From peasants to farmers: Peasant differentiation, labor regimes, and land-rights institutions in China's agrarian transition

Politics and Society

Volumn 38, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 458-489

  Zhang, Q Forrest ^a   Donaldson, John A ^a  

^a SINGAPORE MANAGEMENT UNIVERSITY   (Singapore)

Author keywords

agrarian transition; capitalism; China; land rights; peasants

Indexed keywords

EID: 78650207910     PISSN: 00323292     EISSN: 15527514     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0032329210381236     Document Type: Article

References (105)

1. Philip C. C. Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).
2. One mu is approximately one-sixth of an acre (0.1667 acres).
3. Henry Bernstein and Terence J. Byres, "From Peasant Studies to Agrarian Change," Journal of Agrarian Change 1, no. 1 (2001): 1-56.
4. At times scholars' objections to the term "peasant" appear to be no more than either knee-jerk reaction, as when authors use the term interchangeably with "farmers" without defining and differentiating between the two concepts
5. Robert F. Ash, "The Peasant and the State," China Quarterly 127 (1991): 493-526
6. Eschew the use of the term because of its derogatory connotations, without considering the analytical purchase it provides
7. Kate Xiao Zhou, How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996). Despite this, many more considered objections to the term are not easily dismissed.
8. Henry Bernstein, "Concepts for the Analysis of Contemporary Peasantries," Journal of Peasant Studies 6 (1979): 421-44.
9. Harriet Friedmann, "Household Productions and the National Economy: Concepts for the Analysis of Agrarian Formations," Journal of Peasant Studies 7 (1980): 160.
10. Ibid., 163.
11. Teodor Shanin, "Peasantry: A Delineation of Concept and a Field of Study," European Journal of Sociology 12 (1971): 289-300.
12. We are aware that Friedmann also advocates for the replacement of the term "peasant" with new concepts that are based on specified forms of production. However, what she considers the weakness of the term "peasant"-being negatively defined as resisting com-moditization and rejecting market integration-precisely identifies the point of departure for the transition that this study focuses on. On the other hand, to parse out different forms of production that exist among peasants and then formulate new concepts to replace "peasant" is not the goal of this study.
13. Without detouring into the details, we note that Friedmann's definition and use of the term "simple commodity production" (Friedmann, "Household Productions and the National Economy") differs from that of other authors
14. Judith Ennew, Paul Hirst, and Keith Tribe, "'Peasantry' as an Economic Category," Journal of Peasant Studies 4 (1977): 295-322
15. Bernstein, "Concepts for the Analysis of Contemporary Peasantries"
16. who equate peasants with simple commodity producers and argue for the replacement of term "peasants" with the concept "simple commodity producers."
17. Friedmann, "Household Productions and the National Economy." There is a third direction of transformation, albeit not into a capitalist but a socialist form of production: households dissolve as units of production, yet the noncommoditized reproduction remains. This happened in China under socialist collectivized agriculture, as will be discussed shortly.
18. Henry Bernstein, "Agrarian Questions Then and Now," Journal of Peasant Studies 24 (1996): 22-59.
19. Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural Development. Naturally, in rural China, just like in other rural societies, a diversity of forms of production and classes of producers existed historically. In the late Imperial and Republican periods in particular, commoditization in agriculture progressed to a relatively high degree in some pockets of the country. However, it suffices to say that the household-based, noncommoditized peasant production remained the most prevalent form, and peasantry remained the dominant class among agricultural producers. Furthermore, precedents of de-peasantization were both geographically isolated and historically truncated.
20. Chris Bramall and Marion E. Jones, "The Fate of the Chinese Peasantry since 1978," in Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labour in Africa, Asia and Latin America, ed. D. Bryceson, C. Kay, and J. Mooji (London, UK: Intermediate Technologies Publications, 2000).
21. Vivienne Shue, Peasant China in Transition: The Dynamics of Development toward Socialism, 1949-1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
22. The smallholding peasant economy, after all, was considered by Lenin as "engender(ing) capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a mass scale."
