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ASIA PACIFIC | LEAVING THE LAND

China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities By IAN JOHNSON JUNE 15, 2013 See how this article appeared when it was originally published on NYTimes.com

BEIJING — China is pushing ahead with a sweeping plan to move 250 million rural residents into newly constructed towns and cities over the next dozen years — a transformative event that could set off a new wave of growth or saddle the country with problems for generations to come.

The government, often by fiat, is replacing small rural homes with high-rises, paving over vast swaths of farmland and drastically altering the lives of rural dwellers. So large is the scale that the number of brand-new Chinese city dwellers will approach the total urban population of the United States — in a country already bursting with megacities.

This will decisively change the character of China, where the Communist Party insisted for decades that most peasants, even those working in cities, remain tied to their tiny plots of land to ensure political and economic stability. Now, the party has shifted priorities, mainly to find a new source of growth for a slowing economy that depends increasingly on a consuming class of city dwellers.

The shift is occurring so quickly, and the potential costs are so high, that some fear rural China is once again the site of radical social engineering. Over the past

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decades, the Communist Party has flip-flopped on peasants’ rights to use land: giving small plots to farm during 1950s land reform, collectivizing a few years later, restoring rights at the start of the reform era and now trying to obliterate small landholders.

Across China, bulldozers are leveling villages that date to long-ago dynasties. Towers now sprout skyward from dusty plains and verdant hillsides. New urban schools and hospitals offer modern services, but often at the expense of the torn- down temples and open-air theaters of the countryside.

“It’s a new world for us in the city,” said Tian Wei, 43, a former wheat farmer in the northern province of Hebei, who now works as a night watchman at a factory. “All my life I’ve worked with my hands in the fields; do I have the educational level to keep up with the city people?”

China has long been home to both some of the world’s tiniest villages and its most congested, polluted examples of urban sprawl. The ultimate goal of the government’s modernization plan is to fully integrate 70 percent of the country’s population, or roughly 900 million people, into city living by 2025. Currently, only half that number are.

The building frenzy is on display in places like Liaocheng, which grew up as an entrepôt for local wheat farmers in the North China Plain. It is now ringed by scores of 20-story towers housing now-landless farmers who have been thrust into city life. Many are giddy at their new lives — they received the apartments free, plus tens of thousands of dollars for their land — but others are uncertain about what they will do when the money runs out.

Aggressive state spending is planned on new roads, hospitals, schools, community centers — which could cost upward of $600 billion a year, according to economists’ estimates. In addition, vast sums will be needed to pay for the education, health care and pensions of the ex-farmers.

While the economic fortunes of many have improved in the mass move to cities, unemployment and other social woes have also followed the enormous dislocation.

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Some young people feel lucky to have jobs that pay survival wages of about $150 a month; others wile away their days in pool halls and video-game arcades.

Top-down efforts to quickly transform entire societies have often come to grief, and urbanization has already proven one of the most wrenching changes in China’s 35 years of economic transition. Land disputes account for thousands of protests each year, including dozens of cases in recent years in which people have set themselves aflame rather than relocate.

The country’s new prime minister, Li Keqiang, indicated at his inaugural news conference in March that urbanization was one of his top priorities. He also cautioned, however, that it would require a series of accompanying legal changes “to overcome various problems in the course of urbanization.”

Some of these problems could include chronic urban unemployment if jobs are not available, and more protests from skeptical farmers unwilling to move. Instead of creating wealth, urbanization could result in a permanent underclass in big Chinese cities and the destruction of a rural culture and religion.

The government has been pledging a comprehensive urbanization plan for more than two years now. It was originally to have been presented at the National People’s Congress in March, but various concerns delayed that, according to people close to the government. Some of them include the challenge of financing the effort, of coordinating among the various ministries and of balancing the rights of farmers, whose land has increasingly been taken forcibly for urban projects.

These worries delayed a high-level conference to formalize the plan this month. The plan has now been delayed until the fall, government advisers say. Central leaders are said to be concerned that spending will lead to inflation and bad debt.

