Record Item Language: English

Full Circle? Rural Land Reforms in Globalizing China

ABSTRACT: China’s rural land rights regime is being reformed. Most explanations for the reforms focus on the efficiency effects anticipated from the strengthening of villagers’ land rights. In contrast, this article argues that rural land rights reforms are intended to resolve the intra-state and state-society contention generated by China’s market transition and globalization, and to mediate villagers’ dispossession of their land and their transformation into a proletariat.

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Women’s Land Rights in South Asia: Struggles and Diverse Contexts

“In south Asia, since the 1970s, previously marginalised sections of the rural poor started to organise themselves in movements. In recent years, most of these struggles have been directed against the impact of the liberalising state on the rural poor. For the vast majority, there has been an erosion of livelihood avenues, food insecurity, a loss of assets – owing largely to the loss of their traditional access and control of natural resources. Food security is threatened by loss of biodiversity and loss of knowledge. Women who suffer the most from these trends have in all movements related to these […]

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Governing Women’s Capabilities in China’s Urban Expansion

By the middle of the twenty-first century, China’s urban population is likely to have grown by about 500 million, to more than 1.1 billion people. This article applies Amartya Sen’s concept of capabilities to explore how the government of urban expansion is affecting the generation of rural women whose villages currently are being enclosed by cities and towns. Drawing on interviews, press reports and government and Women’s Federation documents from Zhejiang province, it illustrates how local governments’ economic growth strategies hinge, in part, on reconstructing gendered relations in the spatial organization, civic management, production and social reproduction in new metropolitan […]

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