The Demise of China's Peasantry As a Class

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by The Australian National University The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 14 | Issue 13 | Number 1 | Jul 2016 The Demise of China’s Peasantry as a Class Sally Sargeson Theorists of class have long predicted the end of eliminated through the creation of collective the peasantry: Marx, Hobsbawm and Bernstein ownership and socialist relations of production have all argued that in the transition toin the countryside. Eventually, with the capitalism, peasants would be either transformed transition to communism, full public ownership into individual specialized commodity producers would efface material and political differences (commercial farmers), or forced into wage-labour between town and country, workers and by fragmentation of their land holdings, and peasants, mental and manual labour.4 Post-Mao dispossession, debt and impoverishment.1 On the liberal writers have tended to emphasize other hand, these theorists have beendemographic transition and markets as forces uncharacteristically ambivalent about whether or stratifying the peasantry and shifting peasants not the peasantry constitutes a class. Marx, for into non-agricultural occupations.5 Despite example, argued that although peasants’envisaging different paths to de-peasantization, economic exploitation and political and social both Maoists and post-Mao liberal scholars subordination placed them in an antagonistic viewed the end of the peasantry as imperative for relationship with other classes, they lacked any China’s modernization and rise to global power.6 consciousness of, and capacity to articulate, their In Qin Hui’s words, ‘If China is to be modernized common class interests, much less organize and its peasants are to become modern citizens, politically.2 Pointing to the uneven, contradictory the transformation of peasant into farmer cannot impacts of globalized agriculture and consequent be avoided’.7 differentiation among agriculturalists, Bernstein, too, cautions that ‘“the peasantry” is hardly a Are we witnessing the demise of China’s uniform or analytically helpful social category in peasantry as a class? Bernstein notes that ‘a class contemporary capitalism… The same stricture can only be identified through its relations with necessarily applies to any views of peasants as a another class’.8 If we accept this premise what (single) “class” (“exploited” or otherwise)’.3 types of changes can we trace in the peasant class in China’s recent past, present and imagined future? Answers to these questions will be sensitive to the way we define the two key terms, class and peasantry. Here, I interpret class as the social formations that arise from relations of property ownership, labour and capital accumulation, and which are expressed and consolidated by economic, political, social and cultural practices. Many Chinese political leaders and scholars also This interpretation admittedly glides over have predicted the eventual end of the country’s important theoretical debates. However, it has peasantry. Mao Zedong believed that the merit of accommodating Marxist arguments differentiation among the peasantry would be that class is rooted in ownership and control of 1 APJ | JF 14 | 13 | 1 the means of production and exploitative wage and meets demands from dominant classes for labour, as well as Weberian postulates that status taxes, rents and debt repayment.10 Third, partly groups based on power, education, occupation, as a consequence of the former characteristics, and cultural capital form in all complex modern peasants are only partially integrated into, and societies. Identifying peasants as a class thus dependent upon, markets. Friedmann is quoted requires attention to the way they are set apart in Zhang and Donaldson’s 2010 paper arguing and – potentially – against other socialthat peasants’ ‘access to land, labour, credit, and formations by the following associations: product markets is mediated through direct, non- monetary ties to other households or classes’, Economic: shared experiences ofrather than through monetised transactions in ownership, control or rental of property, markets.11 For example, the acquisition of inputs, employment relations, and the wealth, organization of production and distribution of income, working and living conditions that produce frequently involve norm-governed shape people’s perceptions of theirreciprocal exchange with kin and neighbours, or material interests; provision of corvée labour and a share of the Political: practices that create bases for harvest in return for gaining access to land from collective action and contestation in fields landlord-patrons or socialist state planning of power and material distribution, bureaucrats and cadres. including through protest, representation in organizations, advocacy and what Zhang and Donaldson suggest that these Kerkvliet calls the ‘everyday politics’ of relationships are useful in differentiating making rules about the production, peasants from other agriculturalists, for entitlement to and use of goods and agribusinesses use paid workers, while resources.9 commercial family farmers source their inputs Social: the structure and composition of and sell most of their produce in markets.12 In households, residential communities and contrast, critics such as Ploeg have argued that work places, and the regulations and the distinction between peasant farming and norms that educate people, and govern other modes of agricultural production is membership of and interaction in social overdrawn, for there is considerable overlap and places; interaction among peasants, commercial farmers Cultural and cognitive: styles of learning and agribusinesses, as well as peasant and living that express people’s views of involvement in labour markets.13 Yet definitional themselves as social groups distinct from rigour provides greater analytical traction in other social formations, and which inflect identifying and tracing temporal changes in the how they experience and make those peasantry relative to other classes. For this relationships meaningful in everyday reason, the working definition of peasant used in speech, stories, consumption andthis paper centres on: interaction, and transmit these relationships intergenerationally. small-holding agriculture as a primary occupation; Peasants then may be broadly defined by three reliance upon unwaged family labour and characteristics that distinguish it from other ties to dominant classes or groups for agriculturalists. First, peasants are small-holding production and social reproduction; agriculturalists. Second, peasants primarily use limited market participation. unwaged family labour in farming that supports their household consumption and reproduction, Below, I use these definitions of class and 2 APJ | JF 14 | 13 | 1 peasants to trace changes in China’s peasantry as modern’ subject.15 a class — or spectrum of peasant classes in Mao’s terminology— in the recent past, present, and In describing China’s poor and lower-middle future as imagined by Chinese policy experts. I peasants as a potential revolutionary force and will argue that while China’s rural residents ‘good’ classes from the 1920s through the mid th (nongmin) constituted peasant class(es) in the 20 century, Mao Zedong elevated nongmin in first few decades of the People’s Republic of revolutionary parlance. Yet by adopting Soviet China, by the beginning of the 21st century, most economic blueprints for primitive socialist people registered as nongmin were not peasants, accumulation in the 1950s, Mao also was and did not constitute a class vis-à-vis other instrumental in implementing the very policies classes. Instead, many contemporarynongmin that fixed nongmin to a binary system of had become capitalist farmers, business people, population classification that would allow nong migrant workers in commerce, industry,(agriculture) to be milked to fundgong construction and transport, rentier landlords, and (industry). Between 1957 and 1958, every unemployed recipients of state welfare. household was registered as either agricultural (nongye hukou) or non-agricultural (fei nongye Before setting out this argument, however, it is hukou). The labels were and are consequential. worth noting changes in the etymological uses As agricultural surplus and state investment and policy implications of the terms peasant in disproportionately were directed toward English and nongmin in Chinese. The English industrialization and urban settlements, people term ‘peasant’ derives from the old French with fei nong hukou became entitled to jobs in paisent, ‘country-dweller’, which entered English the state and urban collective sectors, and state- between the 13th and 15th centuries. ‘Peasant’ funded public goods. Not so, those with usually is translated into Chinese asnongmin . nongmin hukou: they had to fend for themselves. Certainly, the simplest meaning of both terms Without work and travel passes nongmin could refers to the occupation of small-holdingonly obtain food, housing and medical attention agriculturalist. But the termnongmin is in the villages in which theirhukou was comparatively new, having come into everyday registered16. Other than by joining the military or usage in Chinese only in the early 20th century, getting into university (‘as difficult as “climbing through works on agricultural technologies, up to heaven without a ladder”’, writes Gao,17 economic disciplines and political theories that nongmin

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