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Articles 1 - 30 of 32
Full-Text Articles in Rural Sociology
Just-In-Time Brokerage: Commodifying Women’S Casual Labor In China’S Capitalist Agriculture, Hui Ma, Qian Forrest Zhang
Just-In-Time Brokerage: Commodifying Women’S Casual Labor In China’S Capitalist Agriculture, Hui Ma, Qian Forrest Zhang
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
What social processes are required not only to recruit workers, but to repeatedly assemble and deliver labor power as a usable commodity in the specific quantity, quality, and timing demanded by capitalist production? In the commercial mushroom cultivation in rural China studied here, this problem is solved through a distinctive form of informal intermediation – just-in-time brokerage – carried out by female labor brokers who organize the supply of village women’s casual labor. Drawing on qualitative field research, we show that brokerage here goes beyond recruiting semi-proletarianized rural women into wage work and revolves primarily around “provisioning”: assembling packages of …
Infrastructuring Planetary Rural Geographies: A View From China’S Rural Construction Movement, Ningning Chen, Lily Kong, Yurui Li
Infrastructuring Planetary Rural Geographies: A View From China’S Rural Construction Movement, Ningning Chen, Lily Kong, Yurui Li
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This commentary responds to Wang et al.'s (2023) call for planetary rural geographies by attending to the neglected infrastructural dimensions. In so doing, we show how China's rural construction movement demonstrates Wang et al.'s (2023) three geographies of planetary rurality: as spaces of crisis, conflict, and hope. Simultaneously, we address how planetary rural thinking can foreground infrastructural geographies and their destabilization of urban-centered discourses, leading to a reconsideration of rural–urban relationality. We then identify new insights that critical infrastructural studies offer to planetary rural geographies. This includes an emphasis on the material grounds, hidden politics, and non-linear temporal patterns of …
Producer-Oriented And Consumer-Oriented Alternative Food Networks And Rural Revitalization In China: Distinct Trajectories And Variegated Impacts, Meiling Wu, Qian Forrest Zhang
Producer-Oriented And Consumer-Oriented Alternative Food Networks And Rural Revitalization In China: Distinct Trajectories And Variegated Impacts, Meiling Wu, Qian Forrest Zhang
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Alternative food networks (AFNs) have been increasingly perceived as an engine for rural revitalization, yet AFNs can differ in their founding motivations, operational methods, and organizational forms, which thus produce varying economic, social, and environmental outcomes. Despite this, the complexity of AFNs in the role of rural revitalization remains surprisingly under-researched. This study, drawing a distinction between producer-oriented and consumer-oriented AFNs in China, explores the dynamics of how producer-oriented and consumer-oriented AFNs are formed and give rise to distinct trajectories of rural revitalization. When AFNs prioritize producers' pursuit of alternatives to conventional agrifood systems over merely catering to urban consumers’ …
Towards An Extended Resource Theory Of Marital Power: Parental Education And Household Decision-Making In Rural China, Cheng Cheng, Yu Xie
Towards An Extended Resource Theory Of Marital Power: Parental Education And Household Decision-Making In Rural China, Cheng Cheng, Yu Xie
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Existing literature on the resource theory of marital power has focused on the relative resources of spouses and overlooked the resource contributions of spouses’ extended families. We propose an extended resource theory that considers how the comparative resources of a couple’s natal families are directly associated with marital power, net of the comparative resources of the couple. Using data from the China Panel Family Studies, we examine how the relative education of a couple’s respective parents affects the wife’s decision-making power, net of the relative education of the couple. Results suggest that the higher the wife’s parental education relative to …
