Moving millions to eliminate poverty: China’s rapidly evolving practice of poverty resettlement

Motivation Unlike in other places where resettlement is largely a by-product of large infrastructure projects, in China, resettlement is used as a tool for poverty alleviation. With the introduction of Xi Jinping’s Targeted Poverty Alleviation, and the goal to end absolute poverty by 2020, resettlement has become central to China’s poverty-alleviation practice. Rather than investing in dispersed, remote villages, the Chinese government prefers to bring people to development by constructing high-density resettlement sites in small towns and peri-urban areas: up to 16 million people are being resettled between 2016 and 2020. Despite the scale of these interventions, the Englishlanguage literature on poverty resettlement is limited and is yet to detail rapidly evolving policies or how these are playing out on the ground.


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Poverty resettlement is an ongoing discursive and material project, part of which is the build-up of policy knowledge and best practice. Much of this occurs in Chinese institutions and in Mandarin.
Given the scale of the phenomenon and the particular ideas about development and poverty alleviation that it embodies, there is an emerging, but fairly limited English-language literature examining poverty resettlement. There is of course an extensive literature on other forms of resettlement as development, not just as a result of infrastructure projects (see, for instance, Rogers & Wang, 2006;Tan et al., 2013;Fan et al., 2015;Rogers & Xue 2015), and on China's other povertyalleviation strategies (Rozelle et al., 2003;Ravallion & Chen, 2007;World Bank, 2009;Park & Wang, 2010;Meng, 2013;Kuhn et al., 2016;Loubere, 2016;Yan, 2017;Gao, 2018). But the rapid evolution of poverty resettlement policy and practice in the context of Targeted Poverty Alleviation has received little attention. Xue et al. (2013), Lo et al. (2016) and Lo and Wang (2018) consider the question of volition in poverty resettlement, long-versus short-distance resettlement, and resettlers' satisfaction with life post-resettlement, while Li et al. (2015) and Li et al. (2018) examine livelihood impacts and environmental implications of poverty resettlement in southern Shaanxi. Li et al. (2018)'s statistical analysis found that resettlement resulted in better environmental conditions (reforestation and sediment retention), and that while household income increased overall (mostly through remittances and government subsidies) thereby reducing the incidence of poverty, expenditure also increased: post-resettlement households were spending much more on housing, food, education and healthcare. Li et al. (2015)'s study in Ankang similarly found conservation benefits, and well as high up-front costs for households and local governments, but longer-term benefits in terms of access to infrastructure. These existing studies are primarily based on large-scale surveys, which do not necessarily capture the everyday experience of resettled household and local officials. Given the intensified focus on poverty resettlement in the lead-up to the 2020 target, further qualitative analysis of its policy environment, implementation, and impacts is warranted.
This article examines how poverty resettlement projects are working under Targeted Poverty Alleviation, with a focus on the implementation and impacts of, as well as overlapping motives for, projects in Shaanxi and Gansu. We begin with an overview of poverty resettlement at the national scale and the specific approaches of the two provinces. Our findings are then described through four themes: overlapping motives, reduced financial burdens, unresolved (old) problems and new tensions. We conclude with a preliminary discussion of what poverty resettlement in China means for development practice more broadly, which we hope will catalyse further dialogue.
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First, though, a note on methods. Data collection for this study took place in June 2018, with site visits to model 6 and non-model resettlement communities in Shaanxi, and non-model sites in Gansu.
Sites were selected based on local contacts in these two provinces, but in some cases were snowballed (i.e. when discussing one site we were directed by a participant to another one nearby, or when visiting a site under construction we searched through media reports and government reports to identify and travel to villages where households had not yet moved). As our approach was qualitative and exploratory, the sites were not intended to be representative, but importantly include both model and non-model communities. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with local officials in the new resettlement communities, enterprise managers employing resettled households, village leaders in mountain villages slated for resettlement, households in mountain villages who had not yet moved, and resettled households. In total, 22 in-depth interviews were conducted. Secondary data was collected at the different sites (particularly from billboards displaying project information and introductory texts from local officials), and online (policy documents, media reports, guidelines etc.). Using thematic coding we identified four key themes in our data through which we can better understand the practice of poverty resettlement in China: overlapping motives, reduced financial burdens, unresolved problems, and new tensions.
To ensure the anonymity of research participants we do not use the names of specific villages, resettlement communities, or businesses. The cases that have most informed our analysis are Shaanxi Model Urban Community 1, Shaanxi Model Urban Community 2, Shaanxi Micro Enterprise Park, Shaanxi Walnut Agribusiness, Gansu Rural Resettlement Community and Gansu Urban Resettlement Community.

