Industrial Tree Plantations and the Land Rush in China

Implications for Global Land Grabbing

Yunan Xu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000042252
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industria estrattiva di risorse naturali
• Index: Business

This book analyses the political and economic causes, mechanisms and impacts of the industrial tree plantation boom in China.

In the past two decades, the industrial tree plantation sector has been expanding rapidly in China, especially in Guangxi Province. Based on extensive primary data, this book concentrates on the political economy of the sector's expansion with a focus on the recent and dramatic agrarian transformation involving the land-labour nexus, the impact on villagers' livelihoods, the role of the state, and political reactions from below. The book questions the stereotypical portrayal of local communities as the excluded villager. Instead, it demonstrates that this is a much more complex issue with varying levels of passive and active forms of inclusion and exclusion within local communities. While most literature focuses on crop booms for food and biofuel production the industrial plantation sector has largely been overlooked, despite it being one of the biggest sectors in the current rush for land. Filling this lacuna, this book also reveals that while China has traditionally been painted as a major land grabber and consumer of crop booms it is also a destination of foreign investment. In doing so the book highlights how large-scale foreign land deals can also take place in traditional 'grabber' countries like China which feeds into the wider debates about global land politics and resource grabbing.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of land grabbing, rural development and agrarian transformations, as well as Chinese development.

1 Rethinking the industrial tree plantation sector in Southern China

Introduction

In recent years, crop booms have occurred worldwide under the convergence of food, fuel, financial, and environmental crises (Hall 2011). As Hall (2011) points out, when a crop boom takes place, there is a rapid increase in the changes in land-use for the cultivation of that particular crop in a given area. This is not only a process of extensive land-use change, but is often followed by land acquisitions/land grabs in varying ways and at various levels. These large-scale land acquisitions, popularly called ‘land grabs’, are highly visible worldwide in the current literature and political debates (Margulis, McKeon, and Borras Jr 2013). These land acquisitions include a dynamic change in land control: when someone gains access to land, those who were previously using it lose part of or full control of it. This aligns with the definition of land grabbing put forward by Borras Jr et al. (2012), that land grabbing is essentially a form of ‘control grabbing’: “grabbing the power to control land and other associated resources such as water in order to derive benefit from such control of resources” (Borras Jr et al. 2012, 850). These changes in land control and land-use have significantly affected the livelihoods of local villagers and, in some cases, even resulted in the dispossession of various social groups, normally the marginalized, and have provoked widespread conflicts (Scoones et al. 2013; White et al. 2012).

These crop booms have attracted a pyramid of academic studies, especially concerning land politics. In this book, land politics includes issues around who controls the land under what channel and for what land-use, who gets what from the land, and the implications of these land-based changes.¹

Among the current crop booms, there is an expanding industrial tree plantation (ITP) sector in Southern China, currently large scale (in terms of total land area covered and capital involved). The rise of the sector there involves changes in both land-use and land control, at varying scales and dominated by foreign corporations (including Finnish and Indonesian ones) and a variety of domestic actors (including the state actors, domestic corporations, individual entrepreneurs, and local villagers). The commodities produced are mainly for industrial use. During this crop boom, the villagers in question are not fully expelled, because of the specific rural land system.² Meanwhile, they have distinct livelihood changes and are affected differently due to their different positions in the sector (which include passive inclusion, active inclusion, passive exclusion, and active exclusion).³ In some places, the villagers embrace the land deals, while in others these land deals have provoked conflicts. These dynamics of the ITP sector in China are the focus of this book. By analysing these, this book intends to contribute to the current booming discussions on land politics – both empirically and theoretically.

Empirically, this work centres on one significant sector that has not received sufficient attention in the literature of land politics and highlights a more complicated role of China within the global land rush. To be specific, this study focuses on the rapidly expanding industrial tree plantation sector, which is linked to the increased demand for timber, pulp, and other biomass products (Kröger 2016). This has received much less attention compared to other sectors such as food, biofuels, and mining, despite its relative scale in terms of land area covered (Kröger 2014b). It deserves systematic research attention, if only because it is one of the biggest sectors in the current land rush in terms of land area involved. In addition, and perhaps even more importantly, this is also one sector that involves China in a more complicated way.

China is linked to the current global land rush as an investor in overseas production, a key player in the circulation/trade, and a key site of consumption, but rarely as an important destination of cross-border land investments within a crop boom. Where studies about land grabbing in China exist, the research is mainly about forced/illegal land transfers (tudi liuzhuan),⁴ or development-induced land expropriation (Siciliano 2013, 2014).⁵ So, this case can single out China as a distinct area of research in the global land politics literature.