Post-Productivism And Rural Revitalization In China: Drivers And Outcomes, Meiling Wu, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
Post-Productivism And Rural Revitalization In China: Drivers And Outcomes, Meiling Wu, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
We propose that post-productivism offers a useful analytical framework for understanding the multi-scalar and diverse changes that are taking place in China’s rural revitalization. As a theoretical framework that emerged from the study of rural changes in the Global North, the applicability of post-productivism in the Global South has been contested. This paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of the emergence of post-productivism in rural China and uses post-productivism as a framework to conceptualize a wide range of changes in China’s rural revitalization. We conceptually clarify the driving forces that give rise to post-productivism and the outcomes these drivers produce. …
Horizontal Concentration And Vertical Concentration In Capitalist Agriculture: Re-Interpreting Marx And Chayanov, Qian Forrest Zhang
Horizontal Concentration And Vertical Concentration In Capitalist Agriculture: Re-Interpreting Marx And Chayanov, Qian Forrest Zhang
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
How capitalism transforms peasant farming is a central question in agrarian studies. The two most important theoretical perspectives on this question—Marxist and Chayanovian theories—both have limitations. The former overlooked how commercial capital can transform smallholders’ production through vertical integration and extract surplus from smallholders through commodity relations; the latter neglected how labor commodification transforms smallholders’ family economic behaviors. These two theories, however, complement each other on these two fronts. Through critically re-interpreting Marxist and Chayanovian theories, this paper offers a synthesis that integrates the two perspectives into a coherent theoretical framework and proposes that capitalist agriculture expands through both “horizontal …
Producers’ Transition To Alternative Food Practices In Rural China: Social Mobilization And Cultural Reconstruction In The Formation Of Alternative Economies, Qian Forrest Zhang
Producers’ Transition To Alternative Food Practices In Rural China: Social Mobilization And Cultural Reconstruction In The Formation Of Alternative Economies, Qian Forrest Zhang
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
The shift from the conventional agri-food system to alternative practices is a challenging transition for agricultural producers, yet surprisingly under-studied. Little research has examined the social and cultural processes in rural communities that mobilize producers and construct and sustain producer-driven alternative food networks (AFNs). For AFNs to go beyond just offering “alternative foods” or “alternative networks” and to be constructed as “alternative economies”, this transformation in the producer community is indispensable. This paper presents a case study of a rural cooperative in Shanxi, China. The discontent with both productivist agriculture and the social decay in communities motivated a group of …
Why Do Farmers’ Cooperatives Fail In A Market Economy? Rediscovering Chayanov With The Chinese Experience, Zhanping Hu, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
Why Do Farmers’ Cooperatives Fail In A Market Economy? Rediscovering Chayanov With The Chinese Experience, Zhanping Hu, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
In The Theory of Peasant Cooperatives, Chayanov develops the theories of differential optima and vertical integration, which stress the vulnerability of peasant farming in capitalist markets, and argues that cooperatives can support smallholders only if they operate as ‘a cooperative movement’, are buttressed by a strong ‘cooperative culture’, and achieve ‘vertical integration’. Based on extensive fieldwork in China, we identify six major obstacles that explain the failure of most cooperatives. Chayanov’s arguments caution us to not only the vital importance of cooperatives to the resilience of peasant farming, but also the apparently insurmountable obstacles that cooperatives face in market economies.
