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ABSTRACT
Based on archival research and interviews with state officials and state-affiliated academics, this article argues that the Chinese state's decision to slow down rural land transfer since 2017 is a Polanyian countermovement against the adverse consequences of earlier, excessive labor and land commodification. The central government's drive for land consolidation is contingent upon and structurally constrained by the process of rural labor commodification. By focusing on connections between land and labor and situating agrarian transformation under the context of national capital accumulation, this study examines land beyond agriculture and argues for the continued importance of the classical Agrarian Questions.
Acknowledgement
The CIAC small grant from the Association for Asian Studies supports part of the fieldwork for this article. Prof. Beverly Silver, Prof. Joel Andreas, Prof. Michael Levien, Prof. Ricado Jacobs, and Prof. Ryan Calder provided insightful comments for the many drafts of this article. I want to thank Corey Payne, Samantha Agarwal, Liu Mingtang, Conrad Jacober, and Wan Yifeng from the Hopkins Sociology Department. I also want to give my thanks to Song Qi from the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University, Xu Mengran from the Department of East Asian Studies at University of Toronto, Prof. Li Ke from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. I am grateful to Prof. Lu Aiguo at the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences and Prof. He Gaochao at the Johns Hopkins University for their help during my fieldwork.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 It is called ‘三权分置’ in Chinese.
2 For a more critical analysis of the HRS's economic effect, please refer to Bramall (Citation2004).
3 Liu Zhongyi was the Minister of Agriculture between 1990 and 1993.
4 Interview with Liu Shouying 07/2018. Liu worked for the State Council Development Research Center.
5 Zhang Gensheng was the deputy head of the State Council Rural Development Research Center.
6 Interview, July 2018.
7 Interview, Jan 2019.
8 Interview, July 2019.
9 Interview with Liu Shouying and Zhang Xiaoshan, July 2018.
10 Wan was the Vice Director of the NPC Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee in 2003.
11 Song is the Director of the Economic Research Center under the Ministry of Agriculture.
12 Ye is the Head of the Rural Economy Department, State Council Development Research Center.
13 Zheng is one major architecture behind the New Socialist Countryside Movement. He worked as the Vice Chair of the Party Central Committee’s Policy Research Office during the 2000s.
14 Interview, July 2018.
15 Han Jun is the vice Minister of Agriculture.
16 It is generally agreed within the policy circle that this was not a new policy, but a product born out of previous local experiments.
17 Interview with Zhang Xiaoshan, July 2018.
18 Interview with Zhang Xiaoshan, July 2018.
19 Interview with local officials, July 2019; April, 2021.
20 Interview with Wen Tiejun, Jan 2019.
21 Interview with Ye Jingzhong, Dec 2018.
22 Interview with Zhang Hongyu and Ye Jingzhong, July 2018, Jan 2019.
23 The MoA numbers are very likely much lower than the actual number of disputes, as many of such events did not get reported to the government. Interview with local officials, Dec. 2020.
24 Informal Interview, June 2019.
25 Ministry of Agriculture, Internal Document, April 2018.
26 Interview, July 2018.
27 Interview with Unanimous senior official, Ministry of Agriculture, Jan 2019.
28 Interview with local official, April, 2021.
29 Interview with Yao Yang and Anonymous state newspaper editor, July 2018.
30 In July 2018, the Beijing Daily published a news article titled “Rural Revitalization is not Over-Industrialization,” which made the above-mentioned arguments. This piece was later instructed by Xi himself.
31 Interview with Unanimous senior official, Ministry of Agriculture, Jan 2019.
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Tiantian Liu
Tiantian Liu is currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology at the Johns Hopkins University. He holds a BA in Political Science and an MA in Sociology. His research interests include: development, agrarian change, historical capitalism, and social movements.