Compulsory Development: the Ideal Type of Land Acquisition in India and China

Huang Yinghong (Associate Professor, School of International Relations, Sun Yat-sen University; HYI Visiting Scholar)
Chair/discussant: Malcolm McPherson (Senior Research Fellow, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School)

Co-sponsored with the Asia Center and the Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute

Land acquisition in India and China since the late 1980s has been theorized into an ideal type, “compulsory development,” which highlights the extremely active role of the state and its compulsory measures towards land acquisition in both countries, in order to achieve commitment to development. As developing countries, the state in both China and India acts as the land use planner and regulation maker in land administration, as well as the major land developer and monopolistic player in the land market, while at the same time extracting a high proportion of revenue from land development projects, which is realized through compulsory land acquisition despite the numerous flaws of land acquisition institutions. ”Compulsory development,” as we call it, is a key feature in the political economy of land acquisition in both countries. It provides an ideal type to both penetrate through the dense fog of the hybrid phenomena of land acquisition in these two largest developing societies, and to develop a systematic analysis towards land acquisition, or even development, in both countries. This talk will focus on the theoretical model of compulsory development, including its definition, characteristics, and diverse variations.