Rural Revitalization In China: Towards Inclusive Geographies Of Ruralization, Ningning Chen, Lily Kong
Rural Revitalization In China: Towards Inclusive Geographies Of Ruralization, Ningning Chen, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This commentary welcomes Gillen et al.'s geographies of ruralization as an alternative to the urban-centered analysis of socio-spatial transformation in post-reform China. We offer three perspectives to further develop such alternative articulation by drawing on China's most recent geographical experiences of rural revitalization. The first is the ‘top-down’ process of rural revitalization launched by different levels of Chinese state agents and how this is divergent from local needs or embedded in bottom-up engagement. The second is the temporal dimension of ruralization highlighting how uses of the past are implicated in and legitimize the state agenda of rural revitalization. The third …
Building Productivism In Rural China: The Case Of Residential Restructuring In Chengdu, Qian Forrest Zhang
Building Productivism In Rural China: The Case Of Residential Restructuring In Chengdu, Qian Forrest Zhang
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This paper theorizes the rural restructuring in China today as a transition towards productivism – characterized by both a productivist agricultural regime and productivist rural spaces. The rise of the productivist agricultural regime has spearheaded this transition for two decades; now the residential restructuring programs implemented under various policy schemes are also producing spaces of productivism in the new concentrated settlements. This paper, employing Halfacree’s three-fold conceptual model of rural space and using the empirical case of residential restructuring in Chengdu, offers the first full analysis of the rise of productivism in all three facets of rural space. It demonstrates …
Making Ethnic Tourism Good For The Poor, Jean Junying Lor, Shelly Kwa, John A. Donaldson
Making Ethnic Tourism Good For The Poor, Jean Junying Lor, Shelly Kwa, John A. Donaldson
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
How can ethnic tourism alleviate rural poverty? Due to the difficulty of simultaneously expanding tourism while promoting pro-poor tourism, most villages traverse one of two developmental pathways: 1) ensuring an inclusive structure before expanding, or 2) expanding before building an inclusive structure. This study compares four comparable cases in Southwestern China to understand the politics behind the decision to choose different pathways, and the impact each pathways has on local residents. While the first pathway requires a careful balance to maintain a pro-poor structure as tourism volume expands, the second pathway presents apparently insurmountable barriers to poverty reduction due to …
Politics And The Price Of Rice In Thailand: Public Choice, Institutional Change And Rural Subsidies, Jacob Ricks
Politics And The Price Of Rice In Thailand: Public Choice, Institutional Change And Rural Subsidies, Jacob Ricks
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Despite the Thai state’s long record of rice market interventions, historically politicians failed to leverage rice subsidies in their pursuit of political support, notwithstanding the large number of farmers in the country. Since Thaksin Shinawatra’s election in 2001, though, each government has subsidised rice producers, although at varying degrees. What explains this change? This article traces the four-decade history of rice price support programmes. It is proposed that these policies be interpreted through the dual lens of institutionalism and public choice theory, demonstrating how political institutions have shaped incentives for politicians to cater to different constituencies. During the pre-1980 period, …
Farmers' Cooperatives In China: A Typology Of Fraud And Failure, Zhanping Hu, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
Farmers' Cooperatives In China: A Typology Of Fraud And Failure, Zhanping Hu, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Since the 1990s, agricultural cooperatives—particularly what China calls Farmers’ Specialized Cooperatives—have experienced rapid expansion in China. After more than two decades of growth and policy support, what is the overall performance of the ever-increasing numbers of these cooperatives? We visited 50 cooperatives across the country, most of which had officially been lauded as successful, to make a first-hand evaluation of their overall status and performance. We argue that, judging by either international or Chinese standards, the vast majority of these agricultural cooperatives are not authentic and fail to deliver expected benefits to smallholders. We categorize them into five types: genuine …
Political Dynamics In Land Commodification: Commodifying Rural Land Development Rights In Chengdu, China, Qian Forrest Zhang, Jianling Wu
Political Dynamics In Land Commodification: Commodifying Rural Land Development Rights In Chengdu, China, Qian Forrest Zhang, Jianling Wu
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Commodification of land is at the forefront of the re-casting of rural China by the spread of capitalism. This study examines a market-based program of land development rights trading in Chengdu, China. The program was made possible by a change in the central government’s land-use regulation that shifted the policy goal from ‘no net loss’ of farmland to ‘no net gain’ of construction land. We detail how local governments at multiple levels work together to construct land development rights as a commodity and build market institutions to foster its trading, illustrating land commodification as an inherently political process. A unique …
