China's Vision for Developing Sichuan's Post-Earthquake Countryside: Turning Unruly Peasants into Grateful Urban Citizens

Abstract

In the aftermath of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, government officials, scholars and outside observers eagerly hoped that the emergency relief and reconstruction process would bring about the emergence of civil society and increase grassroots democratic participation. Contrary to this optimistic assessment, this article contends that the local state used the opportunity of the disaster as an experimental laboratory to implement an array of already existing national development plans. The urgency with which the reconstruction was to be completed and the opportunities to meet national development targets as well as access reconstruction funds were too tempting to resist. However, the ham-fisted Leninist implementation style met with local resistance and has contributed to a significant deterioration in local state-society relations. The fact that many local residents continue to question why, despite the huge resources invested by the state in the reconstruction project, they have yet to see any improvement in their economic and overall living conditions points to a deficit of local participation and a breakdown in political communication and trust. By focusing on the different political economies of disaster reconstruction, this article attempts to illuminate the regime's vision for developing the countryside, rural politics, and state-society relations in China more broadly. Unless the state is able to incorporate local needs into its development plans, it will not win the trust and support of local residents, regardless of the amount of money it invests or the benevolence of its intentions.

Fostering Civil Society Through Community Empowerment: An Extended Case of the Sichuan Earthquake in China

“…Xu (2014) claims that the earthquake created a situational opening for civic engagement, which is “characterized by challenges to the state’s managerial capacity, a critical need for civil society’s services, a general agreement on priorities and goals, and the state’s efforts to construct a morally respectable image” (p. 91). However, Xu also noticed the inertia of the institutional environment and foresaw the marginalization of NGOs in post-disaster community reconstruction, which was confirmed in Sorace’s (2014) study. Teets (2009) likewise warns that NGOs still suffer from the deficit of capacity, the deficit of trust from the public, and the deficit of interaction with local governments.…”

Ancient and current resilience in the Chengdu Plain: Agropolitan development re-‘revisited’

“…The municipality also established a grant programme to villages for infrastructure and environmental management projects, economic development and cultural programmes determined through participatory budgeting (Cabannes and Ming, 2013). The agropolitan tendencies of these programmes, however, have been offset by many of the agglomeration-focused tendencies and associated problems described above for the nation as a whole (Sorace, 2014; Wilczak, 2017; Zhan, 2017a; Zhang and Wu, 2017a).…”

Commemorating a difficult disaster: Naturalizing and denaturalizing the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China

“…The central and local governments invested 670 million yuan (US$110 million) in the Beichuan earthquake memorial sites—including the old town and the memorial (Southern Weekends, 2013), and 2 billion yuan (US$291 million) in the reconstruction of the whole Yingxiu town (Wenchuan County Government, 2015). The state also utilized its tremendous power by removing residents, reshaping the topography, and suppressing dissidence without many restrictions (Sorace, 2014). Consequently, a gigantic, brave new world spotted with “politically safe” devastations was constructed within 5 years.…”