It Takes More than One Village: Arbitrary Responsiveness and the Demolition Campaign in a Chinese City

Zhihang Ruan, Hunter College, CUNY

Existing literature on demolition and urban renewal tends to focus more on explaining the rise and success of these initiatives than on the factors that hinder them. Within the smaller body of work that examines why some projects fail to move forward, scholars often highlight legal and institutional barriers, conflicts among influential stakeholders, and the effective mobilization of opposing groups (Kuyucu 2022; Darrah-Okike 2019). Drawing on fieldwork research and interviews conducted in 2021, as well as analysis of policy documents from 2019 to 2024, this paper traces the evolution of a large-scale demolition campaign in the Huangpu District of Guangzhou. Compared to many other cities in the country, Guangzhou and others in the Pearl River Delta were relatively slow to demolish “villages-in-the-city” (Wilson 2023). This slower pace partly stemmed from the region’s once-vibrant civil society organizations, municipal leaders’ ideologies, and the strong kinship networks in the villages. However, in 2019, a surprisingly ambitious demolition campaign began in the peri-urban district of Huangpu, targeting 66 villages for demolition within three years. While the campaign was extremely successful in demolishing dozens of villages and relocating hundreds of thousands of people within just two years —provoking a considerable backlash from villagers and profoundly affecting migrant tenants—it did not take a turn until the top leadership responded to a different demolition initiative in the municipality. This case illuminates evolving state-society relations in contemporary China, highlighting a new form of “arbitrary responsiveness.” It challenges the assumption that social pressure or higher-level mandates alone can spur government action in regimes like China (Meng and Su 2021). Instead, it demonstrates that the reshuffling of party-state and central-local relations reshapes the channels through which responsiveness occurs in China.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 153. Chinese Political Economy