Providing Rural Public Services Through Land Commodification: Policy Innovations And Rural-Urban Integration In Chengdu, Qian Forrest Zhang, Jianling Wu
Providing Rural Public Services Through Land Commodification: Policy Innovations And Rural-Urban Integration In Chengdu, Qian Forrest Zhang, Jianling Wu
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Zhang and Wu offer a detailed account of the innovative local policies in Chengdu, China, where a national land-use policy that has created widespread problems in other trial areas has been turned into a positive, transformative force in rural reconstruction. There are three key innovations in this so-called ‘Chengdu model’: First, leveraging on the most important resource in rural area, land, and through the commodification of land development rights, creating a financial source that can fund rural public services provision; second, transforming traditional rural residential patterns and concentrating the rural population in newly built residential communities; and, finally, using both …
Understanding The Failure Of China’S Specialized Cooperatives In China, Zhanping Hu, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
Understanding The Failure Of China’S Specialized Cooperatives In China, Zhanping Hu, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
At first blush, contemporary China seems ripe for the rapid development of agricultural cooperatives. After all, cooperatives have not only enjoyed a long history in China, but the country’s recent experience with agricultural communes should make it more amenable to the reestablishment of joint production and spontaneous bottom-up cooperation. Agricultural cooperatives in China date to the 1930s, as Rural Reconstruction Movement advocates promoted cooperatives as a “third road” between capitalism and socialism. Although Mao’s regime disbanded most bottom-up cooperatives, rural cooperatives began to reemerge in rural China by the end of the 20th century, particularly after 1998, when farmer cooperatives …
On The Social And Political Effects Of Opening In Rural China, Housi Cheng, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
On The Social And Political Effects Of Opening In Rural China, Housi Cheng, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
What are the economic, social and political effects when previously isolated villages are opened to the outside world? Scholars from different traditions expect different sorts of positive or negative affects to occur. Rural China presents an ideal environment to study this question empirically. Villages within rural China are in the process of being opened to the outside world in different forms, such as through being connected by road, the investment of agribusiness, or urbanization. Moreover this opening is being driven and shaped by different actors, including local residents, government and businesses. The different ways and actors that this opening occurs …
Rural Households' Social Reproduction In China's Agrarian Transition: Wage Employment And Family Farming, Qian Forrest Zhang
Rural Households' Social Reproduction In China's Agrarian Transition: Wage Employment And Family Farming, Qian Forrest Zhang
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Wage employment has penetrated deeply into rural households’ livelihoods and has become acentral pillar in China’s rural economy. In the past three decades, three developmentspropelled the growth of wage employment: rural industrialization, rural-to-urban migration,and rise of capitalist agriculture. These developments brought in a decisive break to thetrajectory of China’s agrarian transition: the traditional model of household reproductionbased on family farming and handicraft production has now been replaced by a new one inwhich wage employment and family farming are closely bonded in a myriad of ways –through both the household-level division of labour and individual-level circulation of labourbetween the two.
Class Differentiation In Rural China: Dynamics Of Accumulation, Commodification And State Intervention, Forrest Qian Zhang
Class Differentiation In Rural China: Dynamics Of Accumulation, Commodification And State Intervention, Forrest Qian Zhang
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This paper develops a classification of the emerging agrarian class positions in China today. Using an instrument based on rural households' combination of market positions in four markets – land, labour, means of production and product – I identify five agrarian classes: the capitalist employer class, the petty‐bourgeois class of commercial farmers, two labouring classes of dual‐employment households and wage workers, and subsistence peasants. This classification is then used as a heuristic device to organize the empirical analysis that examines how dynamics of agrarian change drive class differentiation in rural China. For the capitalist employer class, the analysis focuses on …
Rural China In Transition: Changes And Transformations In China’S Agriculture And Rural Sector, John A. Donaldson, Forrest Q. Zhang
Rural China In Transition: Changes And Transformations In China’S Agriculture And Rural Sector, John A. Donaldson, Forrest Q. Zhang
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Agribusiness companies operating in China are transacting in various forms with small agricultural producers, and in doing so, transforming the household-based agriculture in rural China. We argue that the presence of these distinct forms and the diverging relations between agribusiness and producers show the central importance of China’s collective land rights. China’s unique system of land rights – featuring collective ownership but individualized usage rights – has acted as a powerful force in shaping interactions between agribusiness and direct producers. It provides farmers a source of economic income as well as political bargaining power – albeit to various degrees – …
