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Land Expropriation and Rural Conflicts in China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2001

Xiaolin Guo
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Extract

In the early spring of 1999, I was conducting fieldwork on agricultural development in a township in northeast Yunnan.This study is a result of my fieldwork carried out in February–March 1999 and again in December 1999 in the township where I conducted household surveys in three villages (20–30 households in each, depending on the size of village, by random sampling) and interviews with village leaders and officials at township and county levels. The township, which I call Banyan, is under the jurisdiction of a county-city (xianji shi) that acquired its urban status in 1994. One afternoon, as I was sitting by a kitchen fire interviewing a housewife in a village two kilometres from the township seat, some people from the neighbourhood walked in, and it did not take long before a crowd gathered in the room. No sooner had I concluded my interview when voices roared from the audience. Taken by the villagers for a reporter, I was bombarded with bitter accounts of the ongoing land expropriation in their community.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 166 , June 2001 , pp. 422 - 439
Copyright
School of Oriental and African Studies, 2001

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Footnotes

This research was funded by the Danish Council for Development Research and the Aarhus University Research Foundation. My fieldwork in spring 1999 was partly supported by the travel grant of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. My special thanks to Jean Oi for her critical reading of my early draft. I am very grateful to Stephan Feuchtwang for his useful comments, and to Chris Hann and Susanne Brandtstaedter for giving me an opportunity to present the paper at the Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.