Paper short abstract:

This paper contrasts two distinct types of governing communal tomb land, participatory and top-down, in the newly urbanised villages in Xi'an and Fuzhou. It argues that the state's governing of tomb land as emerged public goods has double bind both in GDP growth and affective relations.

Paper long abstract:

The clearing of land occupied by tombs has become a major stake of state governance and a source of conflict in rapidly urbanising China in the past decades. These collectively owned plots of land functioned as commons, as the local inhabitants used them to worship their ancestors. In recent years tomb land has become part of officials' politics of value, and tombs have been relocated and remains have been cremated. In this paper we seek to understand how such re-evaluation is undertaken, what kind of governance is adopted, and how people negotiate with monetary as well as non-monetary values. Drawing upon ethnographic research in recently urbanised villages in Xi'an and Fuzhou, this paper contrasts two distinct types of governance, namely, participatory and top-down, involving municipal, military, civil affairs agents and urbanised native villagers. These diverging ways of turning tomb land into public goods will shed light on the contextual differences in political processes underlying public goods provision. The double bind faced by the state in handling its citizens affective relation to the dead and the imperatives of GDP growth provides a critical space to rethink the role of the local state in development.