EAST ASIAN DEVELOPMENTAL PATH AND LAND-USE RIGHTS IN CHINA

This paper highlights contemporary China's long-term continuities with the historical East Asian developmental path in relation to its post-1978 revival of market-economy traditions. The revival of market economy traditions does not exemplify the unfolding of processes associated with the "one-size-fits-all" Washington Consensus. Rural land reforms were driven from below and strongly influenced policy changes from above. Neither rural nor urban land use relations suggest a more general unfolding of neoliberal processes of capitalist accumulation by dispossession. Contemporary Chinese land relations reflect the effects of continuities with historical East Asian regional traditions more strongly than do some discontinuities and ruptures that emerged in the conjuncture of the mid-1980s. These continuities remain more important in understanding the future of the China-led East Asian region. Like the Ming and Qing dynasties, China's Party-State is sharply focused on problems of governance. Retaining legitimacy and recreating a welfare state to promote harmonious development rather than growth fetishism appears to characterize China's current trajectory.