Urbanization strategies and agrarian change in Eastern China: a multilevel integrated assessment of domestic land grabbing

by Giuseppina Siciliano

This paper explores the links between urbanization strategies and domestic land grabbing processes in a rural village located in Chongming island. Chongming is currently the poorest district of Shanghai. One of the most significant development interventions in the island is the rural-urban migration policy. That is, the displacement of rural people from rural villages to cities. This intervention is part of the official rural development strategy of China, which emphasizes that an effective reduction of the urban-rural income gap should be based on the transformation from rural to urban and from traditional to industrial agriculture. This paper investigates the implication and trade-offs of such policies for the local population and for sustainable local development, in terms of: land-use changes, food self-sufficiency, livelihoods of small-scale farmers, economic development, as well as environmental protection. Besides contributing to the analysis of the impacts of urbanization strategies on local communities and agro-ecosystems, this paper gives an empirical contribution to the discussion of the influence of development strategies on the agrarian change and the domestic land grabbing process in China.