Political economy of land grabbing inside China involving foreign investors

China tends to be a dominant figure in the literature on global land grabbing. It is either cast as a major land grabber in distant places such as Africa, or as a key player in crop booms elsewhere because it provides for massive market demand, such as for soya from South America. These are all important issues and are well covered in the literature. However, the crop booms inside China that involve transnational capital and investors – and have provoked conflict around land politics – have been overlooked. Spotlighting the issue of land grabbing inside China reminds us that capital accumulation is principally interested in geographies and settings where it can generate profit – regardless of nationalities, boundaries, structural or institutional conditions. This paper hopes to contribute towards a more refined picture of global land grabbing

Politics of inclusion and exclusion in the Chinese industrial tree plantation sector

In the last two decades, the industrial tree plantation (ITP) sector has expanded rapidly in southern China, causing important changes in land-use and land control. It involves both domestic and transnational corporations, and has provoked widespread conflict and political contestations. The villagers who are affected by the expansion of ITPs have reacted in varied and complex ways: some of the villagers were incorporated in the ITP sector, while others are excluded; some have embraced the change, while others have complaints; and some of the complaints remained latent, while others developed into (overt or covert) forms of resistance. This paper explores how and why various social groups have responded differently to the expansion of ITPs. This paper reveals the dynamics of villagers’ inclusion and exclusion in the ITP sector, covering both ‘passive’ and ‘active’ forms of inclusion and exclusion, resulting in differentiated political reactions from villagers. This paper hopes to contribute towards a more comprehensive understanding of the complex engagement of villagers in changes in land use and land control, not just in the most commonly studied countries in global land grabbing but inside China, and in transactions that involved large foreign companies, something that has so far been missed in the literature on land grabbing

Land grabbing by villagers? Insights from intimate land grabbing in the rise of industrial tree plantation sector in Guangxi, China

While most studies focus on large-scale foreign corporate-dominated land grabbing, relatively small-scale land acquisitions initiated by local villagers receive much less attention. This reflects that the scale, the identity of investors and a simplified role of villagers tend to take precedence in analyses of land grabbing. However, the common dichotomies of “large vs small” “outside vs local actors” and “victim vs grabber” might be problematic and even misleading, considering the case of Guangxi. In China's Guangxi province, with the rise of the industrial tree planation (ITP) sector, some villagers have gained control over the land from local or nearby village collectives and have become owners of ITPs. Over the course of these practices, grabbers are not from “outside” but “local villagers” themselves. They are then able to control the land, which was originally collectively used and benefit from it at the expense of their neighbours and kin, under certain contexts. Such land control change is called intimate land grabbing. This case demonstrates that: (1) small-scale land grabs are not necessarily less significant than large-scale ones; (2) land grabs dominated by local actors sometimes have more serious adverse impacts on local communities; and (3) villagers can also be grabbers, rather than simply victims, or otherwise resisters. In bringing the issue of intimate land grabbing into the debate, this paper argues that the importance of a land grab is neither represented by its scale nor the identity of the grabber(s), but by its de facto consequences, especially the distribution

The Political Economy of Industrial Tree Plantations in the Era of Global Land Rush: the case of Guangxi, China

The industrial tree plantation (ITP) sector is expanding rapidly and massively in Southern China, and recently especially in Guangxi. The rise of the ITP sector, involving both foreign and domestic actors, has led to extensive changes in land-use and land control, as well as in labour conditions and livelihoods in the villagers in question. These changes and the resulting encroachment by the ITP sector, has led to diverse political reactions by the affected villagers. Exploring the dynamics of the sector’s expansion in Southern China offers, on the one hand, a more refined analysis of the role of China in global land politics and calls for a rethink of the nature of land politics. On the other hand, it helps to deepen the understanding of a complex maze of recent and dramatic agrarian transformations in Guangxi involving the land-labour nexus and villagers’ livelihood changes. In this context, the central research question is: Why and how did the industrial tree plantation sector expand in Southern China, and what implications does it have for the livelihoods of rural villagers? Using a critical agrarian political economy and political ecology analytical framework, this study explores the dynamics of the ITP sector’s expansion in Southern China - contextually, interactively, and dynamically. This study demonstrates that the rise of the ITP sector emerged under particular economic, political, and social conditions worldwide and in China, while the contours and trajectories of the ITP sector (re)shape and are (re)sha

Sum-Rate Optimization for RIS-Aided Multiuser Communications with Movable Antenna

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is known as a promising technology to improve the performance of wireless communication networks, which has been extensively studied. Movable antenna (MA) is a novel technology that fully exploits the antenna position for enhancing the channel capacity. In this paper, we propose a new RIS-aided multiuser communication system with MAs. The sum-rate is maximized by jointly optimizing the beamforming, the reflection coefficient (RC) values of RIS and the positions of MAs. A fractional programming-based iterative algorithm is proposed to solve the formulated non-convex problem, considering three assumptions for the RIS. Numerical results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and the superiority of the proposed MA-based system in terms of sum-rate.Comment: 5 page

On the Effectiveness of Spectral Discriminators for Perceptual Quality Improvement

Several recent studies advocate the use of spectral discriminators, which evaluate the Fourier spectra of images for generative modeling. However, the effectiveness of the spectral discriminators is not well interpreted yet. We tackle this issue by examining the spectral discriminators in the context of perceptual image super-resolution (i.e., GAN-based SR), as SR image quality is susceptible to spectral changes. Our analyses reveal that the spectral discriminator indeed performs better than the ordinary (a.k.a. spatial) discriminator in identifying the differences in the high-frequency range; however, the spatial discriminator holds an advantage in the low-frequency range. Thus, we suggest that the spectral and spatial discriminators shall be used simultaneously. Moreover, we improve the spectral discriminators by first calculating the patch-wise Fourier spectrum and then aggregating the spectra by Transformer. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed method twofold. On the one hand, thanks to the additional spectral discriminator, our obtained SR images have their spectra better aligned to those of the real images, which leads to a better PD tradeoff. On the other hand, our ensembled discriminator predicts the perceptual quality more accurately, as evidenced in the no-reference image quality assessment task.Comment: Accepted to ICCV 2023. Code and Models are publicly available at https://github.com/Luciennnnnnn/DualForme