite heavy-handed tactic, taking away two organisers of the contentious collective actions and detained them for five and ten days respectively (V1421, 23-02-2014; V1424, 10-01-2014; V1432, 22-01-2014). The village did get the public attention in 2012 due to a report on the deadly house collapses, which was mentioned in Chap. 1. However, to

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some members of the public, this seemed to prove their opinions of urban villagers’ greediness (I1201, 11-11-2012; I1202, 16-11-2012). For example, in a casual chat on my way to N1, the taxi driver (I1201) asked me questions when I told him I was doing research on the village, “Why do you pick that village? Did you see the news? People died because the villagers constructed houses like crazy! All they want is to get more money.” The villagers in both N1 and N2 could not change the course of demolition, thus they turned their attention on how to get more compensation and building even higher extensions was one of their “informal living strategies.” “Even if I can’t get more compensation with these extension floors, at least I can still rent out rooms and get more rental income before demolition” (V1421, 23-02-2014). V1421 also did the maths for me: N village now covers an area of 0.25 square kilometres. The plan of the second redevelopment is to move the villagers into thirty-storey high-rise buildings, which can spare around 0.19 square kilometres of land. The current price of land around N village is about 6.9 billion per square kilometres, so 0.19 square kilometres of land is worth 1.3 billion. If the local authorities sell the land with constructed office or residential buildings, the price goes even higher. Our compensations are far less than the real value.

Therefore, after villagers failed in protecting their rights to the place and housing, “a fair compensation and a secured livelihood” became their bottom line, and the villagers are in the second phase of working to protect their rights to rental income and a decent livelihood. Villagers’ experiences of conflicts and compromises influenced their attitudes towards future lives, and their sense of being urban people significantly. In villages W, X, and R where no conflicts arise, although the villagers were not generally supportive towards the redevelopments (with 168 out of 216, 78% being neutral and not supportive), they were still optimistic in certain ways. As some villagers said, “at least our lives will not be as hard as it was back in the early 1990s.” or “at least it’s better than working on farmland or in factories” (V1426, 03-01-2014; V1433, 23-01-2014). In comparison, villagers in N1, N2, and M have a strong feeling of “being left behind” or “being abandoned” in the process of rapid urbanisation:

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“Urbanisation is not good, at least it’s not good for us.” A villager in N1 (V1430, 22-01-2014) said, “It’s good for the developers: they can earn a lot of money; it’s also good for the officials in the local government: they earned faces and demonstrate good achievements in their political career. But it’s our interests that are sacrificed. My house was originally two storied, and I built three storeys on top of it. During the demolition, the compensation was calculated only based on the floor spaces of my original house. For the rest floors, I was only given ¥450 per square meters for the cost of construction materials, much lower than the real cost. A reasonable price should be around ¥900 per square meters… After redevelopments, we don’t have the knowledge and skills to compete with others. We were just given compensations and thrown out there.” When we were firstly moved here (relocated community for M), there was nothing. There were no grocery shops or markets around, only one bus route to the downtown area. So some villagers began to sell vegetables and daily stuffs alongside the roads in and out of the village. But local authorities called off the street vendors because, according to them, it was the illegal occupation of public spaces. It was after that the shuttle buses to a supermarket were provided … Yes, it’s getting convenient now. But look at the place where our village used to be, so prosperous with all the luxury shops and dwellings we can never afford. (V1315, 05-01-2013) People always talking about how lives are getting better compared with what they were 20 or 30 years ago. But isn’t it a natural development for a country without much turbulence? Yes, people’s income levels have been increasing, but so did prices for everything … It’s always the farmers who got hurt in the last 30 years. When everyone was talking about xiaokang (economic comfort) society, our lands were expropriated. When everyone was talking about harmonious society, our village was demolished. Now everyone is talking about the Chinese dream. Where’s mine dream? (V1209, 17-05-2012)

These excerpts indicate that the villagers’ negative feelings towards urbanisation and urban village regeneration results from the government’s heavy-handed approaches, and also from the anxieties and uncertainties about the future. Furthermore, they have also lost the trust towards local authorities due to the governments’ profit-driven

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behaviours. From the villagers’ perspective, the local authorities’ role in redevelopments is to promote urban development, rather than include villagers. In this way, what villagers strive for during urban village redevelopment, is more in line with Lefebvre’s notion of “the right to the city,” in which the rights claims are based. What the villagers strive for is not merely a fair compensation or secured livelihood; they demand more—a specific urban equality—the right not to be displaced from urban life in “renewed centrality” (Lefebvre 1996; Holston 2008).

4.5 Conclusion This chapter explored how the notion of inclusion is understood by the villagers in terms of citizenship as identity and as the process of struggle for rights. First of all, in response to the government’s trade-off policy, villagers do not take the change of hukou and the access to social benefits as a process of inclusion. Before urban village redevelopment, the general financial status of many villagers was not lower than that of the average urban person, with someone even being higher. Villagers see the profits generated from their housing base land as something they deserve— something that compensates them for the unequal treatment that they experienced during the era of the planned economy. Therefore, although they get compensation during urban village redevelopment, the process is considered by villagers as a damage to their formal and informal rights to property, not to mention the fact that in some cases, villagers’ right to active participation is seriously hindered by government’s heavy-handed redevelopment plans. In this respect, in order to achieve social inclusion, policy makers need step away from the perspective of “what villagers get after redevelopment,” but to focus on “what villagers have before redevelopment,” and to make sure that “whether the exchange of have and havenot” is a positive one during redevelopment. Regarding the relationship between villagers’ sense of inclusion and their financial status, a potential link has been established. Villagers’ sense of inclusion is generally aligned with their financial status. In cases where villagers have a strong financial status, they also show a high level of sense

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of inclusion. Furthermore, the sense of inclusion may also be influenced by how villagers participate in the process of redevelopment. The studies of N1, N2, and M show that in cases where villagers’ active participation is seriously hindered, villagers show a strong feeling of being left out during rapid urbanisation. Therefore, it is important to look at what villagers strive for during urban village redevelopment. In general, what the villagers strive for can be marked by two phases. In the first phase, before the confirmation of redevelopment proposal, villagers tried to change the course of demolition and protect their right to residential places and housings. In other words, most of the villagers did not want to move in the first place, not only because of financial reasons, but also because of their emotional attachment to the place where they had been living for many years. However, in many cases, the villagers are unable to hold their places and housings, thus what they can do is to take a step back and fight for more compensation, which I refer to as the second phases—protecting their rights to rental income and a decent livelihood after redevelopment. Therefore, what the villagers strive for is not only a fair compensation for a secured livelihood, but also the rights to have a say, and to not being displaced from urban life in renewed centrality. The next chapter will include the study of the three villages with high scores on sense of inclusion (W, X, R), and explore further how villagers’ sense of inclusion can be affected by the active participation during urban village redevelopment.

Notes 1. According to the “Law on Nine-Year Compulsory Education,” which took effect in 1986, the primary (compulsory) education in China spans nine years, which includes six years of primary education and three years of junior secondary stage. Therefore, younger villagers tend to obtain higher educational level in comparison with their elders. 2. The “20 minutes’ walking distance” is based on the sustainable urban design concept of walkability, which is a measure of “the extent to which the built environment is friendly to the presence of people living, shop-

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ping, visiting, enjoying or spending time in an area” (refer to Abley (2005), Walkability Scoping Paper. Available at: http://www.levelofservice.com/ walkability-­research.pdf [Accessed: 11 Oct 2019]). Based on the concept, the maximum walking distance for a using-friendly community amenity is 1.6 kilometres, which is about 20 minutes’ walk in the average human walking speed (5 kilometres an hour). 3. From 1979 to 1985, China carried out a strict one-child policy. Since 1985, the family planning policy in rural areas have changed slightly. In general, a couple is not allowed to have a second child if the first child is a boy; however, the couple can have a second child 48 months after the first one, if the first child is a girl. The couple is not allowed to have the third child if the first two children are both girls. People who violate the policy are subject to large amount of fines. If a village is redeveloped and the villagers are transferred to urban people, the villagers have a five years’ transitioning time, after which the redeveloped village should be in compliance with the family planning policy in urban areas. 4. The relocated community of W is a mixed-residential community. The indigenous villagers live in three high-rise buildings and the rest of the residential buildings are put on the property market.

References Holston, J. (2008). Insurgent Citizenship: disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kung, K.J. and Lin, Y. (2007). The decline of township-and-village enterprises in China’s economic transition. World Development, 35(4): 569–584. Lefebvre, H. (1996 [1968]). Writings on Cities. Edited and translated by Kofman E. and Lebas E. Oxford: Blackwell. Xi’an Statistical Bureau (2014). Statistical year book of Xi’an, 2014. Beijing: China Statistical Publishing House. Xu, C. and X. Zhang (2009). The evolution of Chinese entrepreneurial firms: township-village enterprises revisited. IFPRI Discussion Paper 00854, April 2009. International Food Policy Research Institute. Zhang, J. and C.  Feng (2011). Chentshi jumin zhufang goumaili yanjiu—yi woguo 35 ge dachengshi weili [A study on the Housing Affordable Index for urban citizens in 35 big cities in China]. Chengshi Fazhan Yanjiu [Urban Studies], 18(10):78–84.

5 Making a Difference: Inclusion Through Active Participation

5.1 Introduction As indicated in the previous chapter, in all the studied cases, villagers have shown a strong desire to participate actively in the process of urban village redevelopment. Furthermore, in cases where there is a high level of active participation, villagers also have a higher sense of inclusion when compared to other cases. However, the importance of villagers’ participation is not fully recognised by the local government. As discussed in Chap. 3, the local authorities usually consider villagers’ involvement as an uncontrollable factor that may delay the redevelopment process and trigger conflicts. In addition to this, local authorities also have a general concern surrounding villagers’ lack of knowledge and experience in making decisions. This chapter will challenge the local authorities neglecting villagers’ desire to participate in the process of urban village redevelopment. A study of three cases with high levels of inclusion show that, when being empowered, villagers have a clear idea as to what they need and can work together to achieve a strong outcome during redevelopment. The way they achieve a favourable solution is based on both the villagers’ decades © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 X. Zhang, In the Name of Inclusion, New Perspectives on Chinese Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6120-1_5

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of rural autonomy and the mutual trust established between ordinary villagers and village committees. Carrying on from the previous discussion, this chapter further explores how villagers develop their own strategies to create a relatively inclusive environment for decision-making. Firstly, the chapter introduces the village autonomy in urban villages and explains how it lays the foundation for villagers’ participation in the redevelopment of urban village. The chapter then goes on to illustrate that although local authorities limit the scope of villagers’ participation, villagers still have their ways to resolve conflicts and achieve solutions outside of the formalised framework.