23. Daniel Kelliher, "Chinese Communist Political Theory and the Rediscovery of the Peasantry," Modern China 20, no. 4 (1994): 387-415.
24. The distrust of peasants' political "dual nature" ran through generations of Communist thinkers and leaders.
25. Friedmann, "Household Productions and the National Economy," 163.
26. Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).
27. Bramall and Jones, "Fate of the Chinese Peasantry since 1978."
28. Shanin, "Peasantry," 3.
29. Bramall and Jones, "Fate of the Chinese Peasantry since 1978."
30. Scott Waldron, Colin Brown, and John Longworth, "State Sector Reform and Agriculture in China," China Quarterly 186 (2006): 277-94.
31. William H. Hinton, The Privatization of China: The Great Reversal (London, UK: Earthscan, 1991)
32. Xiaoyuan Dong, "Two-Tier Land Tenure System and Sustained Economic Growth in Post-1978 Rural China," World Development 24, no. 5 (1996): 915-928
33. Loren Brandt, Jikun Huang, Guo Li, and Scott Rozelle, "Land Rights in Rural China: Facts, Fictions and Issues," China Journal 47 (2002): 67-97
34. Chris Bramall, "Chinese Land Reform in Long-Run Perspective and in the Wider East Asian Context," Journal of Agrarian Change 4 (2004): 107-41.
35. Bramall, "Chinese Land Reform." However, whether land consolidation leads to productivity gains is debated. If farm size increases, but not to the extent of allowing mechanization and is not associated with increased labor input, land productivity may decline due to reduced per unit labor input and a lower intensity of land use. Land consolidation has to be carried out in certain ways, such as moving land to more efficient users, to increase productivity.
36. Forrest Q. Zhang, "Retreat from Equality or Advance toward Efficiency? Land Markets and Inequality in Rural Zhejiang," China Quarterly 195 (2008): 535-57.
37. Waldron, Brown, and Longworth, "State Sector Reform and Agriculture in China."
38. Alan De Brauw, Jikun Huang, Scott Rozelle, Linxiu Zhang, and Yigang Zhang, "The Evolution of China's Rural Labor Markets During the Reforms," Journal of Comparative Economics 30, no. 2 (2002): 329-53.
39. Bryan Lohmar, Scott Rozelle, and Changbao Zhao, "The Rise of Rural-to-Rural Labor Markets in China," Asian Geographer 20, no. 1-2 (2001): 101-23.
40. Ling Zhu, Zhongyi Jiang, and Joachim von Braun, Credit System for the Rural Poor in China (New York, NY: Nova Science, 1997)
41. Linxiu Zhang, Jikun Huang, and Scott Rozelle, "China's War on Poverty: Assessing Targeting and the Growth Impacts of Poverty Programs," Journal of Chinese Economics and Business Studies 1, no. 3 (2003):301-17.
42. Kellee S. Tsai, Back-Alley Banking: Private Entrepreneurs in China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
43. Brandt et al., "Land Rights in Rural China."
44. We hasten to add that expropriation of farmland by state agencies is possible and has happened so frequently that it has become a major source of contention in rural China.
45. Xiaolin Guo, "Land Expropriation and Rural Conflicts in China," China Quarterly 166 (2001): 422-39.
46. This kind of land grab, however, can only happen with the use of the state's coercive power and mostly for nonagricultural uses of the land. Private actors, no matter how economically powerful, cannot deprive agricultural producers of their land and then use that land for agriculture.
47. Q. Forrest Zhang, Qingguo Ma, and Xu Xu, "Development of Land Rental Markets in Rural Zhejiang: Growth of Off-Farm Jobs and Institution Building," China Quarterly 180 (2004): 1040-062
48. James K. S. Kung, "Off-Farm Labor Markets and the Emergence of Land Rental Markets in Rural China," Journal of Comparative Economics 30, no. 2 (2002): 395-414
49. Brandt et al., "Land Rights in Rural China"
50. Scott Rozelle, Jikun Huang, and Keijiro Otsuka, "The Engines of a Viable Agriculture: Advances in Biotechnology, Market Accessibility and Land Rentals in Rural China," China Journal 53 (2005): 82-111.
51. Jonathan Unger, "The Decollectivization of the Chinese Countryside: A Survey of Twenty-Eight Villages," Pacific Affairs 58, no. 4 (1985-1986): 585-606
52. Fengqin Liu, "Buwanquan Heyue Yu Luyue Zhang'ai: Yi Dingdan Nongye Weili" [Incom-plete Contracts and Obstacles to Contract Enforcement: The Example of Contract Farming], Jingji Yanjiu [Economic Research] 4 (2003): 1-22
53. Hongdong Guo, Robert W. Jolly, and Jianhua Zhu, "Contract Farming in China: Perspectives of Farm Households and Agribusiness Firms," Comparative Economic Studies 49 (2007): 285-312.
54. This is likely because these researchers' instruments do not detect the increasing numbers of commercial and entrepreneurial farmers in China.
55. Honglin Wang, Xiaoxia Dong, Scott Rozelle, Jikun Huang, and Thomas Reardon, "Producing and Procuring Horticultural Crops with Chinese Characteristics: The Case of Northern China," World Development 37, no. 11 (2009): 1791-801.
