5 Land-Use Strategies
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5 Land-Use Strategies Abstract This chapter describes the land-use and land-arrangement strategies that Chinese migrant and left-behind rice farmers use to manage their farmland and off-farm migration. These include both social and technical strategies – only some of which accord with state expectations – such as leaving behind family members, building houses on farmland, using labour-saving technologies, switching from rice to cash crops, or even abandoning fields. Using specific household cases, the chapter demonstrates how peasants draw on a wide repertoire of available resources to handle their situation. Shedding light on the logics behind these decisions, it argues that, in taking seemingly technical agricultural decisions, farmers are in fact pursuing various long-term and short-term projects that best match their fluctuating current and anticipated future household situation. Keywords: China, socio-technical household strategies, land-use arrange- ments, rural-urban migration, migrant-left-behind nexus, intensive and de-intensive rice farming During my stay in Green Water Village I learned that making strategic use of farming technology was only one way to preserve paddy fields under conditions of missing labour due to migration. Mrs. Luo and her family drew on a whole repertoire of strategies, consisting of proven techniques as well as seemingly experimental, or even drastic measures. In fact, the entire living arrangement of Mrs. Luo’s household was a strategic response to cope with the paddy field predicament, and not an easy one. As mentioned before, Mrs. Luo’s husband Zhou Wenlu was a migrant in his early fifties, working for a construction company that moved to different sites across the country every year. This slim and earnest man with a suntanned, beardless face had been the first to leave the household. That was around the beginning of the reform period in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when his three children – Yuemei, her younger sister and brother Kaufmann, Lena, Rural-Urban Migration and Agro-Technological Change in Post-Reform China. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463729734_ch05 188 RURAL-URBAN MIGRATION AND AGRO-TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE IN POST-REFORM CHINA – started primary school. Having only received basic schooling himself, but being fond of studying and reading books to learn autodidactically about things such as medicinal herbs, he longed to give his children a good education. Thus, he succumbed to the pressure of paying for their education. In addition, he hoped to provide his son Pengyu with a sufficient material basis to find a good wife who would eventually bear grandchildren and take care of himself and Mrs. Luo in their old age. Zhou Wenlu therefore put up with the burden of leaving the family alone. He accepted the tiring working conditions common on many construction sites: the seven-day working schedule, the nights in crowded containers, where men from all over China speak to each other in different dialects, squeezed into bunk beds, with the only private space consisting of a bed slot divided from the rest of the room by a mosquito net. Once the three children had grown up, they also left the village in search of the good life. Yuemei, the eldest, was the first child to leave in the early 2000s. She studied diligently and passed the difficult entrance examination for a Beijing university. Although her sister Linjie did not manage to gain a place at university, she followed Yuemei to Beijing anyway, where Yuemei financially and organizationally supported Linjie’s vocational training instead. One year the two sisters had felt lucky to see their father more frequently, when his company had also been working in Beijing. Meanwhile their little brother, Pengyu, followed the cohort of younger village men. He went south to Guangdong Province, where he found a job in mining, just as other fellow villagers had done before him. This job was facilitated by Yuemei, who had graduated by then and begun working in a German company, and so was able to pay for the digger operating training he required. Meanwhile, the somewhat frail Mrs. Luo remained all by herself in Green Water. This was not her native village (niangjia), but the village she had moved to when she married Zhou Wenlu. At that time, mobile phones were not yet in general use to keep in touch regularly and, during the first years of Zhou Wenlu’s migration, there were not even telephone lines in the village.1 Thus, Mrs. Luo had to wait for the Spring Festival until she would finally see her husband and children again. The rest of the year, she usually lived on her own, taking care of the household’s fields, and trying her best to maintain the rice cultivation. Only after Yuemei and her sister consecutively married other migrant workers and each gave birth to a baby in Beijing, did Mrs. Luo leave the