5.2 V  illage Self-governance: A Foundation for Urban Villagers’ Participation 5.2.1 V  illage Autonomy: A Rural Way of Citizen Participation In contemporary China, rural villages’ self-governance began to attract public attention in the early 1980s when several villages in the Guangxi province tried to elect their own village leaders to take responsibility for managing local affairs. Since then, the topic of whether the practice of grassroot democracy should be written in law and what form that should take sparked a nationwide debate that took five years to reach a preliminary consensus. In 1987, the National People’s Congress of China enacted the Trial Organic Law of Villagers’ Committees. In 1998, after a long and winding experimental period, the central government finally won the protracted battle against many local authorities’ resistance to the practice and fully adopted the law. (For a comprehensive introduction to the origin and development of rural village self-governance, see O’Brien and Li (2000)). Since then, village committees have been serving as a fundamental administrative unit for rural populations. In urban areas, neighbourhood committees play a similar role. Xi’an’s rural village autonomy began in 1988 with the implement of the trial law. According to the law, which was amended in 2010, a village

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committee can consist of three to seven persons. These positions include a chairperson, vice-chairman, and general members, each of whom has a three-year term of office. Their duties include both governmental and ad hoc undertakings. On one hand, they should assist local governments to enforce state policies, such as promoting public welfare, public health, children’s compulsory education and birth control. On the other hand, they manage daily local affairs, such as ensuring public security, mediating disputes, building public facilities and village infrastructures. China has been a strong advocate of market economy in the last two decades and this has led to village committees being encouraged to promote economic development in rural areas through land management and collective property ownership. Village committees were required to report their progress regularly to the village assembly or their representative. The village committee would then defer to the villagers’ assembly for debate surrounding decisions affecting all villagers. A decision would only be made once the assembly came to a majority consensus (SCNPC 2010). Although villages have become part of urban areas in the process of urbanisation, they still maintain a “rural way” of governance. Take the case of X, for example. Since the late 1980s, the farmlands in X were gradually expropriated for the construction of urban infrastructures and public facilities. This resulted in many of the residents of X abandoning cultivation and focussing on looking for work in factories or construction. In 1992 when a new group of village committee members were elected, they proposed to use the compensation from the expropriated farmlands and the rest of the collective land (around 26,700 square metres) for the village’s economic development. The proposal was a controversial one, as many villagers were worried about the large amount of money needed to invest in construction, as well as the village committee’s ability to manage the new commercial properties. In response to villagers’ concerns, the village committee carried out a detailed proposal based on several case studies in other, similar, urban villages. The proposal included information on what type of property was to be constructed, how much to spend on construction, how to manage the property, and the profits to expect from the property. A public vote was then held to decide whether the proposal should be accepted. One villager recalled the day of the public vote (V1313, 04-01-2013) during an interview,

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On the day of voting, the chairman of the village committee gave us a very exciting mobilisation speech. The key term was developing village economy. He said: “Without industries a society cannot be rich; without businesses a society cannot be vibrant (a Chinese old saying wugong bufu; wushang buhuo). We used to be farmers and used to be poor. So we need to think about what is our advantage to develop. Land is our most valuable resource, and we should take good use of that.”

The proposal passed with overwhelming support from over eighty percentages of villagers. Soon after, a market was constructed exclusively for building supplies and occupied 23,000 square metres. The space was rented out at a reasonable price of ¥30 per square metre. The success of the first project led to six years of public discussions and votes by the villagers regarding similar undertakings. Before the start of X’s redevelopment in 2005, the village had already accumulated assets worth ¥2.6 billion, including the construction material market, two high-rise office buildings, and 60,000 square metres of retail space. The villagers’ average share of the collective assets was ¥130,000, and the average income could reach ¥10,000 per person per year (V1311, 03-01-2012; V1313, 04-01-2013). Villagers also have their own ways of resolving disputes within the village. For example, take the case of W before redevelopment. During the mid-to-late 1990s, disputes that occurred in the village often surrounded housing base land and building extensions. The village committee found themselves spending more than half of their time mediating conflicts of this nature. For example, an extension built by one party often-occupied public space or hindered a neighbour’s ventilation, lighting, or fengshui.1 Another common occurrence was that one person traded part of their housing base land to another villager privately, but later demanded a share in the buildings constructed on the property because the property generated much more revenue than he or she expected.2 Therefore, the village committee organised several public meetings and questionnaire surveys to formalise a set of general principles to deal with these disputes. For example, because there was a lack of parking spaces in the village due to densely constructed buildings, villagers who need to park their cars in front of their neighbours’ houses

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had to pay the neighbours a set amount in parking fees. When extensions occupied public spaces, the person who built the extension would be required to leave at least 2 metres for main passageways and 1.5 metres for the aisles between the new extension and the neighbour’s building. Another regulation was that, the villagers who transferred housing base land were not qualified for a share in the profits generated from the newly constructed buildings. However, if a redevelopment were carried out in future, the villagers could get 20% of the housing base land’s compensation. Village representatives were elected and formed a conciliation group to supervise and guarantee the application of these general principles. Therefore, in spite of the comparatively chaotic living situation within the village before redevelopment, the way that villagers governed themselves was actually quite organised (V1310, 03-01-2013; V1312, 04-01-2013). The experiences of these two villages demonstrate that, with more than 20 years’ promotion of village autonomy, Chinese villagers actually have a strong democratic consciousness to govern themselves. This “rural way” of governance is not only based on the idea of active citizen participation, but also a blend with the deep-rooted Chinese rural tradition. In this way, village self-governance lays a robust foundation for villagers’ active and organised involvement in the process of urban village redevelopment.

5.2.2 V  illagers’ Participation in the Process of Urban Village Redevelopment There are generally three key actors in Xi’an’s redevelopment projects— the local government, the developers, and the villagers. These actors represent three different interest groups whom all get involved with the redevelopment process at different phases. Chart 5.1 shows the key actors’ interrelationships in the process of urban village redevelopment. The first phase is proposing the plan. In Xi’an, the government is the advocate and initiates this process. It can be either the municipal government or the district government that proposes a redevelopment plan. Depending on the government’s financial capabilities, developers either can get involved at this phase or can wait until a later phase. The second phase of the

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Government / Planner Negotiation / Financial resource

Welfare policy/ Compensation Negotiation / Response

Villager

Preferential policy/ Master plan

Preferential policy/ Compensation

Developer

Negotiation / Response

Chart 5.1  Interrelationships of the three key actors in the process of urban village redevelopment. (Credit: Author)

redevelopment process is the land transfer, during which the villagers’ collective-owned land is lawfully transferred to state-owned land for the purpose of urban construction. In this phase, demolitions take place and villagers are compensated either from the government or from developers depending on when the developers step into the redevelopment process. Governments can either finish demolition first and then transfer the usage rights of the vacant land to developers, or they can transfer the land to the developers before demolition and let the developers handle it. In the latter scenario, the government always provides preferential policies in order to attract developers. The third phase is the construction and relocation, which usually takes several years to finish before the villagers finally move into a newly constructed community. In the six studied cases, villagers’ levels of participation can be significantly different. One of the main reasons for this is the different modes of redevelopment, namely who dominates the whole end-to-end process (i.e. government-led, village-led, or market-led). As mentioned previously, in the early stages of urban village redevelopment in Xi’an, most of the redevelopment projects were dominated by the local authorities, what is known as government-led redevelopment. In this model, the government was responsible for finding and providing

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financial resources and nominating developers, if necessary, such as the case of N1, N2, and M. This model could potentially lead to a low level of villager participation, as they do not have a stake in the process. In Xi’an, the villagers had no power to influence the process; their only role as negotiating compensation. Their powerlessness is also demonstrated by their channels of obtaining information, which relied on a one-way communication from the government to the villagers. These took the form of public announcements, posters and pamphlets from village committees, or news from public and social media. There was no back and forth dialogue in this process for the villagers to air grievances or ask questions. With a lack of official channels for active participation, villagers in N1, N2, and M, as discussed in the Chap. 4, tended to adopt a contentious way of getting their voices heard by the local authorities. In comparison, the development of W village adopted a village-led model, in which the village founded a development company and was therefore responsible for providing the finances needed for the entire project. W’s financial resources included the collective assets that were accumulated before the redevelopment, bank loan and villagers’ contributions. In this model, although it was the local government who initiated the redevelopment project, villagers could still actively participate the process by negotiating the redevelopment schedules, locations of new communities, and types of relocated housings. In the cases of X and R, a market-led redevelopment model was adopted. Here, the two villages also founded their own redevelopment companies but in order to ease financial burdens, the villages designated other private developers as partners to provide most of the necessary funds for the redevelopment projects. In return, private developers could generate profits by investing in the lands that were available after the relocation of the villagers. In this model, villagers were able to actively negotiate with both developers and the government on the redevelopment plans and compensation on condition that private developers were wholly independent of the government (the scenario did not happen in neither X nor R). In the cases of W, X, and R, the villagers’ levels of participation were comparatively higher and their communications with both local governments and developers were reciprocal.

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Another main reason for the villagers’ different levels of participation is the performance of village committees in the redevelopment process. In Tan and his colleagues’ study (Tan et al. 2012), a redevelopment process is marked by two core steps—“internal process” and “external process”—from villager’s perspective. The internal process refers to the acknowledgment of villagers’ property rights, in which village committees facilitate villagers to reach an agreement on a compensation plan. The external process refers to the land transaction between villages and governments, in which the village committees act as the representatives of the villagers to negotiate with the government. Therefore, irrespective of different redevelopment models in the six studied cases, village committees all played an important role in bridging the external and internal processes, which gave them a dual identity and purpose during the redevelopments. On the one hand, they served as a government agent, assisting with marketing of redevelopment plan, promoting demolition and land transfer, and facilitating the communication between ordinary villagers and the government. On the other hand, they were also residents of the village who individually faced demolitions and relocations. Thus, they were supposed to act for the benefits of all villagers and stood in solidarity with their neighbours, bargaining with governments and developers on behalf of the whole villages. In the case of W (a village-led development), the village committee was also the elite group (the same as the local authorities) who made decisions in the process of redevelopment (further discussions in Sect. 5.3).

