Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Floating Hope, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

It was 1994 when aristocrat Runa Khan and her soon-to-be husband Yves Marre sailed a decommissioned oil barge from the waters off France to her home country of Bangladesh. They had intended to propose to charitable organisations of a revolutionary plan they had: to turn the shipping vessel into a mobile medical station.

The ship would bring medical help to the unreachable islands, or chars, that make up much of Bangladesh. It was a brilliant plan, and would have solved the problem of reaching isolated char communities, most of whom had been neglected by the government and NGOs (non-governmental …

China’S Agrarian Reform And The Privatization Of Land: A Contrarian View, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Many media and scholars outside China are advocating for the privatization of land ownership in China, claiming it to be a necessary step before China can transform its agriculture into large-scale, market-oriented and technology-intensive modern agriculture. Chinese scholars advocating land privatization, on the other hand, typically argue that land privatization would offer farmers more protection of their rights. In this paper, we present a contrarian view to these calls for land privatization published in both mainstream media and academic journals. We argue that, under China’s current system of collective land ownership and individualized land use rights, the aforementioned goals can …

Comparing Local Models Of Agrarian Transition In China, Qian Forrest Zhang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The development of markets and the penetration of capital into agriculture have started the agrarian transition in rural China, which is transforming smallholding, household-based agriculture into various forms of capitalistic production. This again raises in a new historical and social context the long-debated question in the agrarian transition literature: Can family farms survive the onslaught of capitalist agriculture based on wage labor and what shapes the confrontation between family farms and agro-capital? I argue that it is the local political economy—rather than some natural obstacles in agriculture to the penetration of capitalism—that shapes this confrontation and gives rise to a …