Theoretically, analysing the dynamics of the ITP sector in China also offers insights to a better understanding of land grabbing (including its nature, mechanisms, and impacts) and contributes to the discussions around land accumulation and dispossession. More specifically, there is a general assumption in the current land grabbing literature that the current corporate encroachment into rural areas tends to result in the expulsion of people from their land, and their transformation into landless labourers that mostly support the industrial development of urban areas.

However, this case deviates from this popular assumption. With the rise of the ITP sector in Southern China, villagers do not necessarily get dispossessed and become more vulnerable. Instead, villagers show diverse adaptive livelihood responses based on their different access to resources under specific institutional and social structures. As a result, villagers do not always lose, but at times can benefit, from the boom process. In addition, this Chinese ITP case also shows a reverse labour and capital inflow from urban areas to rural areas, with a few villagers returning to rural areas and engaging in the ITP sector with the financial capital they gained in urban industrial sectors.

Therefore, the dynamics within the expansion of the ITP sector in Southern China demonstrate that capital accumulation is possible not only with but also without dispossession of villagers. Thus, an in-depth exploration of this case can open an agenda for discussions in the global scholarship on contemporary land politics and agrarian transformations.

Accumulation and dispossession in agrarian transformations – glances at the ITP sector in Southern China

Many scholars use Marx’s “primitive accumulation” and David Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession” to understand land dynamics in terms of its drivers (for accumulation), mechanisms (dispossession, and mainly coercion), and implications (reproduction of capitalist relationships) (Hall 2013). In this book, instead of an attempt to unfold these loaded theories, I intend to position land politics, especially the dynamics of the land-labour nexus and livelihood change of the villagers, with the rise of the ITP sector in Southern China (in particular Guangxi), based on the classic discussions around “accumulation and dispossession”. In this part, I particularly focus on the “land-labour nexus”, which refers to the interconnected and interacted land and labour dynamics within the boom.

Accumulation with and without dispossession

Karl Marx was the first to give a critical analysis of the process of separating peasants from their means of production during capitalist development. In Capital: Vol. 1, A Critique of Political Economy (Marx 1992, orig. 1887), Marx analysed the sources, characteristics, and mechanisms of capital by studying the history of western countries – especially the birthplace of capitalism, namely, England. When analysing the point of departure of the capitalist mode of production, he touched on the relationship between capitalism and rural development, and coined the concept of primitive accumulation (PA) – “the historic process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” (Marx 1992, orig. 1887, 875). In so doing, he used the capitalist development process of European countries (such as England) to demonstrate how the expropriation of peasants through the forceful expulsion from their land supplied the capitalist labour market with “free and rightless proletarians” (Marx 1992, orig. 1887, 885).

According to Marx, the primitive accumulation involved bloody processes of proletarianization. During the process, peasants were expropriated and expelled from land via fraud, force, violence, and coercion. This, on the one hand, enabled capitalists to have their wealth and power significantly increased through the control over the means of production; while, on the other hand, it created a reserve army of labour serving as cheap wage labour in urban industrial sectors. (Marx 1992, orig. 1887, 908–913). In both ways, separating peasants from land facilitated the process of urban industry.

Marx conceptualized primitive accumulation as a stage towards capitalism, or a precondition for capitalist accumulation, which he assumed would end when capitalism emerged. Based on Marx, David Harvey argues that primitive accumulation is not a stage in a unilinear process towards capitalism, but an ongoing feature of capitalism. Extending Marx’s concept, Harvey proposes “accumulation by dispossession” (ABD) (Harvey 2003, 1) to understand the reproduction of capitalist relationships and continuous accumulation under the crisis of over-accumulation.

In his explanation of ABD, Harvey argues that although a large part of features of PA that Marx outlined have remained, there are several nuances that exist in the current context (Harvey 2003, 145). One the one hand, “some of the mechanisms of primitive accumulation that Marx emphasized have been fine-tuned to play an even stronger role now than [in] th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of acronyms and abbreviations
• 1 Rethinking the industrial tree plantation sector in Southern China
• 2 The rise of the ITP sector in Southern China
• 3 The role of the state in the expansion of the ITP sector in China
• 4 Foreign investments and their land access in the industrial tree plantation sector
• 5 Changes in villagers’ livelihoods in Southern China within the rise of ITP sector
• 6 The politics of inclusion and exclusion in the emerging industrial tree plantation sector in China
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Index