Fighting for Every Inch of Land: Greed and Grievance in Petition Mobilization in Zhejiang

Abstract

Despite a proliferation of studies of the micro-level dynamics of protests and petitions against land takings in China, we know very little about how meso-level factors, such as the local economy, influence petitions to Beijing and provincial governments. Drawing upon the economic approach to civil war, this article examines the roles played by grievances and greed in determining the scale of mobilization at the county level in Zhejiang province. Through archival evidence and interviews in Ningbo and Lishui, as well as an original dataset of petitions, this article suggests that both grievances and greed influence petitioning. Mobilization is especially high in Ningbo, where valuable real estate markets have prompted landless farmers to compete with local governments over control of the rents from land. The article proposes the concept of resource value activation as a cognitive mechanism that has contributed to this process of mobilization.

Public Sentiment on Chinese Social Media during the Emergence of COVID19

“…Doing so can have substantive payoffs. For example, scholars of Chinese politics have noted a seeming disconnect between surveys showing high levels of political trust in China and analyses of Chinese social media data showing high frequencies of protest and discontent (Cai, 2010;Chen, 2012;Heurlin, 2020;King et al, 2013;Zhang and Pan, 2019). However, survey-based designs often, by default, incorporate both positive and negative sentiments.…”

How grassroots cadres broker land taking in urbanizing China

“…This surge of land taking has sparked considerable opposition, including acts of individual resistance (Hess 2010;Erie 2012;Deng 2017), collective petitioning (Cai 2003;Hurst et al 2014;Gui 2017;Heurlin 2020), and popular protest (Guo 2001 These techniques include: relying on professional relocation companies to negotiate with homeowners (Ho 2013a); deploying relatives to apply pressure on reluctant evictees (Deng and O'Brien 2013;Deng 2015, 2017;Luo et al 2017, Luo and Andreas, this issue); depending on religious leaders and lineage elites to get their members to accept requisition offers (Mattingly 2016(Mattingly , 2020; turning to neighbours to prod holdouts into relenting (Deng 2017); using one-on-one bargaining in government offices and the promise of urban residence to pre-empt group resistance (Hsing 2010;Lee and Zhang 2013;Chuang 2014); and channelling disputes into more readily-controlled courts (He 2014).…”