56. Alain De Janvry, The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1981).
57. Friedmann, "Household Productions and the National Economy," 166. 36.
58. Ibid., 163.
59. Some households may choose to specialize in producing staple grains for nonlocal markets. But to do that, they must produce in large enough quantities to be worthwhile, which, in China's context, would require them to expand with more land and labor beyond the household endowments and through market transactions.
60. Max Weber, "Capitalism and Rural Society in Germany," in From Max Weber, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1958), 363.
61. Eric R. Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966)
62. Teodor Shanin, "The Nature and Logic of the Peasant Economy, II," Journal of Peasant Studies 1 (1974): 186-206
63. Bernstein, "Concepts for the Analysis of Contemporary Peasantries."
64. Friedmann, "Household Productions and the National Economy," 176.
65. Ibid., 163.
66. Other factors such as population growth have also created insufficiency of land for subsistence in some parts of China. As a result, some members of rural households become proletarianized and have to sell their labor for wage employment-sometimes in agriculture, thus becoming other forms of producers.
67. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in South-east Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976).
68. In the remainder of the article, we use "commercial farming" and "simple commodity production" interchangeably.
69. Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural Development
70. William L. Parish, Chinese Rural Development: The Great Transformation (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1985).
71. The purchased coffee beans are processed in Nestlé's factory in Dongguan Municipality in Guangdong Province, where instant coffee is produced for China's swelling legion of coffee drinkers.
72. Hong's family income is many times larger than the average annual net per capita rural income in 2007 for Yunnan (RMB 2,250) and China (RMB 3,587). The exchange rate is based on US$1 = RMB 6.837, the prevailing rate in June 2009.
73. Karl Kautsky, The Agrarian Question (Winchester, MA: Zwan, 1899/1988)
74. Susan A. Mann and James M. Dickinson, "Obstacles to the Development of Capitalist Agriculture," Journal of Peasant Studies 5 (1978): 466-481
75. Harriet Friedmann, "World Markets, State and Family Farm: Social Bases of Household Production in the Era of Wage Labor," Comparative Studies in Society and History 20 (1978): 545-586
76. David Goodman, Bernardo Sorj, and John Wilkinson, From Farming to Biotechnology: A Theory of Agro-Industrial Development (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
77. Liu, "Buwanquan Heyue"
78. Kaiwen Feng, "Cunmin Zizhi, Hezuoshe He Nongye Chanyehua Jingying Zhidu De Xietiao Yanjing: Laizi Shangdong Yantai De Diaocha Baogao" [Co-evolution of Rural Self-Governance, Cooperatives and the Institution of Industrialized Agricultural Production: A Survey Report from Yantai, Shandong], Chinese Rural Economy 2 (2003): 45-50
79. Dinghuan Hu, Thomas Reardon, Scott Rozelle, Peter Timmer, and Honglin Wang, "The Emergence of Supermarkets with Chinese Characteristics: Challenges and Opportunities for China's Agricultural Development," Development Policy Review 22, no. 2 (2004): 557-586
80. Guo, Jolly, and Zhu, "Contract Farming in China."
81. A further 40 to 50 percent of their production comes from a more formal contract with village governments, form 4 in our typology. Thus, this case, as with many others, produces through multiple forms.
82. A majority of contract farmers surveyed cited the guaranteed price as the main reason why they entered such agreements, according to a recent survey.
83. Sachiko Miyata, Nicholas Minot, and Dinghuan Hu, "Impact of Contract Farming on Income: Linking Small Farmers, Packers, and Supermarkets in China," World Development 37, no. 11 (2009): 1781-90.
84. This is consistent with recent research that concludes that small farmers generally can benefit from participation in modern agriculture, but mainly when they dominate the production mix and participate as producers.
85. Thomas Reardon, Christopher B. Barrett, Julio A. Berdegue, and Johan F. M. Swinnen, "Agrifood Industry Transformation and Small Farmers in Developing Countries," World Development 37, no. 11 (2009): 1717-26.
86. Theoretically, contract farmers can enjoy one advantage: they can shield themselves from market risks by obtaining from the company a protecting, floor price for their products. In our fieldwork, we routinely found that farmers, sometimes even the local governments, try to secure protection prices from the contracting company, often to no avail. Even when a protecting price is put in contract, it often does not materialize into real protection. Mr. Zhao told us, for example, that when market price dropped below the protecting price on contract, the company would simply raise prices of inputs sold to farmers to offset the difference.