CURRENT POLICY AND PRACTICE
According to official statistics, 3.9 million poor people were resettled in the 12 th Five-Year Plan period (2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015) (NDRC, 2016). In the 13 th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020) the numbers have scaled up considerably: a total of 9.8 million poor people will be resettled according to the National Development and Reform Commission's (NDRC) Poverty Resettlement Plan (NDRC, 2016). But, as Table 1 shows, so-called 'synchronous' resettlements are also taking place, where, presumably, the opportunity is being taken to simultaneously relocate other people, even though they are not designated as poor. This means that a total of 16 million poor and non-poor people will be resettled, representing an unparalleled use of resettlement as an anti-poverty intervention. Most of these people are from villages considered to have insufficient carrying capacity or to lack infrastructure Accepted Article and public services (that are considered too expensive to provide), with smaller numbers from disaster-affected areas and areas where development is now prohibited for conservation purposes.
The largest numbers of people are being moved in Shaanxi (1.25 million), Sichuan, Hubei, Guizhou and Guangxi, with smaller programmes in Gansu (0.5 million), Hunan and Yunnan. Overall, western China (which includes Shaanxi and Gansu) is the main focus, with a target of resettling 10.87 million people; central China aims to resettle 4.4 million people; and 1.01 million will be resettled in eastern China (NDRC, 2016) These interventions are taking place at a huge cost: more than 940 billion RMB (USD135 billion) will be spent, including RMB 300 billion (USD43 billion) on housing alone (NDRC, 2016). The majority of funds are coming from low-cost loans, central and local government budget funds, central government transfers, and household contributions (see Table 2). In the past, these kinds of projects reallocated farmland to resettlers and built large courtyard houses. In Shaanxi, the new wave is high-rise, concentrated settlements, and farmers are not being reallocated farmland (see Figure 1). Gansu's approach is still mixed: it is building new rural This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

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settlements with farmland in some places (see Figure 2, a new village where resettled households would be allocated 2 mu of farmland), and high-rise communities in others.

Figure 1: A resettlement community under construction next to an industrial park in southern
Shaanxi.

Figure 2: A poverty resettlement community under construction in central Gansu
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While poverty resettlements had previously been whole-village (typically natural village 7 ) resettlements, under Targeted Poverty Alleviation, households are being more precisely selected.
One third of projects are still expected to be whole-village, but two thirds will be dispersed, meaning poor people 8 from many different villages are moved into a concentrated settlement (NDRC, 2016).
People may be moved to newly constructed communities, to existing towns, to industrial parks, or within their administrative village. Wherever they move, new housing is constructed: the NDRC's Plan stipulates that resettlement housing should not exceed 25 m 2 per person and was introduced to curtail the cost of resettlement (and subsequent debt) for participating households. The maximum possible size for new housing is 125 m 2 .
While the NDRC's Plan has general guidelines for how funding for poverty resettlement should be spent, provinces develop more detailed guidelines and budget rules. In Shaanxi, apartment construction is capped at RMB 70,000 per poor household, infrastructure and basic public facilities (health services, childcare etc) is capped at RMB 50,000 per capita, and there is an additional RMB 30,000 per capita to subsidize local industries in the resettlement area (Shaanxi Poverty Alleviation Bureau, 2016). The latter is allocated by the provincial government, while county governments are responsible for using the funds for the establishment of new industry parks, agricultural parks, investment promotion, and low-interest loans for resettled families to establish small businesses (Shaanxi Poverty Alleviation Bureau, 2016). In general, the approach is to focus on local specialized industries (known as one county, one industry 一县一业 yixian yiye or one village, one product 一村 一品 yicun yipin) and building new work skills through training programmes, with the aim of ensuring that at least one member of poor resettled families has a salaried job, and that working-age members are developing new skills (NDRC, 2016).
In response to these guidelines and compared to past practice (see, for instance, Xue et al., 2013), we found in discussions with local officials and site visits to many resettlement communities that there is now considerable emphasis on post-resettlement livelihood support in the form of wage labour. Assuming that most people will move out of farming, local governments in Shaanxi have a number of strategies for promoting employment in the new communities. At the household level, they collect information about resettled people's education and skills, and sign agreements with families setting out their respective responsibilities. Households are offered free training programmes, given employment guidance, and those finding it difficult to obtain employment are prioritized for community jobs such as security, gardening, and maintenance. At the community Accepted Article level, local governments seek to create new employment opportunities by promoting and subsidizing industrial (electronics, textiles etc.) or agricultural (including rural e-commerce, rural tourism, land transfer to production bases etc.) sites. External capital is encouraged through preferential taxes and free or subsidized rent for factory premises. One official in Shaanxi described their '1 2 3 4' strategy for employment of resettled families: 10% in public welfare positions in resettlement communities, 20% self-employed or doing business in towns, 30% employed in local industry parks, agriculture parks, and tourist sites, and 40% migrating out for seasonal jobs.
This brief discussion highlights the ways in which poverty resettlement in China is evolving: 1) the scale has intensified; 2) a huge amount of budget and non-budget funds have been allocated and household contributions are now capped; 3) there is a move away from reallocating farmland to 'urbanizing' resettlement; 4) those to be resettled are being more precisely selected based on poverty-reduction goals; and 5) there is considerable emphasis on creating the conditions for moving people into wage labour. What this evolution means in terms of implementation and impacts is now explored in more detail with reference to specific cases in the two provinces.

