Over recent decades, millions of Chinese farmers have been displaced from collective land by the central government’s drive to urbanise the countryside. While urbanisation has benefited China overall, because it is integral to industrialisation which is rapidly raising living standards, it has put great strain on farmers who displaced from land and livelihoods. This thesis uses ethnographic methods, specifically the extended case method, to analyse the relationship between ‘land-lost’ farmers and regional government officials responsible for the expropriation of ‘their’ land, and compensation and resettlement, to understand how each side tries to negotiate and manage that relationship. Representatives of one large central city, its organisations at municipal, district and street agency levels and displaced farmers from three resettlement communities in that city participated in the study. Using an analytic framework deriving from structuration theory, in addition to prevailing accounts in the literature based on conflict theory, the main conclusion is both groups of land-lost farmers and officials are engaged in a complex and dynamic relationship. That relationship is played out locally within a network of power-interests structure, which not only manifests itself as forces of integration and conflict, but also presents as an ongoing process, a game played by knowledgeable agents, whose strategies are enacted, and in so doing, both reproduce that game and alter it. Central government provides the regional authorities with legitimacy within processes of land expropriation, compensation and resettlement for the sake of economic development, but at the same time it requires the maintenance of rigid social stability locally. Regional officials also have to manage farmers’ strategic use of the appeal system and its regional and national offices to highlight their plight and disquiet officials’ illegitimate behaviour locally. The appeal system makes sense to displaced farmers in a way that recourse to legal redress does not. They lack resources to utilise the formal legal system in negotiating their relationship with regional government. Farmers are not necessarily powerless, and importantly, the study finds that the relationship between displaced farmers and officials has developed in different ways in the three different communities, engendering more integration or more conflict.