Polanyi and the Peasant Question in China: State, Peasant, and Land Relations in China, 1949–Present

• Author: Julia Chuang,John Yasuda
• Published date: 01 June 2022
• Date: 01 June 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00323292211032753
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00323292211032753

Politics & Society

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DOI: 10.1177/00323292211032753

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Article

Polanyi and the Peasant

Question in China: State,

Peasant, and Land Relations

in China, 1949–Present

Julia Chuang

University of Maryland

John Yasuda

Johns Hopkins University

Abstract

This article applies Karl Polanyi’s concept of a double movement to the trajectory

of rural state policies in China since 1949. It argues that Chinese socialism created

a contradictory social contract that has fueled an ongoing struggle between state

and peasantry over the surplus generated from rural land. This struggle has shaped

a historical oscillation between state policies that facilitate extraction of agricultural

surpluses and policies that introduce social protections in the form of household

farming and revitalized collective ownership. Based on secondary sources, this article

compares the arc of rural policies during the Mao era and in the transition to and

during the current state capitalist period. Then, based on original interview-based and

ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in rural Sichuan Province, it analyzes the current

introduction of urban and agrarian capital into the rural economy, revealing dynamics

of a current countermovement from state-led extraction to compromise.

Keywords

Polanyi, agrarian transition, state capitalism, China, peasant politics, urbanization, land

politics

Corresponding Author:

John Yasuda, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA.

Email: jyasuda1@jhu.edu

1032753PASXXX10.1177/00323292211032753Politics & SocietyChuang and Yasuda

research-article2021

2022, Vol. 50(2) 311–347

Rural China is undergoing a great transformation. Recent policy reforms, aiming to

modernize the countryside, have resulted in the influx of agrarian and urban capital, in

the form of agribusinesses and private developers, into the rural economy. In the place

of a collective smallholder-dominated countryside, where rural people have universal

use-rights to small plots of rural land, these reforms have created de facto markets for

rural land, dispossessed tens of millions of rural farmers, and placed agriculture in the

hands of large agribusinesses and big household farms. These reforms have introduced

market-based avenues for the transfer of rural assets to agrarian and urban capital yet

continue to maintain the foundation of collective land ownership that has been in place

since shortly after the 1949 revolution. Borne from central state concerns with lagging

agricultural productivity and the desire of local governments to monetize land and

pursue urbanization, these reforms have created a new “marketized form of collective

ownership,” that is, much land remains collectively owned but used by private enter-

prises rather than rural people.1

These changes bring rural China into unprecedented territory: for the first time

since 1949, policies have been designed to bring about the systematic separation of

peasants from use-rights to village land. Despite this, as many scholars have also

warned,2 the current reform moment should not be understood to represent rural

China’s convergence to the Western path toward capitalist agriculture and full dispos-

session of the peasantry. This article instead views the current moment in the context

of China’s internal historical dynamic of state–peasantry struggle.3

This article makes two arguments. First, we observe that the trajectory of reforms

in rural China is driven by struggles between the rural population and the state over the

rural surplus. At stake in these struggles is what Jean Oi once called the “rights to the

residual,”4 which we define as agricultural output and any revenues generated through

rural assets, whether it be rural land, labor, or enterprise. Over time, the parties engaged

in these struggles over the rights to the residual have shifted. During the socialist era,

local rural governments themselves exerted claims over agricultural surplus. Under

the current state-led capitalist era that emerged in the late 1990s, however, local gov-

ernments largely siphon off the surplus through fees collected as middlemen who then

facilitate the flow of rural revenues to agribusinesses and private developers. This

introduction of private capital has changed the character of rural capital accumulation

from state extraction to state-sponsored private extraction, but it has left intact an

underlying historical dynamic of how state policy shifts in response to rural capital

accumulation.

The second argument we make addresses this historical dynamic. We argue that the

trajectory of state–peasantry struggles and state reforms in rural China has a pendu-

lum-like quality, alternating between the central state establishing a compromise with

a peasantry over claims to the rural surplus, and local governments, sometimes at the

behest of the central state, and sometimes motivated by their alignment with urban and

agrarian capital, rebelling against this compromise by moving to expand their claim to

the rural surplus. Once peasants resist this expansion through protest and increased

grievances, the central state, concerned with stability maintenance, again steps in to

strike a compromise.

312 Politics & Society 50(2)

The pendulum-like quality of these reforms, alternating between an expansion of

state-led extraction and social protection, calls to mind Karl Polanyi’s concept of a

double movement. Polanyi, observing nineteenth- and twentieth-century global social

and monetary policies that alternated between expanding laissez-faire policies and

social protection, argued that what we think of as capitalism is the product of both

movements.5 However, in China, state policies protecting the livelihoods of rural

households are not a product of popular resistance to increased exposure to laissez-

faire markets, as Polanyi might predict. Instead, it is the contradictory social contract

initiated by the socialist state in 1949 that pits state and peasantry in a struggle over the

agricultural surplus, resulting in waves of rural resistance when state or state-spon-

sored private extraction grows excessive.

Based on interviews conducted in Sichuan Province with farmers, village leaders,

and county, township, and municipal state officials between January 2010 and January

2015, as well as additional interviews conducted in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Yunnan,

Shandong, and Ningxia Provinces, this article examines the current moment of rural

modernization by placing it in the context of rural reforms under socialism. A previous

wave of rural reforms from the 1950s to 1978 followed a similar trajectory as the cur-

rent rural modernization reforms from 1979 to the present. Both reform waves began

with peasants working under household production that allowed them to maintain an

autonomous source of subsistence. However, in both waves, local governments and

their allies, along with the central state, were unsatisfied with their portion of agricul-

tural output and moved to increase their claim. Rural resistance then forced a change

in policy to address what was viewed to be overly extractive. We conclude with evi-

dence from the current moment of another central state compromise being struck with

rural people.

Origins of the State–Peasantry Struggle

Since 1949, agrarian reforms have reflected an underlying struggle between the state

and peasantry, one rooted in the original socialist social contract. The 1949 Communist

Revolution ended with a promise to rural-born people that they would have universal,

inalienable use-rights to rural land; but this was later accompanied by a de facto policy

of jettisoning rural territories from central state support. By the mid-1950s, the central

state was using an administrative household registration system, called the hukou, to

register its population as rural or urban born, in order to allocate urban and rural popu-

lations to different employment sectors and assign different welfare entitlements to

both. To urban citizens, Mao promised a cradle-to-grave welfare state centered around

the distribution of grain subsidies, made possible through the intensified labor of rural

people, themselves excluded from most state-funded welfare programs. In the transi-

tion to and during the state capitalist period, rural territories became a holding pen for

a migrant workforce that could be flexibly deployed to support urban industrialization

then returned to subsistence farming when unneeded.6

The contradictory political standing of rural people—summoned to support urban

industrialization yet excluded from the urban welfare state—has fueled a struggle

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Chuang and Yasuda