Overlapping motives
In discussing the reasons for relocating poor people from certain villages to consolidated settlements, a number of overlapping motives -both explicit and implicit -were evident. Teasing out these motives is important as it helps us to understand not just how poverty resettlement takes place (its implementation and its impacts), but also why it takes place at such a large scale.
The first is that resettlement is, as already described, a key tactic in Targeted Poverty Alleviation. As an official at Shaanxi Model Urban Community 1 described, to meet the requirements of Targeted Poverty Alleviation, local authorities had to achieve a poverty rate of 3% of the population. Everyone else had to be above the poverty line by 2020. Given that there was limited arable land in nearby mountain villages, which according to her could not meet a family's expenditure (income was about RMB 1000 per person), it made sense to move people down from the mountains so that they could have a 'stable livelihood'. She reported that those who had moved had an average income of RMB 6140 in 2017, and were benefiting from good jobs, good living conditions, a school, and a hospital. Targeted Poverty Alleviation and the 2020 goal are not, however, the only drivers of resettlement.
We visited a mountain village where some people were yet to be resettled to Shaanxi Model Urban Community 1. The village was now part of a water-resource protection zone, meaning no development (such as building tourism infrastructure) could take place. Indeed, resettlements in nearby prefectures are closely linked to interventions to protect the quality of the water in tributaries of the Han River, which flows into the Danjiangkou Reservoir -Beijing and Tianjin's primary source of drinking water since the construction of the South-North Water Transfer Project.
Resettlement therefore achieves both poverty-reduction and water-pollution control objectives.
A local official from the township hosting the Shaanxi Walnut Agribusiness explained that while much of Shaanxi was deep mountains, villages in his region were not necessarily unable to support people (一方水土养活不了一方人 yifang shuitu yanghuo buliao yifang ren). Rather, the important task in his region was to carry out urbanization construction -to enlarge the towns -and so people were moved from otherwise hospitable environments. The ultimate goal, in his mind, was to let the farmers become city residents: 'to change their thoughts and actions'. Poverty resettlement is at least partly envisaged, therefore, as a transition from rural to urban life, and the modernity that is seen to come with urban life, dovetailing with other policy goals for accelerated urbanization. The urban-like settlements of apartment buildings, nearby factories, public squares, and manufactured green space reinforce this notion. As others have already noted, this kind of state-led urbanization is a key part of China's transition to a consumption-driven economy (Wilmsen, 2018a  But it is not just farmland that is affected by poverty resettlement. Given China's strict controls over land use, rural residential land -which includes people's sprawling houses, barns, sheds, and vegetable plots -is of great interest to local governments. Under the so-called Link Policy (Cheng et al., 2018), there can be no net loss of farmland in a local jurisdiction: any additional urban construction must be met by an equal increase in farmland somewhere else. One way of achieving this is to move farmers out of villages and into consolidated settlements and then convert their rural residential land to farmland. By freeing up a quota of land for urban development, local governments stand to benefit financially. But they must first convince resettled households to allow their old homesteads to be demolished or the quota of new farmland will not be met. In some cases, local officials are asking households to sign contracts that their homesteads will be demolished within three years, but this remains a point of contention between officials and farmers.
Clearly, the extensive practice of poverty resettlement is closely tied to Targeted Poverty Alleviation and China's goals for ending absolute poverty by 2020. But poverty resettlement is not just an antipoverty project: it appears to have several overlapping motives relating to land transfer, land quotas, urbanization, and pollution control, that helps us make sense of why it happens at such a large scale.

