RURAL DEVELOPMENT IN TRANSITIONAL CHINA THE LIBRARY OF PEASANT STUDIES NEW APPROACHES TO STATE AND PEASANT IN OTTOMAN HISTORY Edited by Halil Berktay and Suraiya Faroqui (No. 10 in the series) PLANTATIONS, PEASANTS AND PROLETARIANS IN COLONIAL ASIA Edited by E.Valentine Daniel, Henry Bernstein and Tom Brass (No. 11 in the series) NEW FARMERS’ MOVEMENTS IN INDIA Edited by Tom Brass (No. 12 in the series) CLASS, STATE AND AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY IN EGYPT Study of the Inverse Relationship between Farm Size and Land Productivity By Graham Dyer (No. 15 in the series) TOWARDS A COMPARATIVE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF UNFREE LABOUR Case Studies and Debates By Tom Brass (No. 16 in the series) PEASANTS, POPULISM AND POSTMODERNISM The Return of the Agrarian Myth By Tom Brass (No. 17 in the series) AN APARTHEID OASIS? Agricultural and Rural Livelihoods in Venda By Edward Lahiff (No. 20 in the series) LATIN AMERICAN PEASANTS Edited by Tom Brass (No. 21 in the series) RURAL DEVELOPMENT IN TRANSITIONAL CHINA The New Agriculture Edited by PETER HO JACOB EYFERTH EDUARD B.VERMEER FRANK CASS LONDON • PORTLAND, OR First published in 2004 in Great Britain by FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS Crown House, 47 Chase Side, Southgate, London N14 5BP, England This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/. and in the United States of America by FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS c/o ISBS, 920 NE 58th Avenue, Suite 300 Portland, Oregon 97213–3786 Website http://www.frankcass.com/ Copyright © 2004 Frank Cass & Co. Ltd. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data European Conference on Agriculture and Rural Development in China (6th: Leiden University) Rural development in transitional China: the new agriculture.— (The library of peasant studies ; no. 22) 1. Rural development—China—Congresses 2. Rural development— China—Sociological aspects—Congresses 3. Agriculture and state —China—Congresses 4. China—Rural conditions— Congresses I. Title II. Ho, Peter III. Eyferth, Jacob IV. Vermeer, Eduard B. 307.1′412′0951 ISBN 0-203-49929-8 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-58426-0 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0-7146-5549-X (Print Edition) (cloth) ISBN 0-7146-8432-5 (paper) ISSN 1462-219X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rural development in transitional China: the new agriculture/edited by Peter Ho, Jacob Eyferth, Eduard B.Vermeer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index ISBN 0-7146-5549- X (hardback)—ISBN 0-7146-8432-5 (paperback) 1. Agriculture-Economic aspects-China- Congresses. 2. Rural development-China-Congresses. 3. China-Rural conditions-Congresses. 4. Peasantry-China-Congresses. 5. China-Economic conditions-Congresses. I. Ho, Peter, 1968- II. Eyferth, Jan Jacob Karl, 1962– III. Vermeer, E.B. (Eduard B.) IV. Title. HD2097.R84 2003 330.951′009173′4–dc21 2003011126 This group of studies first appeared in ‘Rural Development in Transitional China: The New Agriculture’ a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies (ISSN 0306 6150), Vol.30/3&4 (April/July 2003) published by Frank Cass and Co. Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book. Contents Acknowledgements vi Explanatory Notes vii The Opening-Up of China’s Countryside 1 Jacob Eyferth , Peter Ho and Eduard B.Vermeer Regional Differences in Chinese Agriculture: Results from the 1997 First National 16 Agricultural Census Roberto Fanfani and Christina Brasili Rethinking the Peasant Burden: Evidence from a Chinese Village 44 Li Xiande How Not to Industrialize: Observations from a Village in Sichuan 69 Jacob Eyferth Determinants of Income from Wages in Rural Wuxi and Baoding: A Survey of 22 84 Villages Eduard B.Vermeer The Wasteland Auction Policy in Northwest China: Solving Environmental 111 Degradation and Rural Poverty? Peter Ho Ningxia’s Third Road to Rural Development: Resettlement Schemes as a Last 146 Means to Poverty Reduction? Rita Merkle A Comparative Study of Projection Models on China’s Food Economy 174 Xiaoyong Zhang Social Welfare in Rural China 205 Jutta Hebel Gender Difference in Inheritance Rights: Observations from a Chinese Village 228 Heather Xiaoquan Zhang Local State Corporatism and Private Business 250 Maria Edin Abstracts 265 Author Index 270 Subject Index 277 Acknowledgements The editors are indebted to many people for their support in the gestation of this edited volume. These are the participants at the Sixth European Conference on Agriculture and Rural Development in China (ECARDC) hosted at Leiden University; Anthony J.Saich; Willem Vogelsang; Wim Stokhof and Marieke de Booij. We would also like to thank Tom Brass for his continuous support in bringing out this publication. