1 How the Predicament Arose

1 How the Predicament Arose Abstract This chapter describes how the paddy field-migration predicament has emerged. It argues that the Chinese state has been a major driver of the current situation through its rural policies, which provide both constraints and opportunities with regard to possible household strategies at the nexus of farming and migration. Special attention is paid to the widespread adoption of post-Green Revolution farming technologies that have set free agricultural labour. These transformations are placed into the context of de-collectivization and marketization, the abolition of the collective welfare system, the new urban economy, and loosened migration restrictions – all of which have pushed peasant farmers to migrate and enhanced their precarity, which in turn makes them want to protect their fields as a safety net. Keywords: China, rural state policy, paddy field predicament, Green Revolution farming technologies, rural-urban migration, land use decisions When I tried to revisit Mr. Wu’s street restaurant in Shanghai in spring 2010, it was gone. Not just the restaurant – the whole block was about to disappear. The buildings were in ruins, without doors and windows. A long plastic tarpaulin covered what had once been the entrance to the restaurant. The place was deserted. The inhabitants of the block had moved on. The only person around was a street cleaner with his wheelbarrow who had stopped for a cigarette break, contemplating the empty scene. This transformation was brought about by a beautification campaign that Shanghai had undergone. It occurred in the advent of a major world fair called ‘Expo’, which the city hosted in 2010 under the slogan ‘better city, better life’. In the course of this campaign, the shabby block where Mr. Wu and numerous other migrant workers had lived and worked were found not to fit the image of a better city. Even though Mr. Wu had known several months in advance that the buildings might be torn down, he had Kaufmann, Lena, Rural-Urban Migration and Agro-Technological Change in Post-Reform China. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463729734_ch01 62 RURAL-URBAN MIGRATION AND AGRO-TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE IN POST-REFORM CHINA not been informed about the exact time so, when it happened, he and his family did not have anywhere else to live. Mr. Wu relied on the support of his extended family and fellow villagers in the city to get him through this difficult time and establish a new business. When that enterprise failed, however, his wife Li Cuiping returned home for several years, taking up rice farming again. She did not rejoin him in the city until her husband finally managed to set up a new business that could support them both. Around Chinese New Year 2016, I had a video conversation with Mrs. Luo, who had been left behind in Green Water Village. While she was bottle- feeding her little granddaughter and putting her to bed, she told me that her husband Zhou Wenlu was there too. Instead of returning just for the festival, as he usually did, he had been back for the whole year. As stated in my Introduction, Zhou Wenlu had worked as a construction worker in various provinces for many years to finance his three children’s education. But now he was home. When I inquired about this further, I learned that he had been unable to continue his migrant work due to an illness. Without any access to affordable health services in the city, he was compelled to rely on his home resources until he recovered and could migrate again. The experiences of Mr. Wu and Zhou Wenlu, both working in the city in such a precarious situation that Mr. Wu’s wife and Zhou Wenlu himself had been forced to return home when confronted with adversity, are closely related to a specific policy context that has been implemented since the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established in 1949, and especially in the reform period after 1978. This context comprises: the promotion of modern agriculture, embedded in establishing a socialist market, abolishing the collective welfare system, the new urban economy, and loosened migration restrictions. I argue that the central and local state has played a crucial role in shaping the conditions of rural households. Implementing these policies has significantly contributed to the current situation of predicament, providing the frame of institutional constraints or ‘structures’ (Ortner 2006) that define the scope of farmers’ strategic actions. While this chapter only focuses on the aspect of structural constraints, mainly describing the political side and general content of the policies, I will argue in the following chapters that these policies have simultaneously provided farmers with certain possibilities, e.g. technological options, to cope with the situation. My starting point is Anren County, where Zhou Wenlu’s and Mrs. Luo’s home village, Green Water is located, and the state-led introduction of modern agricultural technologies that have enabled and compelled farmers HOW the PREDICAMENT AROSE 63 to migrate in the