Such concerns may have been behind the call in a recent government report for farmers’ property rights to be protected. Released in March, the report said China must “guarantee farmers’ property rights and interests.” Land would remain owned by the state, though, so farmers would not have ownership rights even under the new blueprint.

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On the ground, however, the new wave of urbanization is well under way. Almost every province has large-scale programs to move farmers into housing towers, with the farmers’ plots then given to corporations or municipalities to manage. Efforts have been made to improve the attractiveness of urban life, but the farmers caught up in the programs typically have no choice but to leave their land.

The broad trend began decades ago. In the early 1980s, about 80 percent of Chinese lived in the countryside versus 47 percent today, plus an additional 17 percent that works in cities but is classified as rural. The idea is to speed up this process and achieve an urbanized China much faster than would occur organically.

The primary motivation for the urbanization push is to change China’s economic structure, with growth based on domestic demand for products instead of relying so much on export. In theory, new urbanites mean vast new opportunities for construction companies, public transportation, utilities and appliance makers, and a break from the cycle of farmers consuming only what they produce. “If half of China’s population starts consuming, growth is inevitable,” said Li Xiangyang, vice director of the Institute of World Economics and Politics, part of a government research institute. “Right now they are living in rural areas where they do not consume.”

Skeptics say the government’s headlong rush to urbanize is driven by a vision of modernity that has failed elsewhere. In Brazil and Mexico, urbanization was also seen as a way to bolster economic growth. But among the results were the expansion of slums and of a stubborn unemployed underclass, according to experts.

“There’s this feeling that we have to modernize, we have to urbanize and this is our national-development strategy,” said Gao Yu, China country director for the Landesa Rural Development Institute, based in Seattle. Referring to the disastrous Maoist campaign to industrialize overnight, he added, “It’s almost like another Great Leap Forward.”

The costs of this top-down approach can be steep. In one survey by Landesa in 2011, 43 percent of Chinese villagers said government officials had taken or tried to take their land. That is up from 29 percent in a 2008 survey.

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“In a lot of cases in China, urbanization is the process of local government driving farmers into buildings while grabbing their land,” said Li Dun, a professor of public policy at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Farmers are often unwilling to leave the land because of the lack of job opportunities in the new towns. Working in a factory is sometimes an option, but most jobs are far from the newly built towns. And even if farmers do get jobs in factories, most lose them when they hit age 45 or 50, since employers generally want younger, nimbler workers.

“For old people like us, there’s nothing to do anymore,” said He Shifang, 45, a farmer from the city of Ankang in Shaanxi Province who was relocated from her family’s farm in the mountains. “Up in the mountains we worked all the time. We had pigs and chickens. Here we just sit around and people play mah-jongg.”

Some farmers who have given up their land say that when they come back home for good around this age, they have no farm to tend and thus no income. Most are still excluded from national pension plans, putting pressure on relatives to provide.

The coming urbanization plan would aim to solve this by giving farmers a permanent stream of income from the land they lost. Besides a flat payout when they moved, they would receive a form of shares in their former land that would pay the equivalent of dividends over a period of decades to make sure they did not end up indigent.

This has been tried experimentally, with mixed results. Outside the city of Chengdu, some farmers said they received nothing when their land was taken to build a road, leading to daily confrontations with construction crews and the police since the beginning of this year.

But south of Chengdu in Shuangliu County, farmers who gave up their land for an experimental strawberry farm run by a county-owned company said they receive an annual payment equivalent to the price of 2,000 pounds of grain plus the chance to earn about $8 a day working on the new plantation.

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“I think it’s O.K., this deal,” said Huang Zifeng, 62, a farmer in the village of Paomageng who gave up his land to work on the plantation. “It’s more stable than farming your own land.”

Financing the investment needed to start such projects is a central sticking point. Chinese economists say that the cost does not have to be completely borne by the government — because once farmers start working in city jobs, they will start paying taxes and contributing to social welfare programs.

“Urbanization can launch a process of value creation,” said Xiang Songzuo, chief economist with the Agricultural Bank of China and a deputy director of the International Monetary Institute at Renmin University. “It should start a huge flow of revenues.”

