Mobilizing compliance: how the state compels village households to transfer land to large farm operators in China

ABSTRACT

Since 2007, as the result of an aggressive government program to industrialize agriculture, more than one third of Chinese farmland has been transferred from smallholding households to large farm operators. The scaling up of agriculture is a global phenomenon, but nowhere has the scale been so vast and the time period so compressed. So far, there has been little investigation into how this massive transfer of land is being accomplished. While official accounts present land transfers as voluntary, in our investigation of transfers in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, we found the methods employed included various types of coercion.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• land transfer
• dispossession
• agricultural industrialization
• agribusiness
• farm cooperatives

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank participants in the ‘Land Dispossession in Rural China and India’ workshop held in Singapore in July 2018 and the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and suggestions. This work has been supported by a scientific research project grant from Ningxia Colleges and Universities (No. NGY2018010).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region People’s Congress Standing Committee Research Group (2016).

2 Ningxia Statistics Bureau and Ningxia Rural Social Survey Corps (2017).

3 Ningxia Autonomous Region People's Congress Standing Committee Research Group (2016).

4 Both authors collaborated in designing this project and writing the paper. Throughout the paper, we use the pronoun ‘we’ for stylistic convenience.

5 We borrow the terms ‘dual-employment’ and ‘small commercial farming’ from Zhang (2015), who developed a more detailed typology to analyze class relations in rural China.

6 In 2019, Fortune magazine ranked COFCO as the world’s 134th largest corporation, with 117,000 employees, US$71 billion in annual revenues, and US$338 million in annual profits (https://fortune.com/global500/cofco/). The initial operating contracts for the Ningxia project were for 18 years, but in 2011 COFCO suddenly abandoned the project and stopped paying rent to thousands of village households (Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region People’s Congress Standing Committee Research Group 2016).

7 Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region People’s Congress Standing Committee Research Group (2016).

8 See, for instance, Han and Wang (2013).

9 Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region People’s Congress Standing Committee Research Group (2016).

10 Reply to No. 8515 of the Fourth Session of the 12th National People’s Congress. http://www.moa.gov.cn/govpublic/NCJJTZ/201608/t20160810_5234645.htm.

11 Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region People’s Congress Standing Committee Research Group (2016, 12).

12 Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region People’s Congress Standing Committee Research Group (2016).

13 Many provinces have eliminated the compulsory work system, but in Ningxia the system remains an important means for village cadres to raise funds.

Additional information

Funding

This work has been supported by a scientific research project grant from Ningxia Colleges and Universities (No. NGY2018010).

Notes on contributors

Qiangqiang Luo

Qiangqiang Luo is Professor of Sociology at Ningxia University in China. He completed a doctoral degree in ethnosociology at Minzu University of China. His research has focused on political contention and grassroots governance in Islamic ethnic minority regions of China, with a particular interest in religion and land transfer. He teaches courses about social science research methods and social issues of Northwestern China at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Joel Andreas

Joel Andreas, Associate Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, studies political contention and social change in China. His first book, Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Rise of China’s New Class (Stanford 2009), analyzed the contentious merger of old and new elites following the 1949 Revolution. His second book, Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China (Oxford 2019), traces radical changes that have fundamentally transformed industrial relations over the past seven decades. He is continuing to investigate changing labor relations and the ongoing transformation of China’s rural society. Corresponding author: [email protected]