Adapting the Local State to Demographic Distress

• In Event: Domestic Politics in Contemporary and Historical China

Abstract

While most studies of development have focused on the relationship between economic growth and the demographic transition, several important economies such as Japan and China have begun to experience absolute demographic decline, thus raising deep questions about the sustainability of the growth model, including among East Asian developmental states.

This paper explores how the Chinese state has been restructuring local administration in response to demographic pressures, seeking to continue to concentrate and urbanize the population in order to maintain overall economic growth despite strongly negative macro-demographic trends and increasing scarcity of human capital. Chinese reforms after the 1970s resulted in the largest and most rapid wave of migration from rural to urban areas in human history. This transition occurred as the state deployed and strictly enforced the “one child policy” (abolished in 2015) while emphasizing the concurrent development of urban areas and even the creation of entirely new cities. The combined effect of these policies has severely undermined the viability and governance capacity of rural villages and small townships and led to drastic reconfigurations of territorial administration and has compelled authorities to restructure the political organization of the local state drastically, in line with the urban process.

Using a complete dataset of nearly 75000 villages and communities along with longitudinal land-use data for Shandong (one of China’s largest provinces), we demonstrate through a combination of remote-sensing, census and administrative data how demographic pressures have affected the survival of local entities at the village and township level, and if they survive, the odds of their eventual reorganization into ‘urban’ communities, towns or wards. We show that this spatial administrative reorganization challenges political control by the party-state, as drastic shifts in population dynamics upturn local political hierarchies and magnify inequalities between still-expanding urban zones and rural areas that keep on losing their labor force to out-migration to cities, while natural population growth declines further over time.

Authors

• Pierre F. Landry, Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Zheng ZHANG, The Chinese University of Hong Kong