Remote Sensing, Land Quotas and Mass Relocation: China's Governance of Farmland

There is increasing interest in understanding China's environmental governance through the lens of governmentality. This article contributes to that discussion by using the Foucauldian analytical apparatuses of discipline and security to understand China's governance of farmland. It argues that the Chinese state applies these two apparatuses simultaneously: on the one hand, it disciplines and deters local states from illegal land grabs by utilizing surveillance tools such as remote sensing and national land surveys; on the other hand, it relies on indirect governance through the land quota market to achieve grain security, transforming both local states and peasants into autonomous market players, and reconstructing China's rural landscape by launching mass peasant relocation programmes. The study also reveals the contingent effects of those power tactics: the state's governance is compromised by the local states’ counter‐conduct, such as data fabrication and concealment, and by the peasants’ denial of their new subjectivity as market players. When the tactics are effective, as in the case of local states actively assuming roles of land quota producers and traders, the villages and peasant households suffer from deprivation of land rights.