From Spatial Improvement to Contested Justice: Post-Resettlement Equity in China’s Rural Land Capitalization

Abstract

Land capitalization has become a key mechanism in China’s rural transformation, converting dispersed natural villages into centralized resettled communities for landless peasants and reshaping their everyday life through urbanized housing, infrastructure, and governance arrangements. However, these visible spatial gains do not necessarily translate into equitable long-term outcomes. This paper examines the structural tension between spatial improvement and contested justice through a case study of Guange Village, China. It investigates how land capitalization reshapes rural resettlement after spatial allocation has been completed. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, local socio-economic data, and documentary materials, the study reinterprets the distributional, procedural, and recognition dimensions of spatial justice through a temporal lens, incorporating insights from the Impoverishment Risks and Reconstruction model to examine how justice disputes emerge and accumulate after resettlement. The findings show that spatial improvement did not eliminate justice disputes, but displaced them into the long-term processes of livelihood reconstruction, community governance, and social reproduction. Distributionally, compensation and land-rent payments were insufficient to offset rising living costs and employment mismatches. Procedurally, conflicts shifted from land acquisition to property management, community operation, and collective responsibility. In terms of recognition, standardized apartment living disrupted rural practices, while family-based inheritance and intergenerational support absorbed part of the institutional tension. The paper concludes that spatial justice in land capitalization should be understood as a dynamic post-allocation process rather than a one-off outcome of compensation, and calls for rural resettlement policies that integrate livelihood support, participatory governance, and recognition of rural social relations.