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ABSTRACT
This paper advances a new framework for analysing agrarian change in rural China and elsewhere in developing Asia, which centres on translocal family reproduction. The framework highlights the crucial connections between rural families’ translocal strategies for meeting reproductive (especially care) needs, their changing aspirations for reproduction, and other aspects of agrarian change, including de-peasantisation, de-agrarianisation and social differentiation. In developing this framework, the paper refers to a village case study in central China and draws on a critique of the ‘livelihoods perspective’ on agrarian change, approaches focusing on ‘global householding’, and the cultural reproduction of class and gender.
Acknowledgements
This paper draws on fieldwork conducted in collaboration with He Congzhi, Wang Wei and Li Xiaoxuan, from the College of Humanities and Development Studies, China Agricultural University. I am grateful to these colleagues for many fruitful discussions as well as assistance in the field. Many thanks, also, to Vickie Zhang, Sally Sargeson, Andrew Kipnis and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful critical comments on the draft paper.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 In China today, agrarian change is being driven primarily by either rural outmigration or dispossession resulting from the expropriation of land (or both at once). This paper draws on a case study from central China, where rates of rural outmigration are particularly high, and in most villages, outmigration is the key driver of agrarian change. For a study of agrarian change driven by the expropriation of land, which is more common in peri-urban areas and the highly urbanised east, see Sargeson (Citation2013).
2 Two partial exceptions, Zhang and Locke (Citation2010) and Chuang (Citation2015), discuss the relationship between gender, migration and household strategies for reproduction. However, neither explicitly addresses agrarian change.
3 I understand the term ‘social differentiation’ to refer to the creation of differences in peoples’ positioning in relations of production and reproduction, and consequent inequalities in control and access to resources, and wellbeing and social status. In this perspective, ‘differentiation’ refers to patterns of gender and intergenerational inequalities, as well as to class stratification.
4 This account is based on 2.5 months’ ethnographic fieldwork in the village in 2015–2016. Figures provided are for 2015.
5 In order to protect identities, pseudonyms are used for all individuals as well as the village. New County, however, is not a pseudonym.
6 In 2015, Gingko villagers had access to about 1326 mu of arable land, or an average of 0.8 mu per person. One mu is the equivalent of 0.16 acres.
7 There are very few local, non-agricultural employment opportunities in the village or its vicinity.
8 Gingko villagers in Mrs Li's generation mostly have between three and seven children. Younger villagers, who began their families after the introduction of the one-child policy at the end of the 1970s, mostly have two children. Single-child families are rare.
9 In 2013–2015, 1 yuan was equivalent to about USD 0.16.
10 Across China, ‘land transfers’ (liuzhuan), such as these, have been spurred by recent state initiatives, especially the provision of subsidies, aimed at promoting large-scale, mechanised agricultural production, and shoring up national food security in the wake of rural labour outmigration (Ye Citation2015; Trappel Citation2016, 119–69).
11 In 2015, village officials reported the average income per person in Gingko village to be 4400 yuan, or about 42 percent of the national rural average, but admitted that figure was probably out of date. At that time, domestic migrant labourers earned an average annual per-capita net income of 20,000–30,000 yuan, while overseas labourers earned about 80,000–100,000 yuan.
12 In 2015, the village head estimated that in the preceding few years, 10–20 Gingko households had bought apartments in New County city each year.
13 According to Shirlena Huang and Brenda Yeoh, the term peidu mama was first coined in the early 2000s by the Chinese media in Singapore to refer to urban middle-class mothers from China accompanying their children to Singapore for the children's education (Huang and Yeoh Citation2011, 395).
14 There are a number of very old residents of Gingko village like Mr Zhou, whom other villagers describe as ‘pitiful’ because they live alone and their adult children rarely visit. They rarely describe themselves as such. In some cases, this appears to be because they feel ashamed of their children's lack of filiality. In others, it seems to relate to ‘descending familism’, whereby the elderly themselves accept a family prioritisation of younger generations’ needs and wellbeing over their own. Descending familism is further discussed below.
15 See, however, works by Wei (Citation2015) and Yin (Citation2015), which draw on Bourdieu to examine class reproduction and distinction in rural Zhejiang, China's wealthiest province. Also relevant to this paper are studies by Ye (Citation2014) and Nguyen (Citation2015), both of which draw on feminist as well as Bourdieusian theory. Ye (Citation2014) analyses the reproduction of class and gender in Bangladeshi men's labour migration to Singapore. Nguyen examines the significance of rural women's work as domestic servants in urban Vietnam for the production and reproduction of class and gender identities in both poor, rural families and the urban middle class.
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Tamara Jacka
Tamara Jacka is professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. Her research interests are in socio-political change in contemporary China, especially as it relates to gender and rural–urban inequalities, and rural–urban migration. Her recent publications include Contemporary China: society and social change (co-authored with Andrew Kipnis and Sally Sargeson, 2013), Women, gender and rural development in China (co-edited with Sally Sargeson, 2011) and Rural women in urban China: gender, migration, and social change (2006).