Qin Hui, "Looking at China from South Africa" 5

Qin Hui, “The People Cannot Sell Their Land, but the Officials Can ‘Enclose’ It:  South Africa’s and China’s ‘Binary Land System’”[1]
 
Translation by David Ownby
　　
Two components for rapid economic growth are manpower and land, and constraints on people and constraints on land are often similar.  I do not believe that land, as a special kind of resource, can truly be “one hundred percent privatized,” and it is normal that constitutional democracies infringe occasionally on questions of land rights for the sake of public welfare.  At the same time, the “boundary between public and private authority” is in this instance clear, and democratic systems ensure that “public authority” not be “privately used,” and that the “private rights” existing in free political systems (which of course includes the right to form or withdraw from a "collective" on the basis of freedom of association) not be confiscated.  Only countries with “low human rights” manage land as a tool of “primitive accumulation,” imposing a coercive “collectivization” on the people in the form of an “enclosure movement,” achieving the goals of “selling land to finance the government” through “financial manipulation 空手套白狼.”  
 
In the context of the South African land system, there was always a conflict between the British tradition and the Boer tradition.  The system originally employed by the Boers in the seventeenth century combined state authority and rental concessions; in other words, after the state arbitrarily requisitioned native land, it “rented” these lands to the Boers on the basis of their distinct racial rights.  This system completely ignored the land rights of the blacks, and was extremely helpful to the whites in their efforts to occupy black land.  Together with the black slave system, it became the Boers’ main tool of primitive accumulation.  Yet at the same time, it also muddled the question of property rights, and obstructed the development of capitalism.
 
After the British occupied the Cape Colony in the nineteenth century, they attempted to carry out land reform at the same time that they abolished slavery.  In 1813, they announced the abolition of the absurd system of arbitrary land expropriation and ordered that state land no longer be rented out according to racial category, but instead sold at auction to the highest bidder in a public market.  Once the land was auctioned off, it became private property, to be freely exchanged.  This privatization in which “commerce replaced expropriation” mainly benefited British with capital, but if the privatizing logic that recognized money rather than status were to be extended downward, then blacks should be able to buy land, and the white government should no longer engage in expropriation. 

For this reason, the Boers fiercely resisted the reform, which made it difficult to implement.  In 1828, British colonial authorities further promulgated Decree number 50, “On the Improvement of the Conditions of the Hottentots and other Free Peoples of the Cape,” which stipulated that blacks could move freely and had the right to buy and possess land.  This measure further enraged the Boers, many of whom decided to leave the Cape area and move to the north, where they established two Boer republics that threw off British rule, eventually sparking the Boer Wars.
 
Yet following the British victory in the wars, they abandoned land reform efforts in an effort to appease the Boers, and as a result, land policy in South Africa remained that of the pre-war Boer system.  For example, the Glen Gray Act of 1894, drafted at a point when most of the good land had already been expropriated by the white government, hypocritically stipulated that under the regime of tribal allocation of black land, blacks would be subject to an “equal land rights system” that required each tribe to guarantee that each black family have its share of land, a share not exceeding ten acres, with no family possessing more than one share.  Whites were not allowed to rent land to blacks.
 
After the establishment of the Federation of South Africa in 1910, the conflict between the British land system and the Boer land system persisted, and through the debate surrounding the land laws of 1913 and 1936, ultimately became a “binary land system:”  within the framework of the “final realization of state ownership by South African whites,” the white community basically set up a system of privately owned land, in accord with the British tradition, which was adapted to the development of the market economy, while the system of family “allocation” imposed on the blacks by the tribal collectives, not only abolished blacks’ rights to purchase and possess land, which had formerly been granted to them by the British land reforms of 1813 and 1828, but also strictly prohibited exchange of land and rent tenancy between blacks and whites. 

White farm owners could hire black labor, but could not rent land to blacks.  The large number of whites who, through the processes of industrialization and urbanization, abandoned agriculture and moved to the cities could transfer their land to other whites, they could transfer it to the state for development projects, but they could not sell the land to blacks.  For the blacks, the authorities solely acknowledged tribal land ownership, did not recognize private ownership by black families, and used the law to “limit individual land rights and the amount of land that an individual could possess.” 
 
In addition, even as it guaranteed black tribal land, the state also allowed itself to expropriate these lands for development purposes.  Whether it was black families without personal ownership rights in the lands they had been allocated, or black people living in autonomous homelands set up by the white state, neither could say “no” to the will of the white state.
 