countryside for the first time, visiting her daughters in order to 1 Telephone lines were laid in 2002 and mobile phone communication enabled in 2003 (Wu 2010, 246). L UEAND- S STRATEGIES 189 help them out. She soon returned to Green Water, however, because she felt ill, which the family attributed to her body not being used to city life. Back home, she continued looking after the fields. Occasionally she visited her aged parents, who lived close by. More frequently, she spent time working alongside the other women left behind in Green Water.2 Based on brief case studies such as this one of Mrs. Luo and her family, this chapter looks at the land strategies of migrants and their left-behind household members, which include both land use and land arrangement. I investigate farmers’ strategic decisions between intensive and de-intensified rice cultivation, in view of their available socio-technical resources. I argue that land-use decisions are not simply the application of different techniques and technologies on production decisions. Instead, farmers are, in fact, pursuing larger ‘projects’ (Ortner 2006; Farquhar 2006). One of these projects is certainly the long-term preservation of the paddy field resource, thereby retaining an important social and material safety net. Other projects range from finding a marriage partner, ensuring security in old age, continuing the patriline, affording their children’s education, safeguarding their own health or, more generally, getting the best out of both the rural and the urban world in search of the ‘good life’. It is useful to apply a repertoire perspective to the strategies described in this chapter, as this allows for a comprehensive analysis that goes beyond simply examining individual strategies, as is common in the literature. Most of the strategies take the form of concrete ‘agricultural practices’ (Schippers 2014a, 339). At their base lies a repertoire of knowledge and skills for dealing with paddy fields in diverse circumstances. This includes particular techniques and technologies to protect the paddy field resource, to transform fields into other valuable resources or, in rare cases, even to allow it to deteriorate. Moreover, a repertoire perspective adds the necessary historical depth. Drawing on Schip- pers (2014a), I suggest that many of the agricultural practices that make up the repertoire of knowledge span a longer time frame, containing knowledge that has been accumulated, tested, and adapted in local society on a long-term basis. Table 2 provides a simplified overview of twelve land-use strategies that the investigated farmers from Hunan and Anhui pursued in view of their paddy field predicament.3 Moreover, it lists these strategies along with the 2 Based on personal observations and multiple conversations with Mrs. Luo’s family, 2010-2016. 3 Increased animal husbandry and fishery as well as growing grains for animal feed instead of human food seem to be further important strategies (see OECD 2005, 52-54; Huang 2016). Except for one small pig farm, I did not observe these in my field sites, however. 190 RURAL-URBAN MIGRATION AND AGRO-TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE IN POST-REFORM CHINA Table 2 Overview of the villagers’ land-use strategies Strategy Actors State position 1 Leaving behind family Migrants with paternal Indirectly promoted members parents 2 Renting out the fields Migrants and those left Tolerated, to some extent behind in need of labour promoted 3 Seasonal return Migrants working nearby Allowed or in flexible conditions 4 Mutual help Able-bodied left-behind Allowed people with the necessary network 5 Hiring labour Left-behind people who Allowed can afford it 6 Labour-saving Left-behind people who Promoted technologies can afford it 7 Direct seeding Left-behind people in Promoted if in connection with need of labour modern field management practices that ensure sufficient grain yield 8 Single-season rice Elderly and infirm left- Tolerated behind people in need of labour 9 Abandoning the fields Migrants and left-behind Forbidden people in need of labour 10 House construction Sons of marital age and Forbidden if on farmland their parents 11 Dry fields Left-behind people in Tolerated need of labour 12 Cash crops Left-behind people in Tolerated, revenue source for need of labour and cash local governments main actors involved and the position of the state, which represents the major structure in which farmers operate. Farmers use some strategies to pursue their own projects in line with state expectations. This is the case with those strategies that allow farmers to sustain intensive rice farming (Table 2, 1-7). These are generally tolerated or encouraged by the state. In practice, however, the position of the local and the central state may differ somewhat. Generally, though, even though countermeasures are not always enforced, the state is rather oppositional to those strategies that entail a de-intensification of rice farming (Table 2, 8-12).