For example, Jinhu villagers consider the Guoqiang company’s waste of arable land to be incomprehensible. Thus, a few peasants tried to grow rice on fallow land they had previously plowed. However, they were forced to stop. The “subsistence ethic” is evident in Mrs. Tang’s husband and father-in-law, both of whom believe that a peasant has a natural right to cultivate fallow land not being exploited by another villager. The Guoqiang company, by contrast, has argued that, in accordance with the legally-binding contracts signed by the peasants when they handed over their land use rights, the company had the authority to decide what to do with the land, even if this meant leaving it unused for a long period of time. Finally, we should consider the middle class urbanites who have visited Jinhu Rural World as tourists. In general, they are looking for adventure and entertainment. Although there are some complaints about overcrowding,macetas de 30 litros disorderliness, and unprofessional behavior among staff members, most on-line reviews and comments about Jinhu Rural World are positive.
Many urban clients—often young couples with one child and a car—were excited that Jinhu Rural World theme park combined entertainment with a concept of agricultural education, thus affirming the Guoqiang Conglomerate’s own advertisements. Since many Chinese are recent urbanites who only recently left the rural world in order to enjoy an urban modern life, they have apparently not yet developed a sense of nostalgia. Though Timothy Oak describes rural tourism as a “playground” for rich and middle-class urbanites, it seems to me that there is something else to be said about the relationship between urbanites and the countryside. The above quote reveals that a rural nostalgia ideology has a practical side that concerns food security in today’s China, daily concerns of ordinary urban Chinese following several toxic food and poison scandals in recent years.16 Thus, for example, a national brand of infant milk formula caused babies to die due to toxic additives in its formula. This incident aroused national skepticism toward food items purchased from the market in general. Health has now become a pertinent day-to-day issue. In sum, although the “New Countryside” campaign is a national policy imposed throughout China by the central government, it is too simplistic to see its implementation as merely a manifestation of top-down authoritarian rule. In reality, multiple actors, each with their own concerns and agendas, have participated in rural development. Needless to say, each group’s vision of rural development does not necessarily accord with the central government’s conception and overarching goals.
The process of envisioning and reenvisioning the “New Countryside” by the various actors inevitably leads to conflicts and contradictions. For example, one finds inconsistencies between the central government and local government on issues of implementation, between the central government’s concern for “national food security” and urban consumers’ concern for food safety and hygiene, and between the real estate developer and the peasants regarding the logic of land use. As one might imagine, there are also power differentials between the different actors, with the peasants on the ground probably having the least say in the process. With all these different actors and agendas, “Building a Socialist New Countryside” is by no means a straightforward process. Here, I describe the process of implementation in the Jinhu case, demonstrating how this process involves some form of negotiation between the different actors, and how this negotiation has manifested itself. Much of the initiative at Jinhu came originally from a well-connected local entrepreneur. According to the young assistant of this man, whom I interviewed in 2012, the boss in question was the executive president of the Guoqiang Conglomerate, which had initially been founded as a government-owned Township and Village Enterprise . This man was a provincial representative to the National People’s Congress.
Although representatives to the National People’s Congress generally do not in fact have political authority,he was clearly well connected and, moreover, would have been one of the first individuals in the county to hear about the “New Countryside” campaign and to learn how to secure state funding for relevant projects. According to the young assistant, when the eleventh five-year plan was first promulgated by the central government in 2005, the boss almost immediately sensed a business opportunity and spent two years mobilizing resources to plan the Jinhu Rural World. In 2007, after taking over a local “dragon head”agribusiness firm that produced agricultural and food products, he established a new subsidiary under the Guoqiang Conglomerate called the New Countryside Conglomerate . Although the young assistant provided a fairly coherent account of how Jinhu Rural World cameabout, it turns out that this is not the whole story. According to one of my peasant informants, there were actually two rounds of contracts signed between villagers and the developer, suggesting that the process was, in fact, more convoluted. Online information provides more details, indicating that the Jinhu project did indeed pass through two phases—an initial failure, followed by later success. According to the well-known virtual community forum called Tianya—which frequently exposes injustice and official corruption—even before getting involved in the New Countryside campaign, the Guoqiang Conglomerate initially rented 2000 mu for 18 years from the peasants, hoping to take advantage of a rumor that the area that is now Jinhu Rural World would be formally absorbed into the Wuhu metropolitan region, a thriving economic zone just to the north. Guoqiang was apparently gambling on a more than ten-fold increase in land value in the immediate future. According to the Tianya article, in order to evade paying large state land taxes, Guoqiang avoided getting the proper land conversion permits. The company was eventually accused of leasing land illegally, and was ordered by the county Department of State Land to cease their activities immediately. At this point, Guoqiang risked losing its entire initial investment. Seeking to turn the situation around,macetas de 5 litros the entrepreneur took advantage of political connections and spent large sums of money bribing local officials to allow Guoqiang to transform the Jinhu development project into one officially responding to the central government’s call for a New Countryside. Once the company convinced the local government to get involved in the project, it expanded the scope of the project site to transform it into a national showcase. Henceforth, what had been a simple act of real estate land speculation turned into the “Jinhu New Countryside Construction Experimental Site” . As we can see, the initial development plan at Jinhu failed when the entrepreneur and the company acted on their own. It became a much more successful project only after the entrepreneur’s interests were coordinated with those of local state officials. This sort of coordination is a critical element in understanding rural development in today’s China. More in depth coordination was also required between the entrepreneur, the local government, and the central government. According to the master plan of the Jinhu New Countryside Experimental Project, the project required an intensive capital investment of around 700 million to 900 million RMB. At the time, Guoqiang had less than 300 million on hand in total assets, and, thus, needed bank loans and government subsidies. Financing of such large amounts inevitably required central government not local government money.
