Chinese Suburban Villages’ State-Society Relations in Flux

Suburban China’s state-society relations have been in flux throughout the rapid urbanization, industrialization, and modernization during a three-decades-long market reform. One of the key consequences of different grassroots state-society relations in the suburbs is whether or not villages achieve sustainable profit-sharing development of collectively-owned land. This paper sheds lights on the relations between village leaders and villagers that determine the outcomes of collective land development. This paper argues that once the patron-client relationship between village leaders and upper-level state officials is cooperative, an important condition for many land developments in rural China, the nature of the relationship between village leaders and villagers—whether it is corporatist, patron-clientelist, or neither corporatist nor clientelist—determines the extent to which land-generated revenue is shared among villagers, a consequence of the suburban land business. Through such a conceptual approach and empirical findings based upon three sets of in-depth case studies with multiple comparative references from coastal regions in China, this paper shows that state-society relations in the suburbs and beyond is not fixed as a constantly contentious one, but rather is largely in flux and evolving.