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Land Politics and Local State Capacities: The Political Economy of Urban Change in China*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 October 2013

Meg Rithmire
Meg Rithmire*
Affiliation:
Harvard Business School. Email: mrithmire@hbs.edu.
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Abstract

Despite common national institutions and incentives to remake urban landscapes to anchor growth, generate land-lease revenues and display a capacious administration, Chinese urban governments exhibit varying levels of control over land. This article uses a paired comparison of Dalian and Harbin in China's north-east to link differences in local political economies to land politics. Dalian, benefiting from early access to foreign capital, consolidated its control over urban territory through the designation of a development zone, which realigned local economic interests and introduced dual pressures for enterprises to restructure and relocate. Harbin, facing capital shortages, distributed urban territory to assuage the losers of reform and promote economic growth. The findings suggest that 1) growth strategies, and the territorial politics they produce, are products of the post-Mao urban hierarchy rather than of socialist legacies, and 2), perhaps surprisingly, local governments exercise the greatest control over urban land in cities that adopted market reforms earliest.

Keywords

land politicsurban planninglocal governmentnorth-east Chinaproperty rights
Type
Articles
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 216 , December 2013 , pp. 872 - 895
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2013 

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Footnotes

*

I gratefully acknowledge funding support from the Institute for International Education, the Chinese Ministry of Education, and the Harvard Academic Real Estate Initiative. In addition, I wish to thank Elizabeth Perry, Alan Altshuler, Timothy Colton, Kristen Looney, Jonas Nahm, Chris Bramall and Andy Harris for comments on versions of this article.

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