5.3 V  illagers’ Strategies: How Optimised Solutions Achieved 5.3.1 W’s Experiences: Reciprocal Communication Among the six redeveloped villages, W provided a good case study to demonstrate how ordinary villagers’ active participation and the village committee’s open performance could lead to positive outcomes. Before the redevelopment in 2004, W had 870 rural households and 175 urban

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households. These urban households were previously the indigenous villagers but transferred their hukou status to urban hukou during the period of economic reform. A brief introduction on the village’s history may help understand the complicated situation. During the economic reform in the 1980s, two major changes happened in the village. The first was the nationwide promotion of Household Responsibility System (HRS) after 1978, a system that initially appeared in the city of Guangzhou during the late 1950s. In this system, village collectives functioned as contractors and sub-contracted arable lands to individual households; the contracts usually lasted for more than 30 years in order to eliminate villagers’ concerns on change of policies and potential revenue risk. The households who signed contracts fulfilled a certain amount of quota obligations to the governments, and became the claimants for the rest of the crops (Lin 1990). W adopted HRS in the early 1980s. The system significantly increased the villagers’ agricultural outputs, and considerably reduced the need for agricultural labours in the village. Therefore, some villagers started to work as temporary workers in state-owned factories. At that time, the abundant social and economic entitlements associated with urban hukou status were quite attractive to the villagers. Because of this, many villagers tried to obtain urban hukou if possible (V1310, 03-01-2013). The second major change in W was the establishment of the village enterprises in the early 1990s. Due to the implementation of HRS that unlocked a large population in need of employment and with W’s proximity to the urban centre, it began to construct warehouses and farm markets in the late 1980s. The town was able to accumulate an initial pot of capital to improve the social welfare and the public infrastructure in W. The development was spurred by the Xi’an Municipal Government’s state-led, rapid urbanisation, during which W’s arable lands were expropriated for urban constructions. The compensation for the expropriated farmlands enabled a further economic development in the village. The village committee began to use the compensation to build up more commercial properties, including warehouses, office buildings, and retail fronts. In 1997 the village adopted the joint-stock system in response to the State Council’s promotion of township and village enterprises. It established various businesses such as a real estate company, a hardware

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co-op, an automobile leasing company, a restaurant, a hotel, a farmer’s market, an electronics manufacturer, a printing factory, and a medical clinic. The ordinary villagers became shareholders of the village’s collective assets, and villagers’ average income from the village assets had reached ¥19,000 in 2003. Because the villagers who had already changed to urban hukou were not entitled to the benefits, many of them tried to return to their rural hukou. However, it was a hard task because the local government had already tightened the transfer restrictions from urban to rural hukous in order to promote the urbanisation process. The village was reluctant to accept more rural households as the increase of rural households meant the increase of the village collective costs and a decrease in profits for the villagers (V1310, 03-01-2013; V1312, 04-01-2013; V1314, 05-01-2013). In this way, W presented a mix of indigenous villagers holding both rural and urban hukou before the redevelopment. Similar situations were also discovered in X and R. W’s redevelopment was an inclusive process that enabled the ordinary villagers’ voices to be heard and considered, including villagers holding both rural and urban hukou. The fundamental action that led to a positive result, was the openness and candour of a two-way communication. The interviewed villagers who were the members of the village committee provided some details (V1310, 03-01-2013; V1312, 04-01-2013). Firstly, before the redevelopment in 2004, the village carried out four rounds of public surveys with regard to the redevelopment scheme. The first draft was written in early May 2004. Every household in the village was sent a copy of the redevelopment draft, on which villagers could comment and provide their suggestions. A special group was also formed to explain the draft in detail and handle villagers’ enquiries. The group included members from the village committee, staff from the village development company, and the professional consultants that the development company hired. Two weeks later, villagers’ comments were collated, and it was found that their suggestions mainly focused on two points. The first point surrounded who qualified for relocated housing. In the first draft, compensation was provided to the villagers who held a rural hukou. However, the village also had 175 households who changed their hukou status during the 1990s to an urban hukou yet still lived in

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the village. The villagers proposed that compensation should be provided based on residency, namely the indigenous villagers who held both urban and rural hukou status should also be eligible for relocated housing. The second theme was uncertainty around what type of flats were going to be provided to those that were relocated. In the initial draft, the relocated flats were mostly three bedrooms and were 120–160 square metres. Based on villagers’ original floor spaces, most of them could get one to two relocated flats. The villagers, however, preferred one to two bedroom flats with smaller floor space. This way, many of the households could receive two to three relocated flats based on square metres, and rented out the unused space to increase their household income. Given the two suggestions, the village committee proposed several solutions and held a village meeting. In the meeting, each potential solution was fully discussed, and decisions were achieved through public vote. Finally, the relocated flats were diversified into three types: one-­ bedroom flats under 40  square metres, two-bedroom flats from 60 to 80 square metres, and three-bedroom flats from 90 to 140 square metres. The minimum standard of floor space for compensation was 50 square metres per person. Villagers with urban hukou were also included for relocated housings based on the minimum standard. Rural households were allocated apartments with a floor space equal to either four times the size of their housing base land or the number of people in a household multiplied by the minimum standard floor space, whichever was larger. Some elderly villagers suggested adding a bathroom in the master bedroom of the three-bedroom flat. After the first revision, the second draft was re-sent to every household in early June 2004. This time around, the villagers’ feedbacks focused on whether a household’s married daughters should qualify for housing compensation as well. This issue is rooted in China’s longstanding rural tradition of females not having their own property rights. From the rural peoples’ perspectives, a household’s daughters would inevitably marry and move out of the village. Thus, although gender equality is guaranteed by constitutional law in China, in practice females’ rights to arable lands under HRS and to a housing base land were usually dependent on marriage (see Liaw (2008) for a comprehensive discussion on women’s land rights in rural China). In W, the hukous of many married women were still upheld as a

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rural status in the village; however, they did not have housing base lands. As in the first draft, compensation was decided based on residency and housing base lands and around 60 households’ married daughters were, therefore, not eligible for housing compensation. After a second round of public discussion and a vote, the married females were also included; however, the compensation standard was slightly lower than other villagers, and their allocated floor space per person was 40 square metres. After the second draft, the villagers’ feedbacks called for a further subdivision on different levels of compensation. Elderly villagers requested more green spaces and a community centre. After a debate the village committee formed a detailed plan with 18 different levels of compensation based on conditions such as, but not limited to, whether one’s hukou was registered in the village, whether one’s hukou had an urban or rural status, or whether a person was a permanent resident. A community centre for the elderly was also added to the plan. After the third version, the fourth draft passed in a village meeting with an overwhelming 96% in favour of the plan. The redevelopment finally took place in the November 2004 after the four rounds of public surveys that lasted nearly six months. Villagers’ participation was not limited to issues on compensation. In the process of redevelopment, a supervision group that consisted of representatives from ordinary villagers was formed. The group worked closely with the professional construction supervisors on the quality control of the buildings, and was responsible for updating villagers on both the progress and the costs of the project. With regard to housing allocations, the village decided to draw lots to guarantee general fairness. Villagers could swap their allocated flat based on their lot. However, the elderly had priority for lower floors and flats with two bathrooms for their convenience. Three months after the relocation was completed in 2007, the village committee carried out a questionnaire survey to see whether the villagers were satisfied with the redevelopment and relocated housing. Over than 90% of the villagers claimed to be satisfied with the redevelopment, and some also gave suggestions on further improvement to public facilities, such as the increase in the number of trashcans and streetlamps.

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5.3.2 X’s Experiences: Trust and Mistrust Although W’s redevelopment was a success, it may have hinged on the strong economic strength of the village and the openness of the village committee. Unlike many other urban villages, W’s economic strength enabled the village to lead the redevelopment project without much meddling from outside actors. The village committee was responsible, and showed a strong capability, for managing and organising the participation process. Meanwhile, the ordinary villagers in W also showed a heightened level of trust towards the village committee in comparison with the other case. This trust was built on the village committee’s competence in managing daily affairs prior to the redevelopment, and its ability and willingness to share information and communicate reciprocally with the villagers during the redevelopment. As a villager commented (V1314, 05-01-2013), “The head of the village committee was a clever guy. Since he was elected the village had been going forward.” Village committee’s work in X, however, was not as easy and smooth as W’s despite its satisfactory achievements before the redevelopment. Before the redevelopment took place in 2005, several members in the village committee had been serving for three terms since their first election in the early 1990s. X’s economic development was quite similar to W’s as it was transferring from a traditional rural village to an urban village with strong village enterprises, and therefore, has accumulated considerable village assets. Similar to the leaders of the economic development in X, the staff in the village committee had a positive reputation amongst the indigenous villagers. Before the official document on X’s redevelopment was announced by the district government, the village committee had already spread the news and started to prepare for the coming potential fallout. The chair was able to convince ten villagers who were held in high regard by the villagers to pass around the news of redevelopment. While this happened, the village committee began to collect relevant redevelopment policies and discuss the detailed strategies of forming a villager representative group and negotiating with the government and the developers.

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There were two types of land expropriation with different development purposes; lands were either acquired for municipal constructions for the benefits of the public or acquired for commercial real estate projects. According to the “Regulation on the Dismantlement of Urban Houses” that came into force in 2001 (State Council 2001), the government held different powers depending on the purpose. For municipal constructions, the government could legitimately carry out a mandate of displacement for citizens that refused to move. For commercial real estate projects, involuntary displacement was not allowed, and compensation had to be settled before demolition took place.3 As X’s redevelopment was not for the purpose of municipal construction, villagers were given a longer time to consider their options. Although there were no obvious conflicts in X, the villagers were not supportive of the redevelopment. They adopted a latent and silent way of resistance: they made no response at all to anything that the government and the village committee proposed. In the spring of 2005, a mobilisation meeting was held. Several officials from the district government attended the meeting and gave speeches to advertise the benefits of the urban village redevelopment. When a villager recalled the meeting, he could still remember the officials’ comments about the old village clearly (V1426, 03-01-2014), “the district officials said that our village had serious issues on public health and safety; roads were too narrow and buildings had potential fire hazards and so on. Thus in response to the villagers’ needs and demands, the local government decided to redevelop the village and bring us a better living place … From where did they hear our demands? We’d never demanded for a redevelopment! Many villagers left the meeting before the officials finished their speeches.” The village committee printed 2000 copies of brochures and tried to persuade the villagers household by household, but many villagers would not even open their doors for the committee (V1311, 03-01-2012; V1313, 04-01-2013). While the committee tried to positively promote the redevelopment, the staff of the village committee were individually in an awkward position. On the one hand, the ordinary villagers criticised the staff for not being on the side of the village and not helping them protect their homes. As one villager commented “they were elected by us, and they should not help the government to promote demolition” (V1426, 03-01-2013;

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V1435, 24-01-2014). On the other hand, the committee was under great pressure from the local government because although X’s redevelopment was not incorporated into any municipal project, the government had listed it as one of the “demonstrative cases” and urged the committee to guarantee a smooth and efficient redevelopment process. As a staff member from the village committee commented, “the government thought that we were party members, so we should assistant local authorities’ work and pursued villagers to accept the redevelopment” (V1313, 40-01-2013). The situation worsened in late summer when several villagers accused the chair of the village committee of taking bribes from the developers, and alleged that was the reason for his promotion of the redevelopment project. The allegations triggered resentment amongst the villagers and distrusts towards the village committee. Someone filed anonymous letters of accusation to the Municipal Commission for a Discipline Inspection. In response, the commission sent an inspection team to the village to start a financial investigation on the chair. The chair’s work was suspended, and was taken over by another member in the village committee temporarily as to not stall the redevelopment project. By this time several other urban villages listed as “demonstrative cases” in Xi’an had already started demolitions. The villagers in X had realised that it was impossible for them to change the course of events and they would have to carry on with the demolition. Thus, they began to insist on forming another villager representative group that was independent of the village committee and was responsible for negotiating with developers directly. The problem, however, was that they were unfamiliar with the relevant politics and regulations on urban village redevelopment. Without professional consultancies the ordinary villagers were not in the best position to negotiate with developers and therefore the initial outcomes of negotiations were not as positive as they had anticipated (V1311, 03-01-2012). Meanwhile, after three months of investigation, the inspection team announced that the chairperson was cleared of all charges, and his management of the village collective assets was completely above board. The official result of the inspection helped him regain his good reputation. As V1426 (03-01-2014) recalled, “I didn’t know where the rumours came from and why I had believed them … At that time there

