3. Land Grabs and Protests from Wukan to Singur

Abstract

This chapter examines the territorial and associational forms of governance through the case of land acquisition and citizens' protests. It talks about the rural protesters at Wukan in China that targeted the bottom-level village authorities and made strong claims of land ownership. It also looks at the case in India where rural protesters at Singur targeted the regional state government and investigates the success of their resistance that depended not on land ownership claims but on the intervention of political parties. The chapter discusses rural collective land ownership that lent a strong territorial logic to the residents' mobilization in Wukan. It also analyzes the involvement of political parties that marked the associational character of mobilizations in Singur.