Primitive Accumulation, New Enclosures, And Global Land Grabs: A Theoretical Intervention, Onur Ulas Ince
Primitive Accumulation, New Enclosures, And Global Land Grabs: A Theoretical Intervention, Onur Ulas Ince
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Recent critical analyses of global land grabs have variously invoked global capitalism and neocolonialism to account for this trend. One line of inquiry approaches land grabs as instances of "primitive accumulation of capital" whereby lands in the Global South are "enclosed" and brought within the ambit of global capitalism. Another perspective invokes the history of Anglo-American colonialism for critiquing the developmentalist discourse that depicts Africa as the "last frontier" to be tamed by the techno-industrial civilization of the North. This essay integrates these two perspectives by elaborating capitalism as an irreducibly colonial formation with global inceptions. I begin with a …
China’S Agrarian Reform And The Privatization Of Land: A Contrarian View, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
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
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 …
The Transformation Of China’S Agriculture System And Its Impact On Southeast Asia, Phoebe Mingxuan Luo, John A. Donaldson, Qian Forrest Zhang
The Transformation Of China’S Agriculture System And Its Impact On Southeast Asia, Phoebe Mingxuan Luo, John A. Donaldson, Qian Forrest Zhang
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
The increased role for agribusiness and larger scale production in China’s agricultural system is limited by China’s severe lack of arable land. The Household Responsibility System provides farmers a measure of power, hampering agribusiness from acquiring land needed for expansion. Some Chinese companies have sought cheaper and often more accessible land in nearby regions, including Southeast Asia. While such investments have the potential to deliver benefits, including increased productivity, structural constraints such as weak land ownership and environmental laws, highly unequal distribution of land and underdevelopment of peasant organizations prevent many poorer farmers from benefiting from these investments.
Rethinking The Rural-Urban Divide In China’S New Stratification Order, Qian Forrest Zhang
Rethinking The Rural-Urban Divide In China’S New Stratification Order, Qian Forrest Zhang
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
I use a Marxist framework centred on the mode of production to conceptually analyze the changing stratification structure in today’s China with a focus on the changing nature of rural-urban inequality. As the state-managed tributary mode of production, once dominant under socialism, is being gradually eclipsed by the reviving petty-commodity mode of production and the newly emerged capitalist mode of production, both of which are market-based and enable the transfer of surplus from labour to capital, a new set of mechanisms are creating and sustaining rural-urban inequality in China. Rural-urban inequality – although still significant in its magnitude – is …
From Peasants To Farmers: Peasant Differentiation, Labor Regimes, And Land-Rights Institutions In China's Agrarian Transition, Q. Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
From Peasants To Farmers: Peasant Differentiation, Labor Regimes, And Land-Rights Institutions In China's Agrarian Transition, Q. Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
The development of factor markets has opened Chinese agriculture for the penetration of capitalism. This new round of rural transformation—China’s agrarian transition— raises the agrarian question in the Chinese context. This study investigates how capitalist forms and relations of production transform agricultural production and the peasantry class in rural China. The authors identify six forms of nonpeasant agricultural production, compare the labor regimes and direct producers’ socioeconomic statuses across these forms, and evaluate the role of China’s land-rights institution in shaping these forms. The empirical investigation presents three main findings: (1) Peasant differentiation : capitalist forms of agricultural production differentiate …
The Beginning Of The End? Agricultural Modernization And Dissolution Of The Peasantry In Contemporary China, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
The Beginning Of The End? Agricultural Modernization And Dissolution Of The Peasantry In Contemporary China, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
No abstract provided.
Update Mental Pictures Of Rural China, Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
Update Mental Pictures Of Rural China, Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Women in straw hats stoop over water-logged plots, working together to plant rice seedlings. A weather-worn man trudges behind an ox ploughing his family's field. Farmers throw newly harvested grain in the air so the wind can carry off the chaff. Tour buses navigate past grain carefully laid out on the black-topped road to dry. Though picturesque, these images of rural China perpetuate stereotypes of a conservative culture resistant to change - and affect public policy.
Beware Of Radical Change: China’S Agrarian Revolution, John A. Donaldson, Forrest Q. Zhang
Beware Of Radical Change: China’S Agrarian Revolution, John A. Donaldson, Forrest Q. Zhang
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
No abstract provided.
The Changes And Non-Changes Of China's Rural Land, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
The Changes And Non-Changes Of China's Rural Land, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
No abstract provided.