Reduced financial burdens
One of the characteristics of much of the literature on resettlement in China (as elsewhere) is a fairly consistent story of resettlement projects resulting in some form of financial deprivation, either through loss of income sources, inadequate farmland allocations, increased expenditure in new This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

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locations, or extensive borrowing to finance new houses (Wilmsen et al., 2011;Ong, 2014;Rogers & Xue, 2015;Lo et al., 2016;Wang et al., 2018 -there are exceptions, see Wilmsen, 2018b). Policy and practice evolve, though, and what the Shaanxi cases show at least is a concerted attempt to better manage the financial impacts of resettlement projects.
We identified two key changes to resettlement practice: controls on household debt and an emphasis on new employment opportunities. Resettlement at this scale is a hugely expensive exercise, and government budgetary funds cannot cover the full cost. In the past, resettlers themselves were required to pay a significant share (Rogers & Xue, 2015;Lo et al., 2016), which resulted in debt problems and contributed to households' impoverishment post-resettlement, not to mention undermining the pro-poor objectives of these projects. We found that apart from those who had moved as part of earlier schemes, all the households we interviewed had contributed no more than RMB 10,000 to the cost of their apartment, with some resettlers reporting that they paid nothing. This is a significant improvement on previous projects where households had contributed up to RMB 80,000 (Lo et al., 2016).
This reduction in household contributions is enabled by strict cost control. As discussed above, the NDRC regulation stipulates that apartments should be no larger than 25 m 2 per person. Shaanxi Model Urban Community 2 met this requirement: apartments were 25, 50, 75, and 100 m 2 depending on the size of the family. In Gansu Urban Resettlement Community apartments were 60 m 2 for two or three people, 75 m 2 for three people, and 90 m 2 for five people. Previous rural-to-rural poverty resettlement projects had an average housing plot of 293 m 2 (Lo et al., 2016), typically a courtyard house with room for storage and some vegetable gardening. Clearly, urbanizing resettlement that moves people into high-rise apartments significantly reduces housing size and therefore costs. The central government has also diversified its funding mechanisms (see Table 2) and there are clear guidelines on which costs should be covered and by whom. It should be noted, of course, that a significant part of the funding is local government borrowing: government documents and official interviews suggest that part of this debt will be repaid through selling land quotas.
Whether this strategy works will depend on the ability of local officials to persuade resettlers to give up their former residences.
In terms of employment, in Shaanxi Model Urban Community 1, the resettlement project was described as a 'complete system' with 'one household, one job position'. Poor households were guaranteed a 'welfare' position for one person at a minimum of RMB 1500 (USD 216) per month.
These jobs included sanitation, gardening, and labouring. As a local official described: 'resettled people's biggest concern is resources, having no money. But people with guaranteed jobs don't have This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

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to worry!' In Shaanxi Model Urban Community 2, 22 poor households were working in a dried-tofu factory located within the community. The Shaanxi Walnut Agribusiness was also helping poor households: poor farmers were given a slightly higher price for their produce, as well as free fertilizer by the company. Resettled households were working in the walnut-processing facility and could earn on average RMB 50 per day. Finally, at the Shaanxi Micro Enterprise Park, the manager explained that resettled households could earn RMB 2400 per month doing low-skilled jobs like metalwork. There was no age restriction on these jobs, with 200-300 low-skilled positions available and 500-600 high-skilled positions. The resettlement community being built alongside the Micro Enterprise Park also included a shopping street, tourist area, and ecological garden, all of which would provide additional employment opportunities. As the manager explained, the approach was to have already planned industrial development before building resettlement communities (先业后 搬 xian ye hou ban). Companies could then go to the village before households had relocated in order to recruit workers. Unfortunately, we do not have comprehensive data on income and expenditure pre-and post-resettlement, hence it is difficult to assess whether these jobs are providing a more secure income source than people's previous agricultural and off-farm sources.
Further research is needed into this question, as while a guaranteed income of RMB 18,000 per year (RMB 1500 per month) is well above the poverty line, other studies suggest that expenditure also rises considerably post-resettlement (Li et al., 2018) and so overall, it is unclear if people are actually better off.
The emphasis on wage labour in the new communities is nonetheless a significant shift from earlier resettlement projects that reallocated farmland with the expectation that households would continue to farm. While post-resettlement employment opportunities are left to the discretion of local governments, housing size and therefore household contributions are now being strictly controlled by central government directives. The cap on household contributions is an important reform that should curtail levels of household debt.