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were reports, news from social medias, on how village committees got huge profits from redevelopment projects. So when I heard about the rumours I though the chairman was like one of the people reported in the news.” Soon after the announcement of the official inspection result, some villagers turned back to the village committee, asking the chairperson to take over the work on negotiation again. After discussions, the village committee decided to cooperate with the representative group in the subsequent redevelopment process, with the village committee taking responsibility for governance and the representatives acting in a supervisory capacity. As the development moved forward in December 2005, the developers were able to persuade some villagers to sign the compensation contract by providing bonuses to the people who moved before the end of 2005. After several months of negotiations, X finally reached an agreement on a detailed plan of compensation and relocation with both developers and the district government. Demolitions took place in late 2006 and the villagers moved to the new community in 2008. During my fieldwork, when asked about their opinions on the result of the redevelopment, villagers usually expressed complicated feelings. Some villagers would still stress their unwillingness to move in the first place. Some also complained that the redevelopment caused their financial loss on rental incomes, and some would calculate how much money they had spent on decorating relocated flats and purchasing extra floor spaces and shops.4 However, most of the villagers, after initial gripes, would also express their satisfactions on the improvement of their quality of life. Looking retrospectively, it might have been hard for the villagers to say whether they had used their resources in the best way possible. They had to struggle for what they wanted, but the result they secured seemed favourable given their generally higher sense of inclusion among the six redeveloped villages.

5.3.3 R  ’s experiences: The Representativeness of Village Representatives While villagers in other cases were “racing against time” before demolitions, the villagers in R waited for a long time before the demolition

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actually took place. Its redevelopment plan was officially announced in 2002 in the list of “district pilot projects.” However, due to the district government’s financial burdens, it was impossible to carry out a government-­led redevelopment as per the initial plan. As mentioned previously, R was located in an industrial area and the logistics distribution centre in Xi’an, which was relatively remote from the urban centre. Thus, its location made the village less attractive to developers in compression with the other five cases. In 2005, the village adopted the joint-stock system, and villagers became the shareholders of the village collective assets, including several warehouses and shops. In 2006, the villagers’ hukou transferred from a rural to an urban status. It was not until 2007, when a private developer stepped in, that the project started moving progressing. R was different from W and X because the village committee in R had a unique way of forming a villager representative group. In the other cases, villager representatives were usually elected by the whole village and acted on behalf of the villagers. They were tasked with getting involved in negotiations on compensation, and to monitor the process of the redevelopment. In R, however, it was the village committee who nominated some villagers as the “representatives.” The representatives were either villagers who had successfully run a personal business or ones with relatively high educational accolades. During the redevelopment, they worked with the “redevelopment leading group” that consisted of the members from the village committee and the relevant district authorities. From the villagers’ perspective, these “villager preventatives” were not actually representative. As a villager commented (V1434, 23-01-2014), “It is always said that the lands in the village belong to the collective, or the village assets belong to the collective. But who is the collective? Who can make decisions? I’m certainly one of the collective but I don’t think I had decided anything about the village’s future during the redevelopment … These people (the villager representatives) were not elected by us. They represented the village committee, not us.” From the village committee’s perspective, however, by forming a selective group of representatives, the “elite group” could help get the best results from the negotiation with developers and the local authorities (V1428, 15-01-2014; V1433, 23-01-2014).

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In 2007, the village committee, together with the villager representatives, carried out three rounds of negotiations with the developer. The first two rounds were based on the residential district’s detailed plan from a Xi’an institute of design and planning in which the ratios of floor space and green space were strictly controlled. Given the villagers’ demands on compensations, the developer found that it was impossible for them to turn a profit whilst meeting those requests. The following two rounds of negotiations took nearly eight months, and both the villagers and the developer firmly held their ground. The district government, however, lost patience gradually and began to put pressure on the village committee to lower their demands for compensation. A member of the village committee revealed some details (V1433, 23-01-2014), Our village was the first project in Lianhu district that adopted a market-­ led approach. Thus the district government tried to make it a demonstrative case and really wanted everything to go smooth and efficiently … The government and developers were on the same boat. Through urban village redevelopment both developers and the government got considerable profits. First, the government got “political face” by turning chaotic villages into modern residential communities. Second, it got land revenues by transferring lands to developers—at least 200–300 million RMB with the lands in R.  Third, it got continues tax revenues after urbanisation completed. Developers would not invest in the project with low profits; if developers quitted, the government would have no money. So apparently the government would protect developers’ profits … We (the village committee) didn’t turn down the possibility of stepping back a little bit, but we also had a ground rule. The village would not move unless we were content with compensations.

An agreement was finally reached in the last round of negotiations, which took two months. The village committee lowered their compensation standard slightly while the local planning authorities raised the plot ratio in the detailed plan to guarantee the developer a profit margin of 17%. Throughout the whole process, it was the village committee and the “representative group” who actively drove decision-making. The villagers got updated information through posters and reports pasted on the announcement board in front of the village committee office. Although

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village meetings were held regularly, they were normally one-way communication from the committee to the villagers. When asked about his opinion on the redevelopment process, V1434 (23-01-2014) said, I admit that the redevelopment was generally good. I don’t know if the result could have been better if everyone got involved… at least they should have considered our suggestions on, for example, what types of commercial properties to be constructed on the economic development land. According to them, there would be launderettes, fruit shops, stationary shops, car accessory shops, video stores and so on, some of which were not frequently used nor easy to get profits. I think small restaurants could have been better.

In general, R is a typical case with elite governance. Although the villagers were well informed in the process of the urban village redevelopment, there was still a lack of active participation and reciprocal communications between the villagers and the stakeholders, which may have led to villagers’ generally feeling a lower sense of inclusion in comparison with the cases of W and X.

5.4 S  ome Reflections from Villagers’ Differing Strategies The three cases present three complex scenarios in which villagers participate in urban village redevelopments at different levels and in different ways. However, although the processes are full of disputes and compromises, the three cases all produced generally favourable results.

5.4.1 B  est Practices of Villagers’ Differing Participations Although W’s redevelopment model is a rare case, it may still provide insights into some best practice regarding villagers’ measures of participation regardless of the different redevelopment models.

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At the preparation stage, it was important that all villagers were well informed early on in the process and that they were able to familiarise themselves with the relevant redevelopment policies. The “buffer time” can be important to villagers who may need to ponder over questions such as: what is the likely impact of the project on both their families and the surrounding neighbourhood; what benefits they can derive from the redevelopment; in what ways or at what stages during the project are they able to get involved and feed back into the process and the project, and so on. Giving them time, rather than pushing them into the project, would facilitate a relatively smooth process afterwards. It was also noted that a channel of reciprocal communications should be established in the early stages of the project. Various measures, such as target group meetings, brainstorms and questionnaire surveys, are good ways to solicit public opinion on issues like relocation plans, compensation, and the location and types of resettlement communities. Holding village meetings regularly and voting on key issues that impact the villagers’ benefits are also crucial in getting their support for the redevelopment. There should also be professionals, either from the planning authorities or from independent third parties, available to answer villagers’ enquiries and ensure that villagers can get honest and clear answers to their questions. At the stage of implementation, villagers’ participation can be achieved in two ways. Firstly, after the redevelopment plan is confirmed, villagers should have access to and be able to monitor the process of the public biddings and the construction of the relocated communities. Regularly held village meetings can make sure that villagers get up-to-date information on the progress of projects and the use of funds during construction. Again, professionals need to be available to give timely and open responses to villagers’ inquiries. Secondly, regarding the issue of compensation, villagers can be easily anxious on this topic because most of them do not have the opportunity to participate in the negotiations directly. Therefore, village committees need to make sure that villagers get updated on the progress of negotiations in detail. Once an agreement is reached, information such as the schedule of constructing resettlement communities and the amount of floor space that will be compensated in each household should be made public as soon as possible.

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Finally, after relocations are complete, villagers’ participation is mainly reflected in carrying out an organised and fair process of housing allocation. Focusing on villagers’ feedbacks on adapting the living environments to meet villagers’ demands can also help them to adept the new communities and their urban identities efficiently.

5.4.2 R  egarding Village Committees and Independent Third Parties The three cases all demonstrate village committees’ important influence on villagers’ experiences of participation, whether the influence is in an active way to promote participation (as in the case of W), or in a passive way to trigger villagers’ self-organised responses (as in the case of X). Village committees have two roles in the process of urban village redevelopments, which often lead village committee members to a conflict. In principle, village committees are the foundation of rural autonomous organisations; thus, it would behove them to take a lead in villagers’ active participation during redevelopments. In reality, however, village committees are also the local government’s executive organisations at a primary level and are subject to the instruction from the higher levels of government. They should help local authorities with the promotion and marketing of demolitions and relocations. This political role tends to trigger villagers’ distrusts towards village committee and chair, as demonstrated in the case of X. During urban village redevelopment, local authorities cooperate with developers by transferring the rights of the use and development of land, from which fiscal revenues are generated and urban areas are beautified. Thus, the local governments usually have the same intentions as developers which is to promote redevelopment projects. Due to a lack of limitation on the government’s power, in the early stage of the redevelopment, it was not rare for the local authorities to use their political power abusively or corruptly and force villagers to move, especially in government-­ led projects (e.g. the case of M). In recent years, the central government has enacted a series of regulations, repeatedly stressing the prohibition of compelled displacement. Examples of compelled displacement are

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forcing inhabitants to move by cutting off their provision of gas, water and electricity. Thus, the local authorities in Xi’an are becoming cautious in using executive power, and increasingly depending on communication and negotiation in the redevelopment process. However, there is still a lack of an efficient mechanism to supervise village committees’ openness. As the villagers have said, local authorities and developers desire the same result; thus, governments still tend to protect developers’ interests and put pressure on village committees when disputes arise. Given the village committee’s’ role in assisting local authorities, it is understandable that villagers would be suspicious of their potential manipulation in the process of redevelopment. Therefore, it is important that a third party gets involved to oversee the conflicts of interest. In the case of X, although villagers’ active participation is triggered by allegations, their attempts in setting up an independent group has great potential for other villagers in a similar situation. The establishment of the group marks the villagers’ transfer from passive actors to active and engaged participants in the redevelopment. If the group fulfils its intended purpose, it can help mediate the mistrusts that usually exist between the villagers and village committees. Although it initially takes some time for the independent group in X familiarise themselves with relevant policies. However once this has taken place, its involvement contributes greatly in supporting the village committee’s stance against developers by alleviating some of the pressure from the local authorities. It also becomes a counterbalancing force to supervise the village committee’s performance and a check and balance for the cooperation between the village committee and the local authorities. Furthermore, independent third parties are not limited to the villagers’ self-organisations. They can also include some “potential participants” such as nearby communities that would benefit from the beautifying urban image, the planning and consultation institutes who get hired to involve in projects, the non-government organisations that are dedicated to harmonious and sustainable urban development, and the public medias who possess direct information resources. In general, with Xi’an’s favouring the market-led approach, as long as the local governments can take a relatively neutral stance and let different interest groups take time to negotiate on equal footing, villagers are

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completely capable of forming a set of strategies and achieving optimised solutions in urban village redevelopments.