Even if this is true, the government will still need significant resources to get the programs started. Currently, local governments have limited revenues and most rely on selling land to pay for expenses — an unsustainable practice in the long run. Banks are also increasingly unwilling to lend money to big infrastructure projects, Mr. Xiang said, because many banks are now listed companies and have to satisfy investors’ requirements.

“Local governments are already struggling to provide benefits to local people, so why would they want to extend this to migrant workers?” said Tom Miller, a Beijing- based author of a new book on urbanization in China, “China’s Urban Billion.” “It is essential for the central government to step in and provide funding for this.”

In theory, local governments could be allowed to issue bonds, but with no reliable system of rating or selling bonds, this is unlikely in the near term. Some localities, however, are already experimenting with programs to pay for at least the infrastructure by involving private investors or large state-owned enterprises that provide seed financing.

Most of the costs are borne by local governments. But they rely mostly on central government transfer payments or land sales, and without their own revenue streams they are unwilling to allow newly arrived rural residents to attend local schools or benefit from health care programs. This is reflected in the fact that China

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officially has a 53 percent rate of urbanization, but only about 35 percent of the population is in possession of an urban residency permit, or hukou. This is the document that permits a person to register in local schools or qualify for local medical programs.

The new blueprint to be unveiled this year is supposed to break this logjam by guaranteeing some central-government support for such programs, according to economists who advise the government. But the exact formulas are still unclear. Granting full urban benefits to 70 percent of the population by 2025 would mean doubling the rate of those in urban welfare programs.

“Urbanization is in China’s future, but China’s rural population lags behind in enjoying the benefits of economic development,” said Li Shuguang, professor at the China University of Political Science and Law. “The rural population deserves the same benefits and rights city folks enjoy.”

Leaving the Land: Articles in this series will look at how China’s government-driven effort to push the population to towns and cities is reshaping a nation that for millenniums has been defined by its rural life.

A version of this article appears in print on June 16, 2013, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the

headline: China Embarking On Vast Program Of Urbanization.

© 2018 The New York Times Company

Natural Resources and Capitalist Frontiers

Author(s): Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Source: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 38, No. 48 (Nov. 29 – Dec. 5, 2003), pp. 5100-

5106

Published by: Economic and Political Weekly

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Natural Resources and Capitalist Frontiers

The late 20th century saw the creation of new 'resource frontiers' in every corner of the world. Made possible by cold war militarisation of the third world and the growing power of corporate transnationalism, resource frontiers grew up where entrepreneurs and armies were

able to disengage nature from its previous ecologies, making the natural resources that bureaucrats and generals could offer as corporate raw material. From a distance, these new

resource frontiers appeared as the 'discovery' of global supplies in forests, tundras, coastal seas, or mountain fastnesses. Up close, they replaced existing systems of hunman

access and livelihood and ecological dynamics of replenishment wit/i the cultulral apparatus of capitalist expansion. This essay explores the making of a resource frontier in

the eastern part of South Kalimantan, Indonesia, in the 1990s.

ANNA LOWENHAUPT TSING

Afrontier is an edge of space and time: a zone of not yet – not yet mapped, 'hot yet' regulated. It is a zone of unmapping: even in its planning, a frontier is imag-

ined as unplanned. Frontiers are notjust discovered at the edge; they are projects in making geographical and temporal experi- ences. Their 'wildness is' made of visions and vines and violence;

it is both material and imaginative. Frontiers reach backward as well as forward in time energising old fantasies, even as they embody their impossibilities. On the resource frontier, the small and the great collaborate and collide in a climate of chaos and violence. They wrest landscape elements from previous liveli- hoods and ecologies to turn them into wild resources, available for the industries of the world.

Most descriptions of resource frontiers take the existence of resources for granted. Most descriptions label and count the resources and tell us who owns what. The landscape itself appears inert: ready to be dismembered and packaged for export. In contrast, the challenge I have set myself is to make the landscape a lively actor. Landscapes are simultaneously natural and social, and they actively shift and turn in the interplay of human and non-human practices. Frontier landscapes are particularly active: hills are flooding away, streams are stuck in mud, vines swarm over fresh stumps, ants and humans are on the move. On the frontier, nature goes wild.

