China's rural land transfer: land institutions, trans-local livelihoods, and agrarian capital

Abstract

There has been a heated academic debate over whether China should promote rural land transfer for large-scale production. Proponents contend that the concentration of scattered small-family farms is an inevitable move towards agricultural modernization and urbanization, while opponents contend that the concentration of farmland will accelerate rural land dispossession. However, the reality of land transfer in China since the mid-2000s seems to contradict with both sides of the debate.

Different from the proponents’ view, most peasants, many of whom are peasant-workers, have to spend their twilight years in the countryside due to various constraints of being fully urbanized. Different from the opponents’ view, they generally consent to transfer their farmland to large farm operators. Then, if so many Chinese peasants (and peasant-workers) still need to stay in or return to the countryside, why do they generally consent to transfer out their farmland?

I tackle the paradox mainly through case studies within two Chinese provinces, Liaoning and Henan, where land transfers have been conducted with different dynamics. In Sweetwater Village, as well as many surrounding villages located at the middle and lower reaches of the Liao River Plain in Liaoning Province, land transfer was spearheaded by commercial farmers “from below”. In Flatland Village in the Eastern Henan Plain, the land transfer process was directed by the state and agribusiness entities “from above”. In both regions, most of the land transfer projects I investigated have been under the acquiescence of the villagers.

I will show that the general consent to rural land transfer in rural China can be attributed to three primary factors: the unique three-tier land tenure system, the emergence of trans-local livelihoods, and the social-political constraints imposed on agrarian capital. Each of these aspects corresponds to a contentious issue: 1) Has China’s land tenure, based on collective land ownership, safeguarded or infringed upon peasants’ land rights? 2) Has the accelerated rural land transfer dissolved the semi-proletarianized labor supply conditions in China? 3) Does the agrarian transition resulting from land transfer represent a transition towards “agrarian capitalism”?

Based on primary data from the two villages, coupled with insights drawn from prior fieldwork in other villages and secondary sources, this thesis reaches the following conclusions: 1) China’s current rural land tenure system which is based on the separation of collective land ownership, individual land contract rights, and marketized land management rights has in the short term, weakened the land bargaining power of peasants, but in the long run, increased the reversibility of land transfers, thereby relieving peasants’ anxiety of permanent land loss. 2) Since the mid-2000s, China has observed the gradual emergence of trans-local livelihoods: rural families organize their lives across multiple locations, spanning both urban and rural regions. There are many different patterns of trans-local livelihoods, one example is the swap of spaces for productive and reproductive activities: peasants’ productive activities are increasingly moved to the rural areas, while reproductive tasks, such as children’s education and care, shift to the cities. As a result, the traditional semi-proletarian framework has limited explanatory power on such livelihood changes and the position of farmland should be re-estimated in rural social reproduction. 3) After comparing three ideal types of agrarian capital: farmers’ capital, enterprises’ capital, and collective capital, this study posits that different varieties of capital display distinct operational logics concerning production, distribution, and managerial ethos, rather than strictly adhering to specific capitalist motions.

The overarching conclusion of this thesis illuminates the paradox of land transfer in China. Indeed, following the mid-2000s, a significant number of middle-aged and elderly migrant workers have returned to rural areas due to circumstances such as unemployment, ageing, or injury. However, their perspectives on land transfer is largely moulded by the nexus of unique land tenure arrangements, the spatial reconfiguration of rural livelihoods, and specific agrarian capital types. Land transfer in China has neither, as many modernization theorists believed, accelerated the pace towards urbanization, nor has it behaved as the voracious beast that critical agrarian scholars warn of, threatening to annex land and severely compromise the interests of the peasantry.