The “binary structure” of this kind of land system brought the following advantages to the white authorities of South Africa.  The authorities were able to tie the blacks to their tribal identities, in the sense that even those blacks who had worked in the cities for a long time were unable to obtain rights as urban dwellers, and at the same time because blacks had been allocated lands by their tribes, the authorities shifted all responsibility for black welfare to these groups.  In the name of so-called “orderly urbanization,” when the economy was flourishing, blacks were allowed to come into the cities to sell their labor, while in times of downturn blacks were seen as “surplus” people in the cities, and authorities did their utmost to send them home to live on their tribal allocations, which meant transferring the cost of the economic crisis onto the blacks.
 
In addition, the white government, on the pretext of avoiding a situation where “blacks had no land,” hypocritically maintained the black tribal collective ownership system, yet the state did not hesitate to advance its own interests above those of the “collective,” and take advantage of the lack of recognition of privately owned black land to arbitrarily expropriate their land at cheap prices, evicting the blacks from one parcel of land after another.  For this reason, while South Africa never had the problem of “land annexation” within the black population caused by the “free commerce in private property,” the problem of the white state’s “annexation” of black land was far more serious than in any country where “private holdings of land” existed.  In 1936, when land relations in South Africa were finally established, blacks, who made up 78% of the population, had only 13% of the land, while the whites, who constituted 18% of the population (this includes the white-ruled “state") owned 87%.
 
In the absence of the globalized economy, this kind of land system would resemble that of the middle ages, and could not perform better than a liberalized land system.  But the context of modern capitalism, the mobility of capital and technology turned South Africa into the model region of “enclosure movements” for the entire world.   With the exception of reform-era China, there was probably no other place in the world where, as soon as an investment project won the approval of the government, land for the project could be obtained overnight, expropriation and demolition carried out at a low cost, and the original inhabitants expelled.  Land, that could be taken at will and developed at cost, and black labor, that could be expelled on a whim, became South Africa’s two great “advantages” in the globalized race to “attract investment.” 

Since there are no “nail houses”[2] and because “transaction costs” are low, South Africa could be much more generous than democratic countries in terms of urbanization and infrastructure development.  South African cities are magnificent, and infrastructure works impressive, even “ahead of the times.”  As mentioned above, while all white South Africans own cars, most blacks are poor, which means that overall rates of car ownership are not high when compared with those of developed countries.  However, highway construction in South Africa developed rapidly beginning in the 1960s, and by the 1980s, the scale of the highway system was second only to the United States and Germany, and superior to developed countries such as Britain, France, and Japan.
 
In today’s world, the country most similar to pre-democracy South Africa in terms of a binary land system is probably the China of the “miracle economy” period.  Prior to the reforms, China relied on “collectivized people’s communes” to carry out “socialist primitive accumulation,” and after the reforms, although peasants could withdraw from the collectives, they could not withdraw from the system of “collectivized land rights,” and hence made an even greater contribution to “capitalist primitive accumulation.”  The most salient characteristic of China’s land system at the present time is that “the people cannot sell their land, but the officials can ‘enclose’ it.”  The government can, at a whim, expropriate the land, while the peasants cannot dispose of land that has been “allocated” to them.  This is especially true when it comes to changing the use of the land. 
 
As I have pointed out elsewhere, this situation produces what I call the “inchworm effect 尺蠖效应:”[3]  if “protecting agricultural land” is the priority, then authorities will be unwilling to allow farmers to dispose of their land, but if they decide to expropriate they will continue to expropriate; and if “land protection is not necessary” becomes the priority, then government expropriations will be all the more out of hand, while the peasants will still not be allowed to sell their land.  The most basic features of South Africa’s land system are also like this.  Their blacks are China’s peasants, and their “tribal ownership system” is our coercive “collective ownership system.”
 
Of course, some people will say that when white South Africans decree that blacks must maintain the “tribal ownership system” and prohibit the privatization of land, then this is merely a sinister move to steal black land.  By contrast, when China’s government decrees that the peasants must maintain the “collective ownership system” and prohibits the privatization of land, their intentions are good, because they fear that the peasants will not know how to cherish their land and that an uncontrolled land market will produce “landless peasants.” 

