Date: Thursday 1 December 2022
Time: 5.00 – 6.00pm AEST
Location: Online
CSC International Research Webinar Series
About this event
This research examines a new group of Chinese urban residents who have entered urban life not through migration, but through transferring nearby rural residents into urban residents in an organized and managed way as cities expand and spread. Through top-down process of administrative transition, they were granted urban household registration (hukou) in exchange for rural land. The process separated villagers from their farming land, provided urban services and social security, and instituted urban grassroots governance structures in the former rural residential communities. As a result, a new type of urban neighborhood—the (newly) urbanized neighborhood—has emerged, which accommodates new groups of urban residents—landless farmers. This study explores in what ways and to what extent the central government’s initiatives on the landless farmers’ integration into urban economy and society have been carried out at local levels and how the local state has responded to the emergence of landless farmers in the cities. Through qualitative research of landless farmers in the city of Suzhou, this article examines urbanization and transformation of landless farmers from a governance perceptive. It explores urban development not only as incorporation through market, but also through local governance, in terms of economic integration through governance means and social integration carried out as a governance task. Governance of landless famers has become a local state-building process through developing local urbanization trajectories, local fiscal strategies, and inter-city competition. As a result, the making of new citizens goes hand in hand with local state-building during China’s urbanization.
About the speaker
Beibei Tang is Professor of China Studies at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. She has undertaken extensive ethnographic research across different localities in China, with particular focuses on local govern¬ance, social stratification, and state-society relations in urban China. Her research is published in high-impact journals such as The China Quarterly, The China Journal, and Journal of Contemporary China. She is the author of Governing Neighborhoods in Urban China (Cornell University Press 2023) and China’s Housing Middle Class (Routledge 2018), the co-author of Class and the Communist Party of China, 1978-2021 (Routledge 2022), the co-editor of Suzhou in Transition (Routledge 2021), and the winner of the 2015 Gordon White Prize (The China Quarterly). She is a member of the editorial board of The China Journal.