5.4.3 R  egarding the Mode of Governance and the Elite Few In the three cases, villagers are generally satisfied with the redevelopments and their living conditions after the redevelopments. They enjoy living in modernised communities and admit that the chaotic living environments before redevelopments are not good for the development of the next generation. When comparing R with the other two cases, it is clear that although villagers’ financial gains in R are generally similar to the villagers in W and X after the redevelopments, their sense of inclusion is still significantly lower than the other two cases. Villagers in W and R have a relatively higher sense of inclusion, because their livelihoods after redevelopments are secured by rental incomes, benefits from collective properties, and their own financial abilities to run personal businesses. These living resources are not from the government’s policies on social welfares or the promotion of shiminhua (being tuned into urban people). Instead, they are from villagers’ demanding equal and active participation which has led to comparatively fair compensation during the negotiation process. The traditional redevelopment approach in China is a top-down process that is usually led by government (Chart 5.2). The participants get involved in a project in accordance with their ability to influence the project. This governance system is actually not participation-friendly, and usually encourages a phenomenon of “professional cult” or “elite cult” that overlooks the views of the general public. To some extent, it can be said that the villagers in the three cases are fortunate because the village committees are responsible and have the ability to manage daily affairs and promote the villages’ future development. However, depending on the qualities, visions, abilities, and responsibilities of the elite few is an unsustainable and unequal form of grassroot governance. In this model it can often be difficult to establish mutual trust between villagers and village committees. Sometimes government officials express views such as

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Propose of projects

Municipal or district governments

Survey and feasibility study

Designers and planners

Approval of projects

Planning authorities and governments

Implementation of projects

Developers and villagers

Completion of projects

Villagers and local authorities

The

TOP

First Phase

The Second Phase The Third Phase

DOWN

Chart 5.2  Traditional approach of urban village redevelopment. (Credit: Author)

“it’s inevitable to sacrifice the interests of a few people given the rapid changes of the society that sometimes develop in ahead of existing policies and policy makers’ experiences,” or “we should allow approaches with trial-and-error in the early stage” (O1406, 04-03-2014; O1409, 02-04-2014). It is not clear whether these comments represent a regretful conclusion that is based on the decades of lived Chinese experiences, or just a pseudo proposition that tries to defend the development- and economy-­driven urbanisation in China. Rittel and Webber (1973: 163) pointed out in their paper “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” “Every solution to a wicked problem is a ‘one-shot operation’; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-­ and-­error, every attempt counts significantly.” Once a redevelopment plan is confirmed, its effects on the inhabitants are irreversible. As mentioned previously, both the emergence and the redevelopment of urban

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villages in Xi’an is a state-led process, which means the speed of urbanisation is controllable. The cases of W, X, and R demonstrate that if the policy makers can slow down their pace and not push redevelopment projects so aggressively, they will not have to sacrifice villagers’ interests to get the desired solutions. If the local authorities, professionals, and grassroot elites can bear the general public’s opinion in mind, a more sustainable and healthier model of government, that encourage citizen participation, can be formed on the basis of cooperation and share of information. If villagers’ participations can depend on a healthy and inclusive governance system rather than a few elite’s capabilities, it is possible to reduce the cost of urbanisation and contribute to establishing a harmonious society.

5.5 Conclusion This chapter continues the discussions on the connection between villagers’ participation and sense of inclusion, and explores that how villagers’ participation plays an important role in shaping the courses of urban village redevelopment. In Xi’an, the traditional redevelopment approach is a top-down, government-led process. It usually considers villagers’ participation as a burden that delays redevelopment projects and triggers conflicts and animosity between villagers and planning authorities. However, as village autonomy has been developing in rural areas for more than two decades, villagers have a strong democratic consciousness and a variety of strategies based on an appetite for selfgovernance. Thus, village autonomy lays a foundation for the participatory process during urban village redevelopments. The three cases in this chapter demonstrate that, villagers can act as an active agent in the process of inclusion. A good and inclusive redevelopment outcome, however, is a joint effort by different actors. On the one hand, an important precondition is that local governments need to take a relatively neutral stranding point and step back from the pushy and development-driven purposes behind the urban village redevelopment. As shown in the cases of W, X, and R, when given time and certain level of professional assistances, villagers’ participation does not necessarily

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hinder the process of redevelopment, as is the concern of local authorities. They are able to develop a set of measures to interact and negotiate with different interest groups in order to achieve favourable solutions. On the other hand, the role that the village committee plays in mediating differences between villagers, governments, and developers can be crucial, yet quite tricky. It acts both as the representative for the whole village to protect villagers’ interests and as a government agency to resolve conflicts and smooth the process of redevelopment. Therefore, it is important that a third party be formed to supervise the village committee’s actions; and the supervision group may include not only villagers in the redeveloped villages, but also “potential participants” such as nearby communities, consultation institutes, non-government organisations, and public medias. In general, the principles that lead to an inclusive redevelopment outcome are centred on two themes. The first is to establish a reciprocal channel of communication between the ordinary villagers and power holders throughout redevelopment. The second is to form a group that acts as a counterbalance to those that hold the power for the purpose of establishing mutual trust among different actors involved in redevelopment. This chapter argues that a good redevelopment result is not planned out by professionals and local authorities; it is a result of the cooperation among local authorities, professionals, grassroot elites, and ordinary villagers to form a sustainable and inclusive model of governance that encourages villagers’ active participation in decision-making process.

Notes 1. Fengshui is a Chinese philosophical system that explains the relationship between people and the surrounding environment; many villagers adopt the principles of fengshui in building their houses. 2. According to the relevant laws and regulations (The Law of Land Administration, Property Law, and Regulation on the Implementation of the Land Administration Law), villagers can transfer the right to use housing-­based land only to other villagers, on conditions that: (1) The transfer is approved by the collective economic organisation (village); (2)

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The villager who receives the transfer is a member of the same collective economic organisation (in the same village); (3) the villager who receives the transfer has no housing base land granted already, and is qualified in accordance with the relevant criteria of land use rights. In reality, however, due to the lax oversight and villagers’ high volume of private transactions, these regulations are not always strictly followed. Thus, when disputes arise, villagers usually prefer to turn to village committees first, rather than legal procedures, to resolve conflicts in private. 3. In the newly effective “Regulation on the Dismantlement of Urban Houses” (2011 version) and “Regulation on the Expropriation of building son State-owned Land and Compensation Therefor (came into force in 2011), governments are no longer allowed to carry out mandatory displacements regardless the purposes of expropriation. If a compelled demolition is needed, governments can go through judicial procedures and only a court has the power to decide whether a compelled demolition should be permitted. 4. During redevelopments, villagers could choose relocated flats that were bigger than their compensation standards. However, they need to purchase the extra floor spaces at preferential prices. Besides, they could also purchase shops and other commercial properties with limited floor spaces from developers at lower prices.

References IOSCPRC (2001). Progress in China’s human rights in 2000. The Information Office of the State Council, The People’s Republic of China, May 2001. Available at www.gov.cn/english/official/2005-­07/27/content_17730.htm [Accessed: 24-10-2019] Liaw, H.R. (2008). Women’s land rights in rural China: transforming existing laws into a source of property rights. Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal, 17(1): 237–264. Lin, J. (1990). Institutional reforms in Chinese agriculture: retrospect and prospect. In J.A. Dorn and X. Wang (eds.), Economic reform in China: problems and prospects. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press. O’Brien, K.J. and L.Li (2000). Accommodating “democracy” in a one-party state: introducing village elections in China. The China Quarterly, 162: 465–489.

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Rittel, H.W.J and M.M.  Webber (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4: 155–169. SCNPC (2010). Organic Law of the Villagers’ Committees of the People’s Republic of China (2010). Effective in 1998, Promulgation in 2010. Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. Tan, X., Q. Yuan and B. Lv (2012). Chengzhongcun gaizao cunmin canyu jizhi fenxi [Analysis of the participatory mechanism in urban village redevelopment]. Tropical Geography, 32(6):618–625.

6 Conclusion: Social Inclusion, Citizenship, and Beyond

6.1 A  Revision of Research Questions and Key Findings The urban village redevelopments in Xi’an has seen different results. On the one hand, local authorities proclaim an achievement of social inclusion that turns urban villagers into urban citizens. On the other hand, scholars raise concerns on the extent to which social inclusion has actually been achieved. Against this background, this research has attempted to interpret the different understandings of inclusion during redevelopment, and to explain the rationale behind these understandings. By adopting a citizenship-­based approach, the main research question is raised in Chap. 1—In the context of the urban village redevelopment, what would citizenship entail in creating social inclusion? Three sets of sub-­­ questions are also developed for answering the main question: • How is social exclusion/inclusion interpreted by policy makers? From the viewpoint of policy makers, where is citizenship situated in shaping social inclusion in the process of urban village redevelopment?

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 X. Zhang, In the Name of Inclusion, New Perspectives on Chinese Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6120-1_6

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• How is social exclusion/inclusion interpreted by urban villagers? Compared with policy makers’ interpretations of social inclusion, what are the implications of villagers’ different interpretations of citizenship? • What do villagers strive for during urban village redevelopment? What differences do their efforts make in creating social inclusion?

6.1.1 Government’s Understanding on Social Inclusion From the perspective of the local government, social inclusion is achieved through a redevelopment strategy that focuses on hukou and its associated social benefits. The reasons behind this strategy lie in the government’s political interpretations on citizenship, which is embedded in Chinese traditional ideologies. As illustrated in Chap. 3, China has a long tradition of taking urban citizenship as a privileged status, and it has placed socioeconomic development as its priority. Whilst the people-­­ centred (minben), benevolent ideas in these ideologies shift policy makers’ focus of redevelopment from “urban beautifying” to “social inclusion,” its focuses on urban citizenship privilege, socioeconomic development, and legitimacy-­driven governance also generate problems in achieving social inclusion from two aspects. First, the redevelopment strategy is development and legitimacy driven. In this aspect, policy makers consider urban membership and its associated benefits as incentives to promote urban village redevelopment, and compensations for villagers as a demonstration of governors’ fulfilment of their legitimate responsibilities—caring for the people and promoting social harmony. Therefore, although the political focus of urban village redevelopment seems to have shifted from buildings to people, in practice this shift does not necessarily change the nature of the development-­­driven redevelopment. Second, under the influence of the idea of benevolence, the redevelopment strategy is a top-­down approach. Villagers are considered as passive actors who await inclusion and receive benefits out of governors’ benevolence. In this aspect, villagers’ active participation is neglected, and their

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ability to defend their property rights during the process of redevelopment is subject to the manipulations from local authorities. Richard Yarwood (2014) points out that citizenship is not a transaction. In the process of urban village redevelopment, however, urban citizenship and its associated benefits are used by the local authorities to exchange for villagers’ properties. Therefore, the redevelopment policies in Xi’an actually implied a trade-­off, by which villagers were made to compromise on property rights in exchange for social rights. This trade-­­ off process also hinders villagers’ struggles for other rights during urban village redevelopment.

