China's ‘Developmental Outsourcing’: A critical examination of Chinese global ‘land grabs’ discourse

This paper examines China's overseas land-based investments in agriculture. Our hypothesis is that – despite extensive media, NGO and scholarly attention to China'sglobal resource-seeking activities – the discourse on Chinese ‘land grabs’ is insufficiently informed by the available data. Moreover, we argue that China's overseas land-based investments are part of what can be termed ‘developmental outsourcing’. Different from a conventional interpretation of outsourcing, this concept refers to global off-shoring in which the state plays a key role in planning, intervention and regulation. This paper does not aim to provide definitive answers, yet intends to scrutinize the data and re-examine the ‘land grabbing’ discourse. This will be done by studying land-based investments in terms of incidence, size and geographical dispersion over 1949-2011. Where relevant and possible, other variables such as the investor, data source, investment type andoutcome will be discussed. Lastly, we will also discuss the data quality and reliability.