Central government funding is distributed through “proposed projects” , managed and monitored by the Development and Reform Commission . In recent years, the central government has allocated large amounts of funds directed towards the modernization of agriculture, as well as to rural education, health care, social welfare, and other concerns of the New Countryside campaign. Any sponsor of a proposed project can fill out a detailed application form, subsequently endorsed by local government officials. Once a project is selected by the central government, the sponsors receive large government grants, as well as opportunities to take out special loans from state banks. It is clear that, in order to get state funding, local government support and coordination were required. As a corollary, once the local government had approved the project, the local government shared with Guoqiang all responsibility for the project’s failures or successes. In addition, the local government played another important role in the project. Not only did it facilitate the process of getting state funds, but also it played an equally important role as a broker between the real estate developer and local peasants. As the young assistant of the Guoqiang boss put it, there were many instances that “required the government to show its face” , for example, when it was necessary to persuade farmers to adhere to the company’s master plan in a timely fashion. It was always local officials and village cadres who went to each household to persuade residents to sign contracts. He further mentioned that the New Countryside Conglomerate included a “Jinhu Experimental Site Management Committee,” whose salaried members were simultaneously county government officials. Their most challenging task was to make sure the rural theme park project went smoothly, confronting peasants with the “face” of government when necessary. Whereas the local government at this point had a direct interest in Jinhu’s success, the central government did not have the same stake in the project. It is quite clear that, as a consequence, Guoqiang continued to work hard to portray the Jinhu development site as a project aligned with the Chinese central government’s macroeconomic concerns regarding rural development, including the issues of “national food security” and ecological sustainability. In some cases, this has involved changes with concrete effects on the ground. For example, I was told by both peasants and staff members of the Guoqiang Conglomerate that the first resettlement housing style consisted of relatively attractive townhouses designed to lure peasants to want to move there. However, Guoqiang was later ordered by the central government—the Ministry of State Land Resources specifically—to stop wasting land. Consequently, for the sake of saving land to help achieve “national food security,” Guoqiang began to build apartment buildings six to seven floors in height in all new constructions in Jinhu New Village. The Jinhu case is not unusual. In fact, I have witnessed other high-rise apartment buildings in new villages across the countryside.Another strategy did not involve actual changes to plans, but rather the deployment of the central government’s rhetoric to describe preexisting projects. Thus, Guoqiang in conjunction with local state officials developed a strategy that adopted key terminologies relevant to central government policies, while at the same time achieving their own goals of company profits and local economic growth. The most common approach was simply to exploit the campaign slogan “Building a New Socialist Countryside” when seeking to justify a particular local development project. Another popular term is “ecological,” as improvements to the environment now constitute an important concern of the government. This phenomenon helps explain why references to the concept of “eco-friendly,” “low carbon,” and “sustainability” are encountered on publicity billboards all over the Rural World theme park. For example, inside the theme park, an “eco-restaurant” proudly advertises in the park’s brochure as one of the core attractions. The “eco-restaurant” is walled and roofed with transparent materials, thus in principle saving energy by using natural light. Yet, inside the “eco-restaurant” —which is filled with plastic cherry trees covered in pink and white blossoms, as well as plastic green banyan trees—the use of the “eco” language is primarily a rhetorical game. There is nothing ecological about fake trees. As in the West, the word “eco” is a buzzword to be exploited in the political and economic arena. In fact, although Jinhu Rural World is said to be the first “low-carbon” “eco-tourist” site, tourists in on-line comments have complained that they found garbage strewn about everywhere, especially inside the crowded tsunami water dome. Even after Guoqiang managed to work things out to the satisfaction of both local and central government authorities, numerous issues remained to be negotiated with local peasants. It is quite clear that the final arrangement reached with the peasants was economically disadvantageous to the peasants. For instance, according to my informants, residents were given 100 RMB per square meter for their old houses. The houses in the New Village, however, were more expensive, at 500 RMB per square meter. In addition, there were numerous additional costs associated with the relocation.