6.1.2 Villagers’ Understanding on Social Inclusion From the perspective of villagers, the government’s trade-­off strategies do not imply a process of inclusion. The reasons for this are twofold. First, before urban village redevelopment, the general financial status of many villagers was not lower than that of the average urban person. As urban villages usually locate at the centre of urban areas, in recent years, villagers have seen a huge increase in the profits generated from their housing base lands. They consider the increased land value as an opportunity to enhance their livelihood and as something that compensates them for the unequal treatments that they experienced during the era of the planned economy. Therefore, although they get compensation during urban village redevelopment, the redevelopment process is considered by villagers as a damage to their formal and informal rights to property. Second, villagers’ active participation can be seriously hindered in the process of redevelopment. As showed in some cases, their rights to information, to supervision in the redevelopment process, and to having a say in the decision-­making that is relevant to their livelihood are deprived by government’s heavy-­handed redevelopment plans. In these cases, villagers show a strong feeling of being left out and excluded during rapid urbanisation. Therefore, it is important to look at what villagers strive for during urban village redevelopment. In general, the process of struggling can be marked by two steps. As many villagers are not willing to move in the first

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place, in the first instance villagers tried to change the course of demolition and protect their right to residential places and housing. However, in many cases, the villagers are unable to hold their places and housing, thus they turn to the second step and struggle for active participation during redevelopment, and more compensations to guarantee a decent livelihood after redevelopment.

6.1.3 Villagers’ Efforts in Creating Social Inclusion In this research, the villagers’ sense of inclusion was taken as an important benchmark in analysing the level of inclusion achieved in redeveloped urban villages. A study on the six redeveloped villages showed that villagers’ sense of inclusion can be influenced by their financial status and level of active participation during redevelopment. In general, in cases where villagers have a strong financial status and high level of participation, they also show a high level of sense of inclusion. Therefore, villagers’ efforts in demanding a decent livelihood and active participation do play an important role in achieving social inclusion. A study of villagers’ active participation in the cases of W, X, and R demonstrated that a good redevelopment result is not planned out by professionals and local authorities. It is a result of the cooperation that exists among different stakeholders. From the government’s side, it is important take a relatively neutral viewpoint, and step back from the pushy and development-­driven purposes behind the urban village redevelopment. From the villager’s side, village committees play a crucial role in mediating resolutions to the differences between villagers, governments, and developers. The principles that lead to an inclusive redevelopment outcome are firstly, to establish a reciprocal channel of communication between the ordinary villagers and power holders throughout redevelopment, and secondly, to form a group that acts as a counterbalance to those that hold the power, for the purpose of establishing mutual trust among different actors involved in redevelopment.

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6.2 Theoretical Implications 6.2.1 Chinese Citizenship This research tries to contribute the theoretical discussions on Chinese citizenship in urban studies, by asking the main research question: • In the context of the urban village redevelopment, what would citizenship entail in creating social inclusion? In general, the idea of Chinese citizenship can be interpreted from four aspects: citizenship as membership, as identity, as rights and obligations, and as a process of struggle for rights. First, citizenship as a membership identifies the individual as belonging to a political community (Yarwood 2014). In European studies, an individual’s membership can be multi-­level, which refers to citizenship at different polity levels (Desforges et al. 2005). Chinese citizenship has a similar multi-­level notion that is based on hukou system. It can be defined at national, provincial and urban-­rural levels, all of which are expressed through hukou status. As an individual’s social benefits and services are closely related to hukou, local authorities tend to use this multi-­level citizenship to classify the people into those who are included in an issued policy and those who are not. In the case of urban village redevelopment, urban citizenship is considered as a privilege in comparison with rural citizenship. Thus local authorities take the change of hukou status as a benchmark for social inclusion. Second, citizenship as identity not only affects how one is seen by others, but also affects how one perceives oneself (Jiang et al. 2008). This notion is particularly useful in the studies on social inclusion and the development of sense of inclusion. Because the excluded tend to be differentiated as someone who do not conform to dominant social rules. For example, in the case of urban village redevelopment, the general public tend to have stereotypes against urban villagers due to the negative discourse used by dominant institutions such as planning authorities and

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mass media. These stereotypes, in turn, influence how villagers perceive themselves as urban citizens after redevelopment. Third, citizenship as rights derives from Marshall’s classical work on the identification of civil, political, and social rights (Marshall 1950, 1973). In China, there has been a long tradition whereby political leaders put socioeconomic rights as a priority. This is based on the traditional Chinese ideologies, which identify that people have a just claim to a decant livelihood, and political leaders should put people at the centre of policy-­making. However, this is a top-­down interpretation, which consider people as a passive actor in the construction of citizenship. In this respect, the local authority in China consider the excluded as someone that waiting for inclusion, rather than someone who can involve actively in the process of inclusion. Finally, citizenship as the process of struggle for rights is particularly important in framing a future citizenship in China, as it can be used to challenge state’s current interpretations of Chinese citizenship. As Yarwood (2014) points out that, a benchmark of citizenship in any political ideologies would have to include some notion of egalitarian openness to difference and otherness. However, the current Chinese citizenship is used by the government as a political statecraft, and is imposed on the excluded regardless of their willingness. Therefore, studies on social inclusion from a perspective of right extension can focus on what the excluded struggle for, and helps to frame citizenship conceptions on the basis of social just in future China.

6.2.2 Social Inclusion The extant studies on social inclusion have been closely integrated in the academic debates on social exclusion. It is defined in a negative way as whatever is not socially excluded (Cameron 2006). Therefore, the studies on the achievement of social inclusion usually fall into dilemmas. By bringing up social inclusion, do scholars mean to accommodate the excluded individuals and groups in a set of structured social relationships, through adapting the excluded to existing economic and labour market; or do they try to challenge the established hierarchy that creates

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exclusion, and to call for the redistribution of powers and reform of government? If the answer is the former, how to avoid differentiating and stigmatising the excluded groups as someone who do not conform to dominant social rules? If the answer is the latter, to what extent a top-­down approach of inclusion or government reform is possible, since policy makers are responsible for setting up a social structure that excludes these people in the first place? In order to avoid these dilemmas, it is important to discuss social inclusion from a perspective of the excluded people. Therefore, this research tries to broaden the discussions on social inclusion based on the idea of sense of inclusion based on two points. First, sense of inclusion is based on people’s subjective interpretation of a situation, which can show the difference between people’s expectations and the actual outcomes of polices. A higher sense of inclusion reflects a greater degree of congruence between actual conditions and people’s aspirations. Second, sense of inclusion is based on people’s relationships with their surroundings, because how people judge their situations is significantly related to the reference groups. In this research, sense of inclusion is based on the notion of social fairness and equality, which involves villagers’ comparison both with other urban citizens and with themselves at different time points.

6.3 R  eflections on Redevelopment Policies and Future Studies The rapid urbanisation has been underpinning China’s economic growth since the central government adopted the opening-­up policy in the 1980s. However, with China’s urbanisation rate exceeding 50% in 2012, the pace of urbanisation has slowed down, and its contribution to economic growth has declined (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2013). According to a government work report issued by National Development and Reform Committee (2013), the urbanisation ratio in 2012 rose by only 1.16 percentage points, compared with an average 4.0% of growth from 2000 to 2011. Since then, the Chinese central government saw only

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a 0.77 percentage increase in the rise of the average urbanisation ratio in the next ten years (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2019). Given fewer pressures in pursuing the speed of urbanisation, local governments may have a potential political environment to shift policy focus from “the speed of development” to “the quality of development.” Nonetheless, as an important contribution to China’s urbanisation, the redevelopment of urban villages is still set to be local planning authorities’ key focus in the next ten years. Furthermore, with growing affluence, evolving development practices, and improved access to information, urban villagers are increasingly attentive to influencing the course of development and controlling their own lives. Therefore, it is an urgent need that the local government delivers a participation-­friendly environment, with villagers empowered with resources and information to take part in the decision-­making process during redevelopments. As implied in previous chapters, although villagers’ rights to participation are conferred legislatively, these legislative provisions are abstract and high-­sounding principles without providing detailed guidance for practice. However, this does not mean that local governments can do nothing but wait for the central government’s strengthening or reforming of the legal framework in favour of public involvement, because grassroots forms of participation are already being proactively produced by villagers in the process of urban village redevelopments. In order to avoid the costly errors that happen to urban villages like N1 and N2, and to facilitate the emerging democratic participation. It is time for the local governments to think afresh about how villagers perceives the notions of social inclusion differently on the basis of what they strive. In a follow-­up interview I conducted with a Xi’an local authority official after the issue of the reform guideline, the official expressed the view that the future urban village redevelopments would be focused on three major points: regularising the procedures of redevelopment projects in order to prevent forced demolitions, insisting on improving villagers’ quality of life, and keeping on promoting the market-­led redevelopment model (O1408, 03-­06-­3015). Besides, establishing a standardised system of supervision and assessment during redevelopments is also important. The purposes of supervision and assessment are twofold: it should provide a restraint mechanism

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to both village committees and developers. Firstly, although in some redevelopment projects village committees would put up public notification about the financial situation and progress of projects, and ordinary villagers would voluntarily form supervision groups to monitor the use of funds and management of collective assets during redevelopments, these practices are not compulsorily regulated. This leaves loopholes for village committees to take advantage of redevelopment projects financially, and jeopardises the established mutual trust between ordinary villagers and village committees, all of which would seriously influence the quality of redevelopment projects. Therefore, the system needs to pay attention to redistributing the political and financial power during redevelopments, restraining village committees’ powers while transferring part of these powers to ordinary villagers. Although this is the end of the book, two points that arise from the research are of interest for future studies. First, could redeveloped urban villages become the test field for the development of community governance and planning in future China? The rapid urbanisation in China in recent years has triggered the emergence of modernised residential communities in urban areas, which resulted from both the development of cities and the modernisation of citizens. A matured modern community is based on both organised official administrative hierarchies and bottom-­up, self-­initiative governance at grassroots level (Fei 2002). Therefore, for facilitating grassroots democracy, promoting public participation in decision-­making and management of public affairs within community is an effective pathway to the development of community autonomy. However, a precondition to initiate grassroots autonomy is the public consciousness that is formed by people’s consensus on the community: shared cultural basis, the same interest, or a bonded destiny in living in the same community. Chinese urban communities are usually full of strangers that lack this kind of shared consensus. In comparison, redeveloped communities of urban villages, which are transformed from traditional rural villages, appear to have a unique advantage in cultivating modern urban communities with a strong sense of self-­governance. The traditional cultural and grassroots resource established in urban villages before being turned into urban communities help villagers form their own way of governance,