I’ve offered my best critique of this interpretation elsewhere:  if you really believe that your concern for the peasants is greater than their concern from themselves, if you really believe that peasants are so short-sighted that they will shoot themselves in the foot, and if my argument that the peasants are not as stupid as you think does not convince you, then go ahead and control the ability of the peasants to sell their land on the premise that it might not be a good idea.  But then might you not restore half of the peasants’ land rights and agree that if they don’t want to sell, then they don’t have to?  If you can’t do this, which would put an end to the “enclosure movement,” then how can you keep worrying about “landless peasants?”  And if you truly hope that peasants can increase their “collective bargaining power” in land matters, and worry that they will be cheated if they act individually, then the answer is even easier:  why not let them organize peasant associations?  In fact, the logic of the system is far more important than any hidden “intention” on the part of authorities.  In a system where there are no controls on the power of the government while the rights of the people are not acknowledged, even the best of intentions will lead to foreseeable outcomes.
 
This is made clear by the failure of the Tomlinson Reform (1955) in the process of establishing “black homelands” in South Africa.  In fact, while South African authorities were masterful at carrying out the “enclosure movement,” nonetheless, in order to maintain the “mobile worker” system and prevent blacks from moving to the city in a “disorderly” manner, they also hoped to tie blacks to small plots of allocated land so that they would not cut ties with the black homelands.  To this end, the Tomlinson Commission, which was responsible for planning the construction of black homelands, implemented further reforms to strengthen land management in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  In addition to diverting a certain number of blacks into local industrial projects in the homelands (meaning that blacks left the land but not the rural areas), the reforms also reallocated black agricultural land and specified land use.  Agricultural land could not be used for grazing, grazing land could not be used to grow grain, and there was no question of changing the use designation of the land. 

Wasn’t this all under the banner of preventing the blacks from “losing their land?”  However, the blacks did not appreciate the initiative.  Their freedom to use their land as they wished was further constrained and they were conscious of being cheated, so they resisted, and at one point, South Africa was on the verge of a “peasant uprising.”  The final result was that the “reform” miscarried.
 
I should point out that the fact that blacks own only 13% of the land means that white expropriation of black land is a more serious problem in South Africa than in China.  This is surely one result of three hundred years of racial oppression.  Even after democratization, in South Africa the problem remained serious, and the democratic government of South Africa has had a difficult time resolving the land issue.  In China, reform has been underway for only thirty years, but the frenzy of land expropriation began after 1992, or in other words has been underway for only slightly more than a decade, but there are already some 700,000,000 “peasants who have lost their land.”  According to authoritative statistics, this number will reach 1,000,000,000 by 2020. 

Obviously, the speed with which this has happened has been much faster than in South Africa.  South Africa stole much land from blacks in the early period, mainly because in this agricultural era the Boers were developing their farms.  China has no “urban agriculture 市民农场,” and state farms are not the mainstay of the agricultural sector, which meant that appropriation of farmland was limited in the past, and the “enclosure movement” was basically fueled by construction projects.  But in recent years, forced enclosures in the name of “scale management” and “modern agriculture” have become very common, and thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of hectares have been given over to Chinese-style “Boer farms,” often making the news in surprising ways.  For example, in Jiangxi’s “Jiangxiang Incident 蒋巷事件” in 2001, more than 50,000 mu were appropriated in one fell blow. And in 1998, Zhanhua’s “China-Australia Joint Fund Farming and Animal Husbandry Company 沾化“中澳合资金角农牧公司” appropriated an area of 150,000 mu in Shandong.  Although the peasants protested and the media reported the protests, the projects were backed by powerful interests and the protests came to nothing.
 
 
After industrialization, expropriation of agricultural land gradually stopped in South Africa, because there remained enough state-owned agricultural land expropriated in the past to meet the needs of construction projects.  In addition, the authorities sought to avoid antagonizing the tribes further while implementing the so-called “Bantu Self-Government” program (1959).[4]  Today, China’s expropriation of land for construction purposes is much greater than in South Africa, and many nasty events, like the Dingzhou incident 定州事件[5] or the Shanwei incident 汕尾事件,[6] occurred because of this.
 
In China, the notion of “peasants who have lost their land” has become harder to grasp, and many recent “enclosures” have been carried out through changes to the residence permit system in which “a township becomes a neighborhood, a village becomes a residence committee, peasants become city dwellers, and the land reverts to the state.”  Once peasants become city dwellers, they are no longer peasants who have lost their land, but in fact we have no idea if they find other jobs.  So the scale of peasants who have lost their land may be larger than we think. 

