Governance of resettlement compensation and the cultural fix in rural China

Abstract

Financial management of resettlement funding has always been problematic for governments and development agencies trying to mitigate the negative effects of moving people from one location to another. In China, Poverty Alleviation Resettlement attempts to rectify the shortcomings in policies designed for distributing compensation and ensuring funds reach their intended use with apparatuses of security. Governance technologies take the form of reimbursement subsidies, which mitigate the risk that funds will be corrupted or households misuse money, by reimbursing expenditures already made on village construction. These technologies convey the contradictory nature of Chinese rural development, as they employ neoliberal discourse to direct fiscal transfers from the central government to enterprising individuals, but also attempt poverty alleviation of rural societies’ most marginalized households. Resettlement technologies are therefore leading to uneven development while simultaneously claiming to adhere to transnational poverty alleviation norms. In this article, the Party-state applies a cultural fix to resolve contradictions in the development apparatus. The Party-state draws on historical governance norms to change the meaning of the corrupt official that receives disproportionate government assistance into the “ideal” all villages should emulate. In this way, the Chinese bureaucracy appropriates the power of local elites to guide conduct and achieve broader political economic goals.