Franny Xi Wu

Ethnography
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July 25, 2024

MIT MCP/MSRED Thesis Blogs

Introduction: Demolition-based Urbanism

Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the nation’s rural land has undergone significant transformations, including redistribution, collectivization, de-collectivization, and commodification, which drastically changed the lives of rural populations at each juncture. During the economic and labor reforms of the 1980s, the vaguely defined property relations and land transfer paradigms inherited from the centrally planned economy quickly unraveled as the demand for urban land skyrocketed. Between 1990 and 2008, Chinese governments expropriated over 4.2 million hectares of rural land, dispossessing some 88 million peri-urban villagers in the process 1. It is estimated that another 2.4 million hectares of land will be expropriated between 2009 and 2030, potentially creating another 50.4 million landless 1,2. By 2030, 1 in 10 Chinese people, or 17% of China’s rural population, will have experienced government-sanctioned land expropriation.

Though each individual’s experience is divergent, many land-losers’ transitions were compounded by violence and disputes, and many were left more penurious by the exploitative terms of resettlement 3. Born a peri-urban villager in East China, I grew up playing in the rubbles of my crumbling hometown as the world’s largest megalopolis metastasized around us. When the local authority decreed that our village would be razed to expedite the property market, my functionally literate family made a decision to fight back. Our home became a hub for underground activists who shared tales of grassroots struggles across the country against the government-developer-enforcement collusion that profited off land at the people’s expense. Growing from a young girl sitting quietly by the table into a core member of our coalition, I was instilled with a sense of duty and purpose for anti-displacement research and advocacy through many hard-fought legal and organizing battles.

My thesis project aims to study grassroots movements against civil rights violations in China’s urban development, specifically forced land expropriation and home demolition in urban and peri-urban villages. With the Rodwin Grant funding to travel to and within China, I will work closely with fellow rural evictees and activists to tell a story of our fight to push back against the authoritarian-corruption nexus of Chinese urbanism. Rather than a reductive platform that amplifies suffering and losses, this project will serve as vessels for empathetic connection, inspiring the audience to reexamine their relationship with the urban hierarchy and stand in solidarity with those seeking justice and restitution.


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 Underpinned by ethnographic methods, this project seeks to fill a critical gap within anti-displacement research: comprehensive accounts of the interplay of actors involved in China’s land financialization are scarce due to the lack of data and written records. Mainstream conceptual frameworks adopt a game theoretic model for the process, categorizing it as a zero-sum competition between actors — namely governmental bodies, developers, demolition enforcers, village leaders, and villagers — whose identities and interests aggregate around the distribution of profits from urbanized land (Ma 2013; He 2010). Under this framework, the emerging and intensified anti-demolition movements are described as evictees engaging in prolonged bargaining and contestation for higher compensation, overcoming their asymmetrical power positions by leveraging nominal official rules and garnering influence through organizing.

However, “impact” isn’t equivalent to “loss” — the assumption that forced urbanization practices are purely instrumental and are perceived and practiced as such by all stakeholders stands to be challenged. Sally Sargeson (2013) observes that expropriation violence is usually “piecemeal and accretive”: evictees’ distinct personal histories, as well as iterated breaches of trust, threats, and harms they experience during protracted conflicts, reshape their perspectives, motivations, demands, and strategies for engaging in anti-demolition activism. Impact and loss need to be equally considered so that displacement mitigation and resettlement offer just compensation and safeguard dignity and agency.

Through my thesis, I wish to expand the instrumental framing of China’s demolition-development pipeline with a series of value rationalities drawn from ethnographic research. How do evictees obtain information about and adapt to the shifting political climate and property market? How do they establish their motivations and evaluate their progress, both for securing financial compensation and seeking procedural rights? What lasting impacts are experienced by evictees with varied responses to forced land expropriation and demolition? By studying the grassroots organization of a socially and economically marginalized cohort of advocates, this ethnographic project will seek to elucidate Chinese evictees’ dynamic pathways to advocating for a more just outcome.



  1. Rong, Z. 2010. Tudi tiaokong zhong de zhongyang yu difang boyi: zhengce bianqian de zhengzhi jingjixue fenxi [Central local gaming in the regulation and control of land: a political economic analysis of policy change]. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, pp.119-121.
  2. Fan, P. 2011. “Woguo dangqian de nongcun shehui xingshi he nongmin jieceng [Report on the social situation and stratification of China’s villagers].” In 2011 nian Zhongguo shehui xingshi fenxi yu yuce [2011 Chinese Society Analysis and Forecast], edited by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 261-271. Beijing: Chinese Social Science Digest.
  3. Li, H.Z. and Zhang, Q.C. 2011. Zhengdi liyi lun [Theorizing interests in land expropriation]. Shanghai: Fudan University Press, p.89.