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which is a mixture of the Western practice of democratic participation, and a Chinese social structure with the focus on personalised connections and relationships. Furthermore, the same economic interests generated from collective-­owned assets, and the same destiny they face in the process of urban village redevelopments facilitated in the building of villagers’ public consciousness. Additionally, as shown in the studied cases, villagers’ strong capability of self-­governance and collective action that was demonstrated in the process of urban village redevelopment reveals their great potential in maintaining themselves as organised, autonomous modern urban communities after redevelopments. In recent decades, Western societies have seen increasing interest in developing community planning in response to community groups’ greater desire to take control of local affairs. This is a process of government and local communities working together to identify local problems and find local solutions (Gallent and Ciaffi 2014). The Chinese governments, in economic-­developed cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, have also tried to test this bottom-­up planning practice in some modern urban communities based on a sub-­district level (sub-­district level, also referred to as street level, is the smallest political division in China). The major obstacles, however, are the community groups’ lack of common interests and the lack of desire to participate and find solution (Chen et al. 2004; Fang et al. 2006; Sun and Deng 2006). These characteristics, as aforementioned, represent an advantage in redeveloped urban village communities. However, little research has been carried out to examine the possibility of developing community-­planning practice in urban villages. Maybe not in Xi’an, but in other metropolitan cities, redeveloped urban villages might provide ideal test fields for the development of community governance, and form the basis on which the development of community planning in developed in China in the future. Second, after the reform of the hukou system, to what extent can the difference between urban and rural distinctions be eliminated? In China, the proposal for eliminating rural-­urban distinctions and the opening-­up of hukou registration has been advocated for years by many scholars. No concrete actions had been taken until the issue of the recent guidance from the central government. The reason for this is simple. Eliminating the rural-­urban distinction means giving more than 600 million rural

6  Conclusion: Social Inclusion, Citizenship, and Beyond 

181

people access to use public services and social resources that were originally targeted at urban citizens, which requires a huge amount of government subsidies. According to the “Urban Blue Book” published by the Academy of Social Science in China (2013), the average public cost to transfer a rural person into an urban citizen is ¥131,000 on a national level (with 176,000 in the east coast region, 104,000 in the central region, and 106,000 in the west region). Here the “average public cost” is actually an estimated calculation based on the public services and resources that an urban citizen uses; that is, it is a measure of differences of the public services between urban and rural areas. Thus, the problem of financial resources is the biggest challenge that confronts the effective reform of the hukou system. This guidance, however, revealed an idea of a gradual trajectory that is different from the previous arguments: taking off the rural-­urban labelling in the first step, and then realising quality in the provision of public services gradually. In practice, residence certificate will be the carrier of public services, including employment, education, health care, family planning, cultural services, certificate and licence service, housing security, pensions, social welfares, and social assistance and so on. These services will be realised and broadened step by step. The guidance also stresses local authorities should proactively expand the provision of public services to the residence certificate holders in future hukou reforms. Therefore, the actual extent to which this kind of inclusion can be achieved still very much relies on local governments’ performance and requires further examination in future studies.

References Academy of Social Science (2013). The Urban Blue Book, NO. 6: the shiminhua of rural people. China: Social Science Academic Press. Cameron, C. (2006). Geographies of welfare and exclusion: social inclusion and exception. Progress in Human Geography, 30(3): 396–404. Chen, M., J. Zhang and R. Cao (2004). Woguo chengshi shequ guihua de lilun goujia jiqi shijian jizhi yanjiu [The theoretical framework and practice

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mechanism of the community planning in China]. The Academic Journal of Nanjing Industrial University: Social Science Ediction, 2004(4):45–28. Desforges, L., R. Jones and M. Woods (2005). New geographies of citizenship. Citizenship Studies, 9(2):439–451. Fang, M., Y.  Dong and X.  Bai (2006). Beijing Yanqingxian Badalingzhen Xinnongcun Shequguihua [The community planning in a new rural village in Badalin, Yanqing, Beijing]. The Academic Journal of Architecture, 2006(5): 19–22. Fei, X. (2002). Jumin zizhi: Zhongguo chengshi shequ jianshe de xinmubiao [The autonomy of resident governance: the new target for the construction of Chinese urban communities]. The Academic Journal of Jianghai 2002(3): 24–35. Gallent, N. and D. Ciaffi (2014). Communities, community action and planning. In N.  Gallent and D.  Ciaffi (eds.) Community Action and planning: Contexts, drivers, and outcomes. Great Britain: Policy Press. Jiang, S., M. Lu and H. Sato (2008). Happiness in the dual society of urban China: hukou identity, horizontal inequality and heterogeneous reference. LICOS Discussion Paper, No. 223. Marshall, T.H. (1950). Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marshall, T.H. (1973). Class, Citizenship and Social Development, Westport: Greenwood Press. National Bureau of Statistics of China (2013). China Statistical Bulletin on National Economy and Social Development in 2012. Available at: http:// www.stats.gov.cn/tjgb/ndtjgb/qgndtjgb/t20130221_402874525.htm [Accessed: 17-01-2018] National Bureau of Statistics of China (2019). China Statistical Bulletin on National Economy and Social Development in 2019. Available at: http:// www.stats.gov.cn/tjzs/tjsj/tjcb/zgyj/202010/t20201026_1796172.html [Accessed: 26-10-2020] National Development and Reform Committee (2013). Comments on the work of deepening economic reforms in 2013. Guofa [2013] No.20. Sun, S. and Y. Deng (2006). Kaizhan you zhongguo tese de shequ guihua—yi shanghaishi weili [Developing the community planning with Chinese characteristics—a case study of Shanghai]. Proceedings of Urban Planning, 2001(6): 16–18. Yarwood, R. (2014). Citizenship. London and New York: Routledge.

Appendix A: Questionnaire (English Translation)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 X. Zhang, In the Name of Inclusion, New Perspectives on Chinese Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6120-1

183

184 

Appendix A: Questionnaire (English Translation)

Research on the Change of Village Residents’ Lives after Urban Village Redevelopment

Village˖

District˖

Number˖

The questionnaire will take your about 15 minutes. Please fill in the blank or tick the appropriate answers. Thank you for your time and participation. Aǃ

Demographic Characteristics

1. Age˛

___________

2. Gender˛

a. Male

b. Female

3. Marriage˛

a. Single

b. Married

4. Educational level ˛

a. Without education

c. Divorced

d. Widowed

b. Primary

c. Junior High

d. Senior High

e. College and above

5. Number of family member˛

a. 1-2

b. 3-4

c. 5and above

6. Number of children˛

a. 0

b. 1-2

c. 3 and above

7. Occupation ˛

a. Unemployed

b. State-owned enterprise

c. Collective-owned

enterprises

d. Private business

e. Others______

  Appendix A: Questionnaire (English Translation)  Bǃ

185

Financial situation

1. How many relocated dwellings do your family own˛

a. 1

b. 2

c. 3 and above

2. How much is your family’s monthly income per person˛___________ 3. What are the major income resources for your family˛˄Multiple˅ a. Rents

b. Work c. Business

d. Village benefits e. Others________

4. Before village redevelopment, what were the major income resources for your family˛ ˄Multiple˅ a. Rents

b. Work c. Business

d. Village benefits e. Others________

5. What are the major spending in your family˛˄Multiple˅ a.

Daily

expenses

d.

Children’s

b.

education

Medical e.

g. Self-supporting after retirement

care&health

Children’s

marriage

c.

Housing

f.

Supporting

Mortgage parents

h. Others_____

6. What are the expected spending in ten years in your family? ˄Multiple˅ a.

Daily

expenses

d.

Children’s

b.

education

g. Self-supporting after retirement

Medical e.

care&health

Children’s

marriage

c.

Housing

f.

Supporting

h. Others_____

7. Compared with the situation before redevelopment, your family income has?

Mortgage parents

186 

Appendix A: Questionnaire (English Translation)

a. Greatly increased b. Increased

c. Unchanged

d. Decreased

e. Greatly decreased

8. Compared with the situation before redevelopment, the stability of your income resources have˛ a. Greatly increased b. Increased

c. Unchanged

d. Decreased

e. Greatly decreased

9. Are you satisfied with your current financial situation˛ a. Very satisfied Cǃ

b. Satisfied

c. Neutral

d. Unsatisfied e. Very unsatisfied

Access to social benefits ˄Please tick the appropriate answer˅

1. What is your hukou status˛ a. urban hukou

b. rural hukou

2. What kinds of social benefits do you have? (Multiple) a. None

b. Minimum standard of living

e. Free job training provided by government

c. Medical insurance

d. Old-age-pension

f. Children’s free basic education

3. If you don’t have any social benefits, what are the reasons? (Multiple) a. In the process of applying

b. Too complicated to apply

c. Low rate of return

d. High level of personal-contribution f. Others____ 4. If you’re holding rural hukou, please answer the following questions: 4.1

Are you willing to change to urban hukou˛ a. Yes

4.2

What are the reasons if your answer is yes˛(Multiple)

b. Not necessary

c. No

  Appendix A: Questionnaire (English Translation)  a. Better job opportunities

b. Children’s education

c. Social benefits for urban people

d. Others________

187

4.3 What are the reasons if your answer is no? (Multiple) a. Lost of homestead land of urban benefits

b. Decrease of village benefits d. Children’s education

c. Low attractiveness

e. Others________

5. If you’re holding urban hukou, please answer the following questions: 5.1 How do you think the change of hukou˛ a. Positive 5.2

b. Not necessary

c. Negative

If your answer is positiveˈin which aspects˄Multiple˅˛

a. Better job opportunities

b. Children’s education

c. Urban Social benefits

d. Others________

5.3

If your answer is negative, in which aspects (Multiple)?

a. Lost of homestead land of urban benefits

b. Decrease of village benefits d. Children’s education

c. Low attractiveness

e. Others________

6. Compared with the situation before redevelopment, your working opportunity has˛ a. Greatly improved

b. Improved c. Unchanged

d. Worsened

e. Greatly worsened

7. Compared with the situation before redevelopment, your medical insurance has?

188 

Appendix A: Questionnaire (English Translation)

a. Greatly improved

b. Improved c. Unchanged

d. Worsened

e. Greatly worsened

8. Compared with the situation before redevelopment, your old-age-pension has? a. Greatly improved

b. Improved c. Unchanged

a. Lost of homestead land of urban benefits

d. Worsened

e. Greatly worsened

b. Decrease of village benefits d. Children’s education

c. Low attractiveness

e. Others________

5. If you’re holding urban hukou, please answer the following questions: 5.1 How do you think the change of hukou? a. Positive 5.2

b. Not necessary

c. Negative

If your answer is positive, in which aspects (Multiple)?