The place I describe is a mountainous, forested strip of south- east Kalimantan. My companions in travelling and learning this landscape are Meratus Dayaks, old inhabitants of the area, whose livelihood has been based on shifting cultivation and forest foraging.l For Meratus, the frontier has come as a shock and a disruption; it is with their help that I experience the trauma of transformation. There are other perspectives: for some, such as migrants and miners, the frontier is an opening full of promise. They come in expectation of resources, and so they can ignore how these resources are traumatically produced. I leave their stories for other chronicles, of which there are many.

In the mid- 1990s, the political regime in Indonesia was called the New Order. The New Order was a centralised and repressive political machine that depended heavily on the power of its military, particularly to control the countryside. In the 1970s and 1980s, the regime flourished through a rhetoric of state-led development. In the 1990s, however, privatisation became a

regime watchword; in practice, the new policies further concentrated economic power in the hands of the president's family and close cronies. In Kalimantan, state policy privileged corporate control of natural resources; huge tracts were assigned to logging companies, mining companies, and pulp-and-paper as well as oil palm plantation companies. The military played an important role in transferring these tracts from previous residents to their corporate owners; military men also took their own interest in resources. It seems fair to say that the military had a central role in creating the 'wildness' of the frontier. This seminal period, which has gone on to shape the wildness of the early 21st century, is the moment I describe.

An Abandoned Logging Road

An abandoned logging road has got to be one of the most desolate places on earth. By definition, it does not go anywhere. If you are walking there, it is either because you are lost or you are trespassing, or both. The wet clay builds clods on your boots, if you have any, sapping your strength, and if you don't have any boots, the sun and the hot mud are merciless. Whole hillsides shift beside you, sliding into the stagnant pools where mosquitoes breed. Abandoned roads soon lose their shape, forcing you in and out of eroded canyons and over muddy trickles where bridges once stood but are now choked by loose soil, vines crawling on disinterred roots and trunks sliding, askew. Yet, ironically, the forest as a site of truth and beauty seems clearer from the logging road than anywhere else, since it is the road that slices open the neat cross section in which underbrush, canopy, and high emergent trees are so carefully structured.

In 1994, I walked on a lot of abandoned logging roads in the eastern sector of South Kalimantan, Indonesia, between the Meratus Mountains and the coastal plains now covered with transmigration villages – block A, block B, Block C – and giant, miles-square plantations of oil palm, rubber, and Acacia for the pulp and paper trade. The region was transformed from when I had last seen it in the 1980s. Then, despite the logging, I had thought the forest might survive; local villagers were asserting customary resource rights and transmigration here was just a gleam in one engineer's eye, and he wasn't in charge. Now, even beyond the newly-planted industrial tree plantations lay miles

5100 Economic and Political Weekly November 29, 2003

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of scrub and vines. These were landslides of slippery red and yellow clay, with silted-up excuses for water. The logging roads had eroded into tracks for motorcycles, water buffalo, and the still-streaming mass of immigrant and local blood and sweat that the government calls 'wild': wild loggers, wild miners, and bands of roving entrepreneurs and thieves. I had seen resource booms before: When the prices for rattan shot up in the 1980s, for example, people went crazy cutting rattan until all the rattan had been cut to the ground. But this was something different. Some- thing easily called degradation was riding through the land. It was the kind of scene that informs so many powerful theories of resource management. The human presence was leaving the landscape all but bare. This, they say, is ordinary behaviour on the resource frontier where everything is plentiful and wild. It is human nature, they say, and the nature of resources.

In the violent clarity of the abandoned logging road, questions come to mind that might seem simple or even idiotic elsewhere. How does nature at the frontier become a set of resources? How

are landscapes made empty and wild so that anyone can come to use and claim them? How do ordinary people get involved in destroying their environments, even their own home places?