Unresolved problems
Several earlier studies have highlighted the particular impacts resettlement can have on elderly people (Rogers & Wang, 2006;Huang, 2017) and the difficulty of managing these impacts. While these earlier projects may have been forced, poverty resettlement is intended to be voluntary. What we found in interviews with yet-to-be-and already-resettled households was that elderly people are still very reluctant to move, and that concerns about urban livelihoods linger. As a result, while officials envisage poverty resettlement as a definitive transition from village to city life, the reality is far more complex.
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An elderly woman living with one of her sons in a mountain village (the household had been allocated an apartment in Shaanxi Model Urban Community 1) described her situation in this way: That house is my two sons', I'll live here in the old house. I choose to live in the old house.
First because [I'm] used to it, also down there there's no land. Now I can still grow vegetables, eat them myself… I'm keeping more than 100 chickens… eggs are 1.5 RMB each.
My kids tell me to move out, I still don't want to move out. Here it's cool, the air is good.
Her son did not intend to resettle immediately either: 'Because after moving out there is no way of raising cows, so [I'll] wait until my health is not good; to move after I can't raise cows'.
Similarly, an elderly woman who was supposed to be moving to Shaanxi Model Urban Community 2 explained that she was still using her land for potatoes, maize, bee-keeping, and raising lambs. She and her husband were intending to sell their chickens and lambs to raise the RMB 10,000 for the apartment. But she thought that if she did resettle, she would still come back regularly to till the land and raise some cows, letting them out to graze each day. A young resettled woman in Shaanxi Model Urban Community 1 explained that while she was happy to resettle because of better educational opportunities for her children, her parents-in-law had not agreed to move, preferring to stay in the village and raise sheep. Indeed, there were still about 370 people living in her old village: she claimed that it was unusual for whole families to relocate and that almost all families had people who had stayed behind.
Even when people do move, there are difficulties with adapting and fitting in to an urban environment; these can be quite deep-seated questions of identity and values. As one 52-year-old man who had already resettled in Shaanxi said: I still think [I have a] farmer identity. City people have wages, stable income; farmers' income is not stable. It's convenient for city people to find work… I still think I'm a farmer; in the city I don't have a sense of belonging… I don't envy city people's lifestyle. In the future I still might go back to the mountains to live.
Older farmers who envisage a mixed livelihood and wish to retain usage rights over at least some of their land complicate the jobs of local officials. There are more and less sympathetic responses to this. An official in charge of the construction of the Gansu Rural Resettlement Community noted that a proportion of people did not want to give up their land and did not want to resettle as they saw land as a safeguard. A local official from a nearby mountain village suggested people had concerns about maintaining a more urban lifestyle: housing, food, and other consumption were all higher than in the village. But this official also attributed elderly people's reluctance to move to their 'unchanged This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

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ideology ', 'traditional thought' and 'wait, depend [on government], need' approach. An official from the Shaanxi Micro Enterprise Park's township saw his job in the following way: The old people living in the mountains do not agree to move. [One has to] adapt the process to the masses, [let them] adapt to living off the mountain, at the same time through different channels resolve their land problems, gradually [they'll] agree.
For resettlement projects to achieve overlapping objectives of poverty relief, land consolidation, and urbanization, and for them to be sustainably financed, farmers have to move and have to do so permanently. Clearly, though, elderly farmers have other ideas about how to arrange their livelihoods. Despite the minimal contribution now required from farmers for new apartments which feature modern amenities and the promise of urban employment, tensions between different sets of values and responsibilities remain: tensions that are not so easily solved by tweaking policies or regulations.