a. Better job opportunities

b. Children’s education

c. Urban Social benefits

d. Others________

5.3

If your answer is negative, in which aspects (Multiple)?

a. Lost of homestead land of urban benefits

b. Decrease of village benefits d. Children’s education

c. Low attractiveness

e. Others________

6. Compared with the situation before redevelopment, your working opportunity has? a. Greatly improved

b. Improved c. Unchanged

d. Worsened

e. Greatly worsened

7. Compared with the situation before redevelopment, your medical insurance has?

  Appendix A: Questionnaire (English Translation)  a. Greatly improved b. Improved c. Unchanged

d. Worsened

189

e. Greatly worsened

8. Compared with the situation before redevelopment, your old-age-pension has˛ a. Greatly improved b. Improved c. Unchanged

d. Worsened

e. Greatly worsened

9. Compared with the situation before redevelopment, your or your children’s education opportunity has˛ a. Greatly improved b. Improved c. Unchanged

d. Worsened

e. Greatly worsened

10. Are you satisfied with your current situation on social benefits˛ a. Very satisfied

b. Satisfied

c. Neutral

d. Unsatisfied e. Very unsatisfied

DǃLiving environment and facilities 1. How much is the relocated floor space per person in your family˛________m2 2. What kind of facilities do you have in your house˄Multiple˅˛ a. Water

b. Electricity

c. Gas

d. Central heating

e. En-suite bathroom

f. Self-used kitchen g. Internet/ digital TV 3. What amenities do you have in your community or within 20 minutes’ walking distance (Multiple) ? a. Market e. Kindergarten

b. Bus/tube stations f.

Primary school

c. Clinic/Hospital

d. Garbage disposal

g. Public space (park, square, sport ground/facilities)

4. Compared with the situation before redevelopment, what do you think are the biggest

190 

Appendix A: Questionnaire (English Translation)

changes regarding living environment (multiple)? a. Public facilities and infrastructures d. Environmental sanitation

b. Housing quality

e. Public security

c. Public transport f. Others________

5. Compared with the situation before redevelopment, the public facilities have˛ a. Greatly improved b. Improved

c. Unchanged

d. Worsened

e. Greatly worsened

6. Compared with the situation before redevelopment, the housing quality has˛ a. Greatly improved b. Improved

c. Unchanged

d. Worsened

e. Greatly worsened

7. Compared with the situation before redevelopment, the public transport has˛ a. Greatly improved b. Improved

c. Unchanged

d. Worsened

e. Greatly worsened

8. Compared with the situation before redevelopment, the environmental sanitation has˛ a. Greatly improved b. Improved

c. Unchanged

d. Worsened

e. Greatly worsened

9. Compared with the situation before redevelopment, the public security has˛ a. Greatly improved b. Improved

c. Unchanged

d. Worsened

e. Greatly worsened

10. Are you satisfied with your current living environment˛ a. Very satisfied

b. Satisfied

c. Neutral

d. Unsatisfied e. Very unsatisfied

Eǃ Participation in urban village redevelopment

  Appendix A: Questionnaire (English Translation) 

191

1. Were you supportive with your village’s redevelopment in the first place? a. Yes, very much

b. Yes

c. Neutral

d. No

e No, not at all

2. During redevelopment, you were mostly concerned about (Multiple)? a. Compensations

b. Livelihood after redevelopment

d. Policy/information transparency

c. Adaptation of urban life

e. Supervision of the redevelopment project

f. Management of village collective assets

g.

g. Schedule of project and time for relocation

Access to social benefits h. Others________

3. Your usually got information from (Multiple)? a. Public announcement from the government media d. Other villagers

b. Village committee

e. Enquiring the relevant institutions

c. Newspaper or

f. Others________

4. In what phases did you participate in decision-making process (Multiple)? a. Proposing redevelopment plan

b. Negotiating compensation

construction of relocated housings

d. Allocating relocated housings

management and use of village collective assets

c. Supervising the e. Supervising the

f. Others ________

5. Your measures of participation were (Multiple)? a. Attending village meeting

b. Village referenda

c. Questionnaire survey

d. Attracting media exposure (Internet, journalist, leaflets, etc.) e. Public protest f. petition 6. Was it convenient for you to get information on relevant policies during redevelopment? a. Yes, very much

b. Generally Yes

c Sometimes yes but not always

d.

192 

Appendix A: Questionnaire (English Translation)

Generally No

f. No, I was completely blocked out

7. How do your think your level of participation in the process of redevelopment? a. Very high

b. High

c. Average

d.

Low

e. Very low

8. Generally speaking, are you satisfied with the redevelopment process of your village? a. Very satisfied Fǃ

b. Satisfied

c. Neutral

d. Unsatisfied e. Very unsatisfied

Sense of inclusion

Please give scores to the following statements to show if you agree with them. Scores can be 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, indicating the range from “1 strongly disagreed”, “2 disagreed”, “3 neutral”, “4 agreed” and “5 strongly agreed”. 1. I don’t consider myself as a farmer. 2. After redevelopment, my quality of life has no difference compared with other urban people. 3.

I feel adapted to urban life after village redevelopment.

4.

I am familiar with Xian as same as other urban people.

5.

I’m being treated as equality as others in the society.

6.

I don’t feel being different from other urban people.

7. My overall suzhi is not lower than other urban people.

  Appendix A: Questionnaire (English Translation) 

193

8. My life is getting better. 9.

I feel optimistic about my future.

Gǃ You’re more than welcome to write down anything you would like to share or comment.

You have completed the questionnaire. Please leave your contact information below if you would like to be contacted for further interview, thank you very much! Your name:

Contact information (Tel., QQ, or Wechat):



Appendix B: List of Interviewee

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 X. Zhang, In the Name of Inclusion, New Perspectives on Chinese Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6120-1

195

196    Appendix B: List of Interviewee For the purpose of pseudonymous principle, interviewees are coded in the form “O/V/IYYXX”. O refers to officials, V refers to indigenous villagers from the studied urban villages, and I refers to other interviewees such as the tenants in urban villages or Xian urban citizens; YY is the year the interview was conducted; and XX is the number of the interview in that group. Below is a list of interviewees in the thesis. List of Villagers N1

V1201, V1202, V1203, V1204, V1209, V1421, V1424, V1430, V1431, V1432

N2

V1205, V1206, V1317, V1318, V1420, V1422, V1423, V1427

M

V1207, V1208, V1315, V1316

W

V1310, V1312, V1314

X

V1311, V1313, V1419, V1425, V1426, V1435

R

V1428, V1429, V1433, V1434

List of Officials Municipal District

O1201, O1202, O1203, O1406, O1408 O1304, O1407, 01305, O1409

List of Other Interviews Migrants worker Graduates Other urban people

I1203, I1405, I1406, I1408 I1304, I1407, I1409 I1201, I1202

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Index1

Active citizenship, 16, 58 Active participation, 66, 69, 107, 114, 134, 140, 141, 143–168, 172–174 Archival sources, 29

Collective economy, 83 Collective ownership, 114, 145 Confucianism, 60, 61, 69, 96, 102 Contentious actions, 14, 94, 135, 137

B

D

A

Beilin district, 26, 118 C

The Chinese model, 39 Cities without slum, 12 Citizenship and Social Class, 55, 56 Civil society, 58, 59 Collective assets, 18, 26, 114, 118, 130, 132, 146, 149, 152, 157, 159, 179

Development-driven, 91, 106, 107, 166, 167, 172, 174 Dual landownership, 114 E

Economic & Technological Development Zone (ETDZ), 8, 9, 82, 83, 108n1, 117 Elite few, 165–167

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 X. Zhang, In the Name of Inclusion, New Perspectives on Chinese Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6120-1

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214 Index F

L

Faulks, K., 56–58 Fengshui, 146, 168n1 Fenhong, 62

Laid-off, 14, 51, 128, 129 Land use rights, 4, 62, 169n2 Legitimacy-driven, 93, 97, 107, 172 Lenoir, Rene, 40, 41 Lianhu district, 26, 84, 118, 160

G

Genmai, 135, 136 Government-led approach, 83

M H

High-tech Industries Development Zone (HIDZ), 8, 9, 97, 98, 116, 117, 137 Household Responsibility System (HRS), 151, 153 Housing Affordability Index, 123 Housing base land, 4, 5, 83, 102, 119, 128, 129, 131, 140, 146, 147, 153, 154, 169n2, 173 Hukou reform, 19, 59, 181

Market-led approach, 84, 160, 164 Marshall, T.H., 55–57, 60, 62, 63, 176 Medical Care Insurance, 90 Minben, 93–96, 172 Minimum Standard of Living Scheme (MSLS), 90, 130 Mixed methodology, 23, 24 Mode of governance, 165–167 Moral community, 102 Multi-deprivation, 41, 43, 48 Multi-level citizenship, 17, 69, 175

I

Immaterial transformation, 85, 90, 92 Independent third parties, 162–165 Informal settlement, 10, 11 Information Office of the State Council, 96 Interview codes, 26 J

Joint-stock system, 114, 128, 151, 159

O

Old age pensions, 63, 90, 101, 117, 128, 130 Open Door Policy, 7 P

Patriarchal clans, 8 Political position, 13, 31n2 Property right, 11, 17, 18, 46, 99, 102, 107, 114, 129, 130, 150, 153, 173

 Index 

215

Q

V

Qujiang district, 87, 117

Village autonomy, 144–147, 167 Village committee, 18, 27, 98, 105, 109n8, 116, 117, 124, 136, 144–146, 149–160, 162–165, 169n2, 174, 179 Village-led approach, 83, 84

R

Rent-seeking, 20, 54 The right to the city, 59, 140 Rural migrant, 5, 9, 14, 20, 46, 51, 52, 54, 59, 92, 98, 109n9, 131

W

WeChat, 122 Weibo, 122

S

Sense of inclusion, 28, 29, 67–70, 114, 130, 134, 140–141, 143, 158, 161, 165, 167, 174, 175, 177 Shiminhua, 92, 96, 107, 113, 165 Socioeconomic profile, 124 Suzhi, 132, 133 T

Taobao, 122 Tier system of city classification, 31n2 Trade-off policy, 140

X

Xi’an City Planning Bureau (XCPB), 26, 29, 81, 85 Xi’an Cultural Heritage Bureau (XCHB), 82 Xi’an Municipal Government (XMG), 7, 84, 95, 97, 108n1, 151 Xi’an Urban and Rural Construction Commission (XURCC), 81, 82 Xi’an Urban Landscape and Forestry Bureau (XULFB), 82 Xi’an Urban Regeneration Office (XURO), 10, 13, 26, 29, 79–81, 84, 85, 89, 90