Industrial Tree Plantations and the Land Rush in China

Book excerpt: This book analyses the political and economic causes, mechanisms and impacts of the industrial tree plantation boom in China. In the past two decades, the industrial tree plantation sector has been expanding rapidly in China, especially in Guangxi Province. Based on extensive primary data, this book concentrates on the political economy of the sector’s expansion with a focus on the recent and dramatic agrarian transformation involving the land-labour nexus, the impact on villagers’ livelihoods, the role of the state, and political reactions from below. The book questions the stereotypical portrayal of local communities as the excluded villager. Instead, it demonstrates that this is a much more complex issue with varying levels of passive and active forms of inclusion and exclusion within local communities. While most literature focuses on crop booms for food and biofuel production the industrial plantation sector has largely been overlooked, despite it being one of the biggest sectors in the current rush for land. Filling this lacuna, this book also reveals that while China has traditionally been painted as a major land grabber and consumer of crop booms it is also a destination of foreign investment. In doing so the book highlights how large-scale foreign land deals can also take place in traditional ‘grabber’ countries like China which feeds into the wider debates about global land politics and resource grabbing. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of land grabbing, rural development and agrarian transformations, as well as Chinese development.