New tensions
The intensification of poverty resettlement as part of Targeted Poverty Alleviation and against the backdrop of land quotas and agricultural scaling up is resulting in some new issues at the local scale.
We identified two key tensions: the selection of poor households and the provision of welfare and other jobs post-resettlement. Another possible tension is the need to reclaim old homesteads to fulfil land quotas (as discussed in 3.1), but further research is needed before drawing any conclusions. These tensions speak to the difficulties of 'perfecting' resettlement through policy reform, given the complexity of local politics.
One resettled man we interviewed in Gansu suggested that some wealthy families in his village had bribed officials or given false information to be classified as poor in order to receive a heavily subsidized apartment. But a village official in Gansu described what is perhaps a more common situation, arising from the targeted approach of identifying poor individuals and households for poverty relief. He said that in his village it was difficult to differentiate between poor and non-poor households: [We] discuss with the village representative committee who is poor, but there are still disputes.
Some hard-working people, taking out loans to buy houses outside [the village], they can't be poor households. Some lazy people enjoy the nation's policies for poor households.
[It] creates disquiet in people's mentality.
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The requirement to use simple measures of household income and assets to separate the poor from the non-poor inevitably creates tension within communities. Once people have resettled though, there are further tensions.
In a high-rise resettlement community we visited in Shaanxi, a group of former farmers were working as security guards at the front gate. A local official explained to us that poor households were prioritized for such security and community sanitation jobs (RMB 1500 per month), but that there were not enough jobs and most people found work on their own. A working-age man we interviewed in this community described how he had applied for jobs but not heard any news. He said the sanitation team leader gave all the jobs to relatives: 'I applied for the sanitation job but heard nothing. None of the people from my village found jobs in the community'.
The Shaanxi Walnut Agribusiness was under some pressure to employ poor resettled farmers, which was creating problems for the manager. He explained that the company had received many honours from the government, but were not adequately subsidized for employing poor households. There was an industry poverty-alleviation project that gave the company RMB 1500 per poor household for equipment purchases, infrastructure etc. (and RMB 3500 direct to the household), but this did not offset the costs to the company of training poor households and other forms of support. He suggested that no poor people worked in his warehouse, because their ability was low and their 'hygiene' 'did not reach standards': 'the consciousness of farmers from mountain areas is not high, [one] has to slowly guide them.
[Any] punishment is only to help them adapt to work, [we] don't really take away their pay'. While Shaanxi's practice (not evident in Gansu) is to guarantee employment for poor households, it is clearly difficult to achieve this: both to provide enough jobs, and to provide the kind of support businesses and former farmers need to adapt to new labour practices. In what follows we briefly discuss the successes and limits of resettlement for poverty alleviation, to begin to shed some light on whether large-scale resettlement is a poverty-reduction strategy that could be (or should be) taken up elsewhere.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
China's investment in poverty resettlement is quite staggering: USD 135 billion over five years to provide millions of people with new apartments, new employment opportunities, and other community infrastructure (NDRC, 2016). This is a highly capital-intensive programme, particularly as household contributions are being kept to a minimum to address some of the problems of earlier projects. It is also a huge administrative effort: coordinating various agencies at multiple levels of government, state-owned construction companies, and private enterprises to engineer a rapid transition from rural to urban life. Detailed guidelines direct these activities and build on decades of experience in relocating people for dam projects, environmental protection, disasters and entrenched poverty. In our own experience of researching these sorts of projects, over time, housing standards have certainly improved and post-resettlement livelihood support is taken much more seriously. But whether any of this could be replicated elsewhere is questionable. Few developing countries have the underlying structural factors that enable large-scale resettlement in China, such as a highly centralized (and rich) fiscal system, a hierarchical political system that can direct the behaviour of local officials, state ownership of urban land, and collective ownership of rural land.
Further, the idea that mass, state-directed, rural-to-urban resettlement programmes can address the underlying drivers of deprivation and inequality remains contested. As Yan (2017) argues, poverty policies should not just address material needs in a narrow sense but reduce social exclusion and foster civic participation. Poverty resettlement as it is currently practised seems almost exclusively focused on material needs that meet the income and asset tests of Targeted Poverty Alleviation. The campaign-style approach of China's War on Poverty (Smith, 2018), and the intense pressure on local officials to meet their poverty-reduction targets before 2020, does not lend itself to participatory, sustainable approaches. Rather, new tensions are arising concerning who is designated as poor and who should receive the subsidized housing and welfare jobs on offer.
Existing problems of convincing older farmers to give up their livelihoods for the promise of an urban, 'modern' life remain unresolved. Finally, the overlapping motives of resettlement projects point to a confluence of interest groups that stand to benefit from separating farmers from their homes and farmland. Poverty resettlement projects might be pro-poor development interventions in specific ways, but they are much more besides.

First submitted November 2018
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