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Out of “Site”, Out of Mind?: Politics of Land Compensation for Chinese Rural Migrants

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Abstract

Local governments’ failure to provide proper compensation for rural residents’ land rights has been one of the main sources of political conflict in rural China. Previous literature has focused on why local governments use different means to compensate for land-losing rural residents. Yet, the question of who local governments prioritize when providing compensation for dispossessed land rights has not been fully examined. Employing the data from the China Household Income Survey (2013), I show that local states are more likely to provide compensation, either a cash payment or access to social insurance, to land-losing rural residents who stay in the township. Land-losing rural residents who live outside the township, to the contrary, are less likely to be compensated for their land rights by local states. Drawing on the China General Social Survey (2010), I suggest that the disadvantage of out-migrants stems from their lowered levels of political participation. The findings from this article imply that internal migrants in China are discriminated against not only in the destination localities but also in their home localities.

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Notes

  1. Of course, the government expropriation of private property rights is not unique to China. Such appropriation happens even in countries in which land ownership is privatized. See, for example, Bae (1998), which discusses land ownership violations by the South Korean government.

  2. Some studies argue that collective land ownership may have actually helped rural residents address this power imbalance by binding them into a collective agent and providing a base for stronger collective actions. See, for example, Zhang and Donaldson (2013).

  3. College level was automatically dropped due to the limited number of observations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1407 W Gregory Drive 420 David Kinley Hall M/C 713, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    Yujeong Yang

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  1. Yujeong Yang
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Yang, Y. Out of “Site”, Out of Mind?: Politics of Land Compensation for Chinese Rural Migrants. St Comp Int Dev 57, 271–301 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-022-09353-0

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