Urban Governance under Agricultural Land Conversion and Local Economic Development in China: A Study on Development Zones in Greater Suzhou
Date Issued
2005
Date
2005
Author(s)
Kuo, Chien-Lung
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
This essay aims to explore, from a perspective of planning and urban governance, the mechanisms of conversion of agricultural land under rapid industrialisation and urbanisation in China, and to study how the local state handles the conflicts between economic land development and the protection of land for agricultural use since the economic reforms. We also analyse the roles local states play, under economic globalisation, in dealing with the pressure from local competition and the protection of arable lands; and discuss the practice and theoretical implications of local governance for the fast-growing area. Then, we investigate the historic processes of and interactions among systems of economic planning, urban planning and land use planning. The case study of the greater Suzhou area, the new electronic industry cluster, describes how local states in China accomplish the local economic development by leasing low-cost construction land to attract foreign investments.
This study proposes the notion of “local interest coalitions”, which helps analyze the forms of urban governance as well as the characteristics of developmental regimes under the drives for local economic growth. It also explains the reason why local states deem land input (development zones) as the initial driving force of the local economy, and argues that it has to do with inter-sectoral negotiations/planning, distribution of interests as well as local financial and political conflicts and crises.
Therefore, focusing on local states, the core issue composes of ideological upper structure, and internal factors of local governments. Local states in the greater Suzhou attempt to set up development zones to attract FDI, resulting in challenges to the legitimacy and authority of planning. Building development zones as incentives to FDI represents a model of local economic growth that is overly dependent on risky land development. More seriously, such policies are one of the basic courses of the problems of dislocation of huge numbers of impoverished peasants and the great losses of agricultural land, both of which are of grave significance in social stability-sensitive and resource-deficient in China.
Subjects
都市治理
地方利益聯盟
發展型政權
土地開發
蘇州
urban governance
local interest coalitions
developmental regimes
land development
Suzhou
Type
thesis
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