first place.1 In this regard I suggest that agricultural policy and, in particular, the promotion of modern agriculture is in fact a major, though largely ignored factor influencing rural-urban migration decisions, and one that deserves closer attention. The details of agricultural policy provided in this chapter need to be understood within the framework of the wider socio-political and economic developments and the overall political climate of the PRC. For most of China’s history, most of its people have worked as farmers. Transforming rural society was therefore seen as an important component of the journey towards a socialist revolution. Hence, the practical issue of fighting rural poverty and producing sufficient crops to feed the population has been the basis of every political development action.2 Considering that China needs to feed around one fifth of the global population with less than 10 percent of the world’s arable land (FAO 2020), the push towards agricultural modernization has been a continuous political issue in the nation’s efforts towards grain security, self-sufficiency and sovereignty. It is therefore no coincidence that agricultural policy is closely connected to a series of key moments in the PRC’s political and economic development (Watson 2001, 57). However, even though the debates around agriculture have been a crucial concern in PRC politics, this does not mean that the countryside has necessarily always been a priority for policy makers. On the contrary, agricultural production was seen as the basis for fostering the nation’s industrial development. Prioritizing industrialization, the PRC has followed a dual rural-urban development scheme. Thus, urban industrial development has ultimately grown at the expense of agriculture (ibid.; Day 2013, 2). Generally speaking, there have been two main phases of PRC agricultural policy: collectivization from the 1950s onwards, followed by de-collectivization after 1978. First, in the early 1950s, farmers went through land reform, whereby poor and landless farmers were allocated land expropriated from rich farmers and landowners. At the same time, the first collectivization campaigns were implemented and agrarian trade was gradually monopolized by the state (Watson 2001, 57-58; Aubert 2003, 424-425). In addition, population movements were tightly restricted through the enforcement of the hukou system of household registration (Cheng and Selden 1994). 1 Aware that ‘modern’ is a highly value-laden term, I use it here descriptively to denote (post-) Green Revolution technology. At the same time, in the context described, the term carries the sense of an aspired scientific modernity, which has been an integral part of the political push for modernization. 2 For details see Song (1998, 155); Watson (2001, 57); Aubert (2003, 424); Santos (2011, 488); and Day (2013, 2). 64 RURAL-URBAN MIGRATION AND AGRO-TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE IN POST-REFORM CHINA Collectivization culminated in the establishment of people’s communes in 1958. In the same year, my field site Longshi Township was renamed the Longshi People’s Commune, and Green Water Village became part of this commune (Wu 2010, 5). Organizationally, a commune was constituted of several villages and was subdivided into production brigades, each of which normally comprised one natural village. The brigades were further subdivided into production teams of about seven to eight households. At the brigade level, households were allocated collectively-owned land, labour, implements, draught animals, and reward in the form of work points. Green Water villagers stored the fruits of their collective labour in a communal granary. They also ate together. A side building of Zhou Wenlu’s house was transformed into a canteen. How this was organized is still documented on a large, now-fading table on the wall inside the building, which he was using as a shed in 2011. The overarching communes carried out production decisions as defined in the government’s plans and quotas. These envisaged a unified village economy, especially with regard to the production of rice. The communes were multifunctional, effectively combining local government, economic management, education, welfare services, and public security (Potter and Potter 1990; Watson 2001). Large-scale collectivization took place within the framework of the Great Leap Forward, a utopian development scheme that aimed to rapidly transform China into an industrialized nation, but was implemented at a high human cost (Perkins 1991, 478). Ultimately, the Great Leap Forward led to a serious agrarian crisis and disastrous famine from 1958 to 1961. As a result, collectivization was subsequently continued on a smaller scale. Moreover, offering a way out of this political and humanitarian crisis, the Chinese Green Revolution (1964-1967) gained momentum (Stavis 1974). This occurred parallel to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1967), a major political movement launched by Chairman Mao Zedong, which came to an end on his death in 1976.

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