Conclusion and Discussion

Abstract

Keeping in mind Liang Shuming’s statement that Chinese society is to a large extent relationship-based (King in Individualism and holism: Studies in Confucian and Taoist values. Ann Arbor, Michigan University Press, pp 57–70 1985: 63; Alitto in Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese dilemma of modernity (2nd ed). Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986; King in Daedalus 120(2):63–84, 1991: 65), the present book has worked to understand the interrelationships between land-lost farmers and government officials, as they are located within their local setting. The book has not attempted to simply arrive at value judgments of the two sides involved, as the oppressed and their oppressors, or to deduce particular policy choices, as to just or effective means by which to effect growth and sustain order, nor has it focused on the consciences of the Chinese intelligentsia or the state’s senior authorities, in their paternalistic concerns for the vulnerable. Instead, the book extends the overtly confrontational form of the relationship set by the framework of conflict theory, to make use of Giddens’ structuration theory in order to analyse the forces of integration and conflict, as well as the dynamic course of the relationship between land-lost farmers and local government in the process of land expropriation, compensation and resettlement. Methodologically, with the use of the extended case method, and fieldwork in three different resettlement communities in one city in the centre of China, I situate the localised relationship between the governing and the governed under the external forces of the Chinese central state, and its dual imperatives of local growth and local order.