The end of alternatives? Capitalist transformation, rural activism and the politics of possibility in China^†

† Day and Schneider’s collaborative research, Feeding China: The Project on China’s Food Histories, Geographies, and Ecologies, is outlined at https://feedingchina.wordpress.com/.

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the politics of possibility for rural activism in reform era China. By periodizing rural reforms from 1990, we explore the political-economic changes that have coalesced in the reform era, and how these changes condition forms and possibilities of activism. We argue that the current modernization–urbanization drive that emerged around 2008 is foreclosing opportunities for the pro-peasant cooperative forms that New Rural Reconstruction activists imagined earlier in the decade. Instead, as the process of capitalist agrarian change deepens in the countryside, food- and farming-related activism now resembles the state’s focus on markets and consumption, to the detriment of addressing social relations of production. Without a focus on distributional politics and power, this shift has the potential to further entrench existing inequalities within and across rural and urban spaces. The contextual work undertaken in this paper is currently absent from the emerging literature on China’s agrifood transformations.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• new rural reconstruction
• agrarian change
• rural–urban divide
• rural activism

Acknowledgements

Parts of this research were presented at several workshops and conferences. The authors wish to thank Ann Anagnost, Joel Andreas, Aaron Benanav, Robert Brenner, Elena Meyer-Clement, Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, Scott Rozelle, Sally Sargeson, Steffanie Scott, Zhenzhong Si, Dorothy Solinger, René Trappel and the two anonymous readers for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Alexander F. Day http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8645-8132

Mindi Schneider http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9738-8894

Notes

† Day and Schneider’s collaborative research, Feeding China: The Project on China’s Food Histories, Geographies, and Ecologies, is outlined at https://feedingchina.wordpress.com/.

1 In this paper we use “modernization” to refer to the linked processes of industrialization, urbanization, rationalization and capitalization.

2 The nutrition transition describes a general shift from diets based on complex carbohydrates and fiber to diets in which meat, saturated fats and simple sugars constitute the highest proportion of caloric intake (Du et al. 2002).

3 See FAO (1999, table 14). The report constructs an “index of government investment bias” by “dividing the ratio of government investment (expenditure) in agriculture to total government investment (expenditure) by the ratio of agricultural GDP to total GDP”.

4 Hukou is the household registration system in China, which assigns legal classification to rural and urban citizens. People born in rural areas are classified as “agricultural”, while those born in cities are “urban”. In general, urban hukou carries more and better social services, including access to better schools and medical care. Rural hukou carries the right to use collective village resources such as farmland. Most migrant workers have rural hukou, despite often living and working in cities for years. In this way, the rural sphere subsidizes urban development with peasant–migrant worker household reproduction split between the two.

5 In 1993, Vice Premier Zhu Rongji explicitly called for limiting the growth of TVEs (Hung 2016, 71).

6 The No. 1 Central Document (zhongyang yihao wenjian) is the first document of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, published annually in January.

7 The eight institutions were: the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Development and Reform Commission, the State Economic and Trade Commission, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, the People’s Bank of China, the State Administration of Taxation and the China Securities Regulatory Commission.

8 Sannong wenti (three rural problems) refers to problems associated with: nongmin (peasants), nongye (agriculture) and nongcun (villages). This formulation is most associated with Wen Tiejun (Day 2008b, 2013a).

9 For microcredit reforms, see Loubere (2017).

10 While most official pronouncements and popular and academic analyses in China attributed food safety problems to the “backwardness” of scientific knowledge, industry regulations, small-scale production and peasants themselves, food safety is a structural problem of modern, industrial agriculture (Schneider 2015; Yan 2012).

11 See for example the 2008 CCP Central Committee Document Decisions of Central Committee of the Communist Party of China Regarding Several Big Issues in Pushing Forward the Reform and Development of the Countryside [Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu tuijin nongcun gaige fazhan ruogan zhongda wenti de jueding] (CCP Central Committee 2008).

12 It is important to note that although grains and grain security remains the focus of food security and agricultural policy, consumption patterns are rapidly changing away from strictly grain-based diets. Huang (2016) shows that food consumption “has been moving from the traditional 8:1:1 ratio of grain:vegetables:meat toward a ratio of 4:3:3” (340). These important dietary changes are beyond the scope of the current paper.

13 One mu equals one fifteenth of a hectare.

14 There are three divided rights connected to land (sanquan fenli): ownership rights by the rural collective (the village); contractor rights held by the peasant household; and use rights transferred by the contractor to a new farming party (Ye 2015, 324).

15 We should be cautious with these statistics. There is a strong fiscal incentive for over-reporting on specialized cooperatives.

16 Yan and Chen criticize pro-peasant “populist” intellectuals such as He Xuefeng, arguing that they ignore or even celebrate “capitalism from below” while attacking “capitalism from above” (2015, 367). Here we suggest that there is an explicit critique of the agents of “capitalism from below” in He’s discussion of the changing structure of political and economic relations in agricultural villages. Likewise, while Yan and Chen argue that the “populist notion of capital … makes differentiation among rural producers invisible” (368), He’s recent work has focused on class differentiation among peasants.

17 See He (2007) for an introduction to the experiment.

18 Si, Schumilas, and Scott argue that this shift occurred because of the food safety crisis that became a major public scandal around 2008 (2015, 303).

19 See, for example, He Huili’s attempt to sell rice grown by Lankao cooperatives (Li 2006).

20 Shi Yan has since gone on to start a new CSA farm farther outside of Beijing called Shared Harvest. She is also the main NRR activist organizing China’s annual CSA conference.

21 Interview by Mindi Schneider, Beijing, November 2016.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexander F. Day

Alexander F. Day is an associate professor of history at Occidental College. His first book, The peasant in postsocialist China: history, politics, and capitalism, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. He is currently writing a history of tea production in Southwest China from the 1930s through the 1970s.

Mindi Schneider

Mindi Schneider is an assistant professor of agrarian, food and environmental studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, Netherlands. Her research is in the fields of development sociology and political ecology, with current work focused on the social and ecological transformations that accompany the industrialization and capitalization of China’s agro-food system. She teaches on global food politics and agrarian political ecology. Email: [email protected]