According to research performed outside of China, taking into account the inequality of land use between peasants who have lost their land and those who have not, as well as the development of “scale management” in the form of the “two field system 二田制” and the “companies incorporating rural families 公司加农户,”[7] by the 1990s, the GINI coefficient for peasants having lost their land reached 0.41, which was clearly higher than in Japan and South Korea.  Some people even argue that prior to the agricultural adjustments of 1988, the GINI coefficient was 0.50, and after the adjustment was 0.47, which is the level noted in Taiwan, Egypt, and Algeria.  The situation is surely worse now.
 
From another perspective, when we say that white South Afrficans expropriated “87% of the national total,” this includes state-owned land.  Although much black land has been stolen, and the black share of the national total land area is low, still the amount of the land allocated to each black family (roughly 8 acres, or 49 mu) is much greater than the holdings of China’s peasants.  Under the tribal allocation system, there are not many “landless blacks” working in agriculture, and the problems faced by blacks in the South African villages and peasants in China are basically the lack of land and the low efficiency of small-scale agriculture, which makes it hard to produce enough food to eat.
 
Some people argue that the reason for the emergence of urban slums in third-world countries like India, Latin America and the Philippines is because agriculture is privatized, and the free market in land creates “polarization,” pushing many “landless peasants” into the cities.  Theorists from apartheid era South Africa, like the already mentioned Tomlinson, cited the same reason for forbidding the privatization of black-owned land.  But the histories and practices of South Africa, China and the other countries discussed above don’t bear out this reading. 

India and Latin America do indeed have problems of land concentration and landless peasants, among others. But these problems were created by historical seizures of land, and are not the result of “the privatization of the small peasant economy, the buying and selling of land, and polarization.”  Moreover, in recent decades, land concentration in these countries has been diminishing, even in the absence of progressive reforms.  The numbers of landless peasants in these countries was much greater in the past, yet city slums were far smaller than they are now.  Clearly, as long as agriculture is relatively inefficient, peasants may develop the urge to move to the cities, regardless of the “ownership system” in place.  And if the cities do not exclude them, the barriers to their entry are even lower, and those entering the cities will increase.  The problems faced by India and Latin America are the following.  If the speed of present economic growth cannot keep up, life in the cities will be no worse than it was in the countryside.  If employment and salaries cannot rise quickly, and the state is unable to assure adequate welfare guarantees, then slums will become a lasting, and perhaps intensifying, “urban blight.”  The fact that peasants who move to the city cannot immediately catch up with city dwellers, and for this reason have to dwell in slums, is a universal fact of urban life. 

The reason there were no slums in the “white cities” of apartheid-era South Africa was not because they were successful in imposing “collective land ownership” on the blacks, but because they only allowed blacks to live in places like Soweto.  And if China’s cities have no slums because of “collective land ownership,” then how should we view measures like “detention,” “urban management,” “temporary residence permits,” and “clean-ups,” which are no less cruel than measures employed by South Africa?
 
Notes

[1] “只许官’圈’，不许民卖：南非与中国的’二元土地制度,’”
available online at http://www.aisixiang.com/data/33585.html, published on Aisixiang on May 12, 2010.

[2] Translator’s note :  “Nail houses”      钉子户 is the Chinese term for houses that refuse to sell to developers, and hence stick out “like nails” as the construction proceeds around them.  See images here.

[3] Translator’s note:  For more on the “inchworm effect,” see Qin Hui, “我看全球经济危机：两种尺蠖效应的互动,” 领导者, 2009.2, available online at http://www.aisixiang.com/data/27203.html.  The basic notion is that the opposition between those arguing for “greater welfare” and those arguing for “freer markets” in contemporary politics allows little room for progress.

[4] Translator’s note:  The Bantu Self-Government Act was part of the initiative to establish “autonomous” black townships.  See https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/black-homeland-citizenship-act-1970.

[5] Translator’s note:  On the Dingzhou incident, see http://bbs.tianya.cn/post-free-3352614-1.shtml.

[6] Translator’s note:  On the Shanwei incident, see http://www.epochtimes.com/gb/6/1/12/n1187274.htm.

[7] Translator’s note:  All of these measures refer to efforts by the Chinese state to “industrialize” agriculture.  For specifics on such policies carried out in the context of the Chongqing model, see Gao Yuan, “Rural Development in Chongqing:  The ‘Every Peasant Household’s Income to Grow by 10,000 Yuan’ Project,” Modern China 37.6 (November 2011):  623-645.