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support for the conference by the following organizations: the Ford Foundation (Beijing), the CNWS Research School for Asian, African and Amerindian Studies (Leiden), the International Institute of Asian Studies (Leiden), and the Dutch Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (Amsterdam). Explanatory Notes In the articles Chinese (traditional) units are used: 1 mu equals around 1/15 ha 1 Rmb or yuan equals around 1/8 US$ (in 2002) For a good understanding of the articles, it is necessary to give some explanation of the administrative organization of the state and the collective. The Chinese state is divided into two echelons: a national and a local level. The local level includes the province, the municipality or prefecture, and the county. The term ‘collective’ or ‘rural collective’ refers to the successor of the so-called people’s commune that was established in 1958 and disbanded in the mid-1980s. Apart from regional variations, the people’s commune generally consisted of three levels: the commune, the production brigade and the production team. After decollectivization, these were replaced respectively by the township, the administrative village and the natural village or villagers’ group (see figure below). Introduction: The Opening-Up of China’s Countryside JACOB EYFERTH, PETER HO and EDUARD B.VERMEER Peter Ho is Assistant Professor at the Environmental Policy Group of Wageningen University. He has published widely on issues of environment, rural development, institutional change and property rights in China, and is currently working on a monograph entitled Institutions in Transition: Land Ownership, Property Rights and Social Conflict in China. Jacob Eyferth is Assistant Professor for Modern Chinese History at Simon Frazer University, Vancouver. He has been a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies at Harvard University and at the Center for Historical Analysis, Rutgers University. Eduard B.Vermeer is Senior Lecturer at the Sinological Institute of Leiden University and Head of the Documentation and Research Centre for Contemporary China. He is a member of several academic advisory committees on China, including the board of the European ChinaAcademic Network at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University. The Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party in December 1978 marked the beginning of the economic reforms and the close of collectivism in the People’s Republic of China. With this, China had embarked on one of world history’s largest experiments in social engineering. The mere size of the country and its population (9.6 million km2 and almost 1.26 billion people in 2000) automatically imply a wide regional diversity in sociological, economic, political, ecological and ethnic terms. In addition, China’s rural development had to start from a weak resource base: the average amount of farmland per capita is only one-third of the world average, while its agrarian society features high hidden unemployment, low levels of education and healthcare, rural poverty, and large shortages in water and energy. When the people’s communes were dismantled in the mid-1980s, this was trumpeted as the ‘second land reform’ as opposed to the ‘first land reform’ during the early years of the People’s Republic. After more than three decades, the use right to rural land was once more returned to the tiller through lease. The lease system, termed the Household Contract Responsibility System, was no policy imposed from above, but sprang from the grassroots of rural society. It was the outcome of regional experiments borne out of dire need in the poverty-ridden county of Fengyang in Anhui province. The people’s commune had definitely failed as an economic and administrative unit. In the last four years before the economic reforms in 1978, grain production had stagnated at a level of around 280 million tons [State Statistical Bureau, 1990:12]. By allowing private lease, the state hoped to stimulate farmers’ incentives that had been dampened by years of collectivism. Shortly after the dismantling of the commune system, the grain harvest Rural development in transitional china 2 reached an all-time record of 400 million tons in 1984. The land lease system replaced the commandist and centralist commune system and privatized agricultural operation. 1 It is no overstatement to say that the past two decades in China have witnessed the fastest change ever and anywhere of a rural economy and society. Over 200 million rural inhabitants have been lifted out of absolute poverty, and tens of millions have become wealthier than the average urban resident. Agricultural output has been growing at a much faster pace than food demand, leaving the Chinese population healthier and better fed than in the past. The impressive growth figures of the Chinese economy were, certainly in the 1990s, to a great extent propelled by the rural (industrial) economy.