China’s rapidly evolving practice of poverty resettlement: Moving millions to eliminate poverty

Abstract

Motivation Unlike other places where resettlement is largely a by‐product of large infrastructure projects, in China resettlement is used as a tool for poverty alleviation. With the introduction of Xi Jinping’s Targeted Poverty Alleviation, and the goal to end absolute poverty by 2020, resettlement has become central to China’s poverty‐alleviation practice. Rather than investing in dispersed, remote villages, the Chinese government prefers to bring people to development by constructing high‐density resettlement sites in small towns and peri‐urban areas: up to 16 million people are being resettled between 2016 and 2020. Despite the scale of these interventions, the English‐language literature on poverty resettlement is limited and has yet to detail rapidly evolving policies or how these are playing out on the ground. Purpose In this article we examine how poverty resettlement projects are working under Targeted Poverty Alleviation, with a focus on the implementation and impacts of, as well as overlapping motives for, projects in Shaanxi and Gansu. Approach and Methods Our analysis draws on semi‐structured interviews and secondary data collected in multiple sites in two provinces. Findings Our findings show that China’s intense focus on resettlement as a tool for poverty alleviation has resulted in reduced financial burdens on those resettled, but is also engendering new conflicts at the local level. Policy implications Our analysis highlights the contested nature of state‐driven resettlement for poverty alleviation and raises questions about the relevance of this practice for other developing countries.

Land Consolidation in Rural China: Life Satisfaction among Resettlers and Its Determinants

“…Our results show that age is an important factor in determining the life satisfaction of resettlers. From a policy standpoint, this further illustrates the importance of facilitating bottom-up participation in order to take full account of different local stakeholders' interests, including those who refuse to participate in land consolidation [38,39].…”

Rural Households’ Poverty and Relocation and Settlement: Evidence from Western China

“…Some argue that the displacement and resettlement of communities should be a last resort [5]; however, China’s central government has relocated millions of households for several reasons, including infrastructure construction (urban demolition, transportation, and hydropower projects). Recent relocation policies have also seen large numbers of people moved to alleviate poverty, address ecological and disaster-related concerns, and make way for major infrastructure construction projects [6,7,8,9]. Many of those being relocated are moving for the first time in their lives away from their rural ancestral homelands and into newly constructed villages, generally located in the same regions [10].…”

“…One such policy, the Relocation and Settlement Program of Southern Shaanxi Province (RSP, or Program) cannot be conceptualized as primarily a function of resettlers’ decisions, because it reflects the actions of the state and aims of local governmental development planning [15]. Being different from the project-induced relocation, the RSP aims to achieve sustainable levels of development, restore critical ecosystem services locally, regionally, and globally, alleviate poverty and improve rural households’ livelihood security, enhance social welfare, as well as foster rapid economic growth [7,8,9,15,16].…”

“…Previous studies contributed significantly to understanding the social-ecological impacts of displacement and resettlement across the globe [3,6,7,8,9,10,13,15,16,21,22,23], especially development-induced displacement and resettlement (DIDR) [11,12,18,19,24,25]. However, most of the studies mentioned above are limited and restricted to environmental issues (water quality and geological instability) and population problems (economic outcomes and health risk).…”

Borderland Infrastructures

“…On the other hand, the growing use of resettlement as a tool for poverty alleviation has become a prominent yet less-documented issue (Merkle 2003;Xue, Wang, and Xue 2013). This is particularly significant as it is estimated that between 2016 and 2020, up to 16 million people were resettled for poverty alleviation purposes (Rogers et al 2019). While such resettlement generally includes some level of subsidies to contribute to the cost of the new house, the case of the Dulong Valley is exceptional in that the entirety of the expenses were covered by the government.…”