The Making of “New Citizens”: Landless Farmers and Urban Governance in China

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This research examines a new group of Chinese urban residents who have entered urban life not through migration, but through transferring nearby rural residents into urban residents in an organized and managed way as cities expand and spread. Through top-down process of administrative transition, they were granted urban household registration (hukou) in exchange for rural land. The process separated villagers from their farming land, provided urban services and social security, and instituted urban grassroots governance structures in the former rural residential communities. As a result, a new type of urban neighborhood—the (newly) urbanized neighborhood—has emerged, which accommodates new groups of urban residents—landless farmers. This study explores in what ways and to what extent the central government’s initiatives on the landless farmers’ integration into urban economy and society have been carried out at local levels and how the local state has responded to the emergence of landless farmers in the cities. Through qualitative research of landless farmers in the city of Suzhou, this article examines urbanization and transformation of landless farmers from a governance perceptive. It explores urban development not only as incorporation through market, but also through local governance, in terms of economic integration through governance means and social integration carried out as a governance task. Governance of landless famers has become a local state-building process through developing local urbanization trajectories, local fiscal strategies, and inter-city competition. As a result, the making of new citizens goes hand in hand with local state-building during China’s urbanization.