The structure and contradictions of productive relations in socialist agrarian ‘reform’: A framework for analysis and the Chinese case

Abstract

This article attempts to develop a complex analytical framework for analysing socialist agrarian reform, and to apply it to the case of post‐Mao China, perhaps the most sweeping agrarian ‘reform’ in the history of socialism. The purpose of doing so is to disaggregate the complex changes which have been wrought under the ‘responsibility systems’ in order to get a more nuanced sense of what has and has not changed, how the various parts fit together, and where the axes of contradiction posed by the ‘reform’ may lie. This analytical framework may also be of use in comparative analysis of socialist agriculture, though that enterprise is not attempted here. One basic argument of this study is that the ‘responsibility systems’ of the recent Chinese ‘reforms’ are neither socialist nor capitalist, but something distinctive, whose potentially heterogeneous elements must be identified, disaggregated, analysed one by one, and then reconstituted, in order to expose their nature, dynamics and contradictions.

Notes

This article was written during a wonderful research leave financed by Oberlin College and hosted by the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex (England). I wish to thank them for their material and intellectual support. In particular, I benefited from discussing issues related to those raised here with Gordon White, though I am sure he would not want (nor does he deserve) any of the burden of responsibility for what appears in these pages. The article was presented in draft form at the Institute of Social Studies (The Hague) and the Sinological Institute of the University of Leiden, to both of which I wish to express my gratefulness for sponsoring and hosting enjoyable, stimulating visits; comments of scholars at both institutions were helpful in preparing this revision.