This is business that gets inside our daily habits and our dreams. Two complementary nightmares come into being; the frontier emerges in the intertwined attraction and disgust of their engage- ment. Consider in comparison the urban frontiers of southern California. Orange County is full of planned communities, in- dustrial tree plantations of neatly spaced condominiums, row on row on row, which give way only to identical roads and shopping malls. There is truly no directions, no place marks, only faceless serenity, time on hold. Orange County is one kind of nightmare. Its flip side is south-central Los Angeles, the mere thought of which drives masses of whites and Asian Americans behind the

Orange Curtain. Time is not on hold in that bastion of short lives. Yet these two nightmares play with each other: Just as the fear of hell drives the marketing schemes of paradise, so too does the desire of paradise fuel the schemes of hell. Both rise and fall on the spectacular performances of savvy entrepreneurs.

The same is true in Kalimantan. The giant monocrop plantations are the flip side of the wild resource frontier: on one side, endless rows of silent symmetry and order, bio-power applied to trees; on the other side, wild loggers, miners, and villagers in the raucous, sped-up time of looting. Each calls the other into existence. Each solves the problems put in motion by the other. Each requires the same entrepreneurial spirit. In that spirit, gold nuggets, swallows' nests, incense wood, ironwood posts, great logs destined to be plywood, and whole plantations of future pulp are conjured. Here I find the first answer to my impertinent questions. Resources are made by 'resourcefulness' in both plantation and wild frontier. The activity of the frontier is to make human subjects as well as natural objects.

The frontier, indeed, had come to Kalimantan. It had not always been there. Dutch plantation schemes mainly bypassed Kalimantan in the colonial period, allowing colonial authorities to treat their natives as subjects of kingdoms and cultures. Kalimantan's Dayaks, to them patently uncivilised, were still seen as having law and territorial boundaries, not a wilderness that needed to be filled up. In its first years the post-colonial nation maintained Kalimantan's villages, fields, and forests. Commercial logging only got underway in the 1970s. Administrative expansion and resettlement followed, with the goal of homogenising the nation. In the 1980s, conflicts broke out between village people and commercial loggers. Massive fires and waves of immigration disrupted emergent localisms. Through the 1980s, however, it was possible to see rural Kalimantan as a landscape of villages, small cultivations, and traditional agro-forestry, with discrete

patches of estate agriculture and large-scale logging and mining here and there.

The late 1980s and 1990s witnessed a national wave of entre-

preneurship. Spurred on by economic 'liberalisation' with its international sponsors, and a consolidating regional capitalism, entrepreneurs shot up at every level from conglomerates to peasant tour guides. In this great surge of resourcefulness Kalimantan became a frontier.

The frontier, then, is not a natural or indigenous category. It is a travelling theory, a blatantly foreign form requiring trans- lation. It arrived with many layers of previous associations. 'Indonesian Miners Revive Gold Rush Spirit of 49ers', pro- claimed a headline in the Los Angeles Times.2 Indonesian fron- tiers were shaped to the model of other wild times and places. Nor was 1849 California the only moment of frontier-making available to be reworked and revived. There is the dark Latin

American frontier: a place of violence, conflicting cultures, and an unforgiving nature driving once-civilised men to barbarism, as Domingo Sarmiento, soon to be president of Argentina, argued in 1845.3 This savage vision of the frontier has continued to percolate through later frontier optimism. There is the nation- making frontier, as famously articulated by Frederick Jackson Turner in his 1893 address. 'The Significance of the Frontier in American History'.4 Wild, empty spaces are said to have inspired white men to national democracy and freedom in the US. Amazing for its erasures, the power of this formulation is suggested by the fact that US historians remained in its thrall for nearly a hundred years. Finally, in the 1960s, frontier chroni- clers dared to mention that there were Native Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and women in these empty spaces, and they may not have benefited from that nation-making freedom quite so much as Anglo-American men. Finally, in the 1980s, environmental historians dared mention that someone despoiled the land, forests, and rivers.5 But the proud frontier story of the making of 'America' will probably be around a long time, particularly because it was remade in an internationally colonising form after the second world war in the concept of the techno-frontier, the endless frontier made possible by industrial technology. The closing of national borders, dense settlement, and resource scarcity need no longer lead to frontier nostalgia; the techno-frontier is always open and expanding. In the guise of development, the dream of the techno-frontier hit Indonesian centres hard in the lat