87. Miyata, Minot, and Hu, "Impact of Contract Farming on Income."
88. Ibid.
89. Hongbin Li, "Zai Nongye Chanyehua Fazhan Zhong Peiyu He Tigao Nongmin Zuzhihua Chengdu Yanjiu" [A Study on Nurturing and Strengthening the Organization of Farmers through Developing Agricultural Vertical Integration], Nongye Jingji Wenti [Issues in Agricultural Economy] 1 (2008): 99-102.
90. Similarly, one recent study also concludes that farmers' bargaining power tends to be considerably lower, in part because of the detailed contracts that constrain the scope for bargaining and the village collectives' role as brokers
91. Randy Stringer, Naiquan San, and Andre Croppenstedt, "Producers, Processors, and Procurement Decisions: The Case of Vegetable Supply Chains in China," World Development 37, no. 11 (2009): 1773-80.
92. For instance, one study of vegetable production in China finds that companies prefer to this form for the "most pesticide sensitive, high value vegetables."
93. Ibid.
94. Dong, "Two-Tier Land Tenure System."
95. Another type of actor often found active in China's agricultural modernization is the agricultural cooperative, organized mainly on a voluntary basis by groups of farmers or one or more village collectives. These cooperatives, which reemerged in the late 1980s and increased steadily to more than 150,000 nationwide by the middle of the current decade, can be structured in different forms.
96. Yamei Hu, Zuhui Huang, George Hendrikse, and Xuchu Xu, "Organization and Strategy of Farmer Specialized Cooperatives in China" (Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Erasmus Research Institute of Management, 2005)
97. Feifei Zhang, Guoxia Wang, and Jianming Cai, "Different Types of Agricultural Cooperatives with Periurban Farmers in China: Two Cases," UA-Magazine 17 (2007): 35-37.
98. The great variety among cooperatives precludes attempts to categorize them into their own type. Many cooperatives appear to be no more than variations of other forms described in this article. For example, when a group of households form a cooperative in a bottom-up manner and pool their resources to expand production through renting more land and hiring labor, these producers are essentially entrepreneurial farmers. On the other hand, the top-down cooperatives in which residents within the cooperative hold land-usage rights, but the land and production are managed in a hierarchical manner, can be considered as a variant of form 4, the semiproletarian farm workers with Chinese characteristics.
99. An exception to this can be found in Wang et al., "Producing and Procuring Horticultural Crops with Chinese Characteristics." These authors' survey of Beijing and Shandong surprisingly finds no incidence of contract farming. However, their measures apparently do not allow them to detect commercial or entrepreneurial farmers, which our fieldwork revealed were common forms among the vegetable farmers we interviewed in Shandong. If they had, the study would likely have revealed that the changes in the retail system had indeed sparked important changes affecting the relative power of the producers they surveyed vis-à-vis agribusiness and other actors.
100. Goodman, Sorj, and Wilkinson, From Farming to Biotechnology.
101. Recent studies have also cited poor farmers' access to land under current institutional arrangements as one reason why poorer, smaller farmers have gained from changes in food retailing.
102. Wang et al., "Producing and Procuring Horticultural Crops with Chinese Characteristics." Less than formal property rights have also benefited small producers in other contexts. In Romania, for example, small-scale farmers fought against the privatization of "communal property," in this case a granary that had previously been part of the village's collective farm under the previous communist regime.
103. Katherine Verdery, "Fuzzy Property: Rights, Power, and Identity in Transylvania's Decollectivization," in Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World, ed. Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).
104. Philip C. C. Huang, "Zhongguo nongye mianling de lishixing qiji" [China's Agriculture Faces a Historical Opportunity], Dushu [Readings] 10 (2006): 118-129
105. Philip C. C. Huang and Peng Yusheng, "Sanda lishixing bianqian de jiaohui yu zhongguo xiaoguimo nongye de qianjing" [The Convergence of Three Historical Changes and the Prospects for China's Small-Scale Agriculture], Zhongguo Shehui Kexue [Chinese Social Sciences] 4 (2007): 74-88.