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Capitalist Agrarian Change and the End of the Revolutionary Peasant Dialectic: Chinese Communist Party Rural Policies in Long-Term Perspective

Alexander F. Day

Introduction

Peasant incomes have risen considerably in Meitan County, Guizhou, since the late 1990s. The county government has promoted tea production for almost 20 years now, turning the county into one of China’s top producers. In the process, many peasants have become commercial and entrepreneurial farmers, or have transferred their land to them through specialised cooperatives. The county now boasts more than 500 tea enterprises, mostly processers formed with local capital that contract with farmers for tea leaves, grow them on land they lease or buy them on the spot market. Rising incomes have led local producers to lease land in neighbouring counties to grow even more tea, and in turn peasants from those counties have begun to pick tea leaves as itinerant agricultural labourers in Meitan – class divisions somewhat aligning with administrative borders. The county has even published a book about how good it is to come to work as a ‘peasant’ labourer in Meitan.¹ Class differentiation, land markets, new spatial arrangements, poverty relief, new forms of cooperatives, agrobusiness and modern capitalist farming: these linked processes are transforming the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCPs) relationship to the peasantry, and perhaps bringing about the end of the category itself.

This chapter puts contemporary rural policy into the long-term perspective of the Party’s shifting relationship to the peasantry. The Party has always aimed to maintain and improve the livelihood of the peasantry through the transformation of rural society, ending debilitating poverty, usury, high rents and rural corruption while breaking it from feudal social relations. Yet, at the same time, the Party also intended to push China towards socialism, necessitating a release and development of the rural productive forces and their integration into wider, national developments. These changes in the structure of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) political economy meant that the social form of the peasantry – the particular social forms through which rural residents produced and reproduced themselves – had to be understood historically, and, more specifically, as a historically limited category. After the CCP came to rule in 1949, and as agriculture came to be structurally linked to national development though the institutionalisation of a rural–urban divide, the broader goals of political economy came to dominate the narrower goal of advancing peasant livelihoods, with rural residents having little power to challenge that dominance. Thus, this chapter questions the idea that there has been an enduring alliance between the Party and a sociological category of peasants.

While I develop the changing meaning of the category ‘revolutionary peasant dialectic’ throughout the chapter, it is important to note from the outset that there was neither a stable meaning for the category ‘peasant’ nor a simple or stable relationship between the Party and the peasantry as its social basis. Most basically, by ‘dialectic’ I am pointing to the historical movement and transformation of social classes and categories in relation to the changing political economy of production and social reproduction. How ‘the peasantry’ reacted to the rapid revolutionary social and political changes that China was undergoing in the twentieth century was complex because the category contained multiple unstable classes with differing social and political tendencies. ‘The peasant’, therefore, was always a contingent political category. Instead of an enduring alliance with a social basis, from the beginning, Party politics and policy had to mediate the relationship between the Party’s revolutionary and developmental goals on the one hand, and the complex social tendencies contained within the category of the peasantry on the other.

This chapter breaks the century-long relationship between the Party and the peasantry into four periods. In the first, the period of the civil war, the Party was forced into the countryside and developed a dialectical and revolutionary understanding of peasant tendencies, with an understanding that concrete analysis of peasant classes was crucial to the Party’s victory against the Nationalists.

In the second, the socialist period of 1949 through to the 1970s, Party rural policy was guided by an understanding of the interaction between the overall political economy and the dialectical tendencies of agricultural producers. Thus, while the long-term historical goal of the Party was the transformation of China into a socialist industrial nation, attention always had to be paid to how various peasant classes reacted to rural policies that promoted the development along that historical line. Those reactions not only affected the rural legitimacy of the Party, clearly very important to the leadership, but also the development of the agrarian productive forces. Managing the Party’s important relationship to rural dwellers meant analysis of potentially dangerous peasant tendencies that could block further progressive development. Collectivisation was to push rural society towards modern, scaled-up agriculture while it facilitated surplus extraction, though tensions rose as the Party often misread or ignored peasant interests in the process.

In the post-socialist reform period from the late 1970s, both the historical vision of the Party (Dirlik 1989) and its understanding of the peasant were transformed. For one, after 20-plus years of industrialisation, economic development was less reliant on rural surplus than in the past. Further, within the context of China’s changing relationship to the world – a post-socialist relinking to global capitalism – the focus of China’s political economy was shifting in two senses. First, there was a shift from increasing absolute production towards relative productivity, meaning greater attention to technological change and efficiency, under the rubric of the Four Modernisations. Second, attention to the development of the productive forces came to dominate the Party’s vision, and the goal of a revolutionary transformation of social relations was shunted so far into the future that it receded beyond the horizon. With peasant developments playing a lesser role, agricultural production was returned to household management, and land, still owned by the village collective, was contracted to peasant families. This institutional compromise put agricultural modernisation on hold and restrained class differentiation while the Party focused on the technological development and expansion of the industrial economy along with its new connections to global capitalism. Throughout this period, the Party shifted its attention to a new, urban population for its legitimacy, and inequality between urban and rural residents grew through the 1990s.

From the perspective of rural China, this reform period is now over. In the post-reform period, beginning around 2008, the Party has renewed its focus on agricultural modernisation, but without any vision of a revolutionary transformation of social relations; rather, contemporary modernisation entails capitalist agrarian change, with class differentiation seen as playing a positive role in agricultural development. New rural institutions of capitalist agrarian change (land transfer with three-level property rights, specialised cooperatives, dragonhead agribusiness firms and more integrated value chains) together with urbanisation, a realignment of food security and the elimination of extreme rural poverty characterise this period. More rapid disintegration of the rural population into various classes means that, after almost a century of interaction with the peasantry, the Party is now bringing about its end as a pivotal political and sociological category.

Civil War

Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, the two main founders of the CCP, viewed the end of rural poverty, suffering and unequal landholdings as important goals of the Party; however, they had contrasting understandings of the peasantry. Li was more a populist, viewing the peasantry as a singular if distressed class, in need of organisation by China’s progressive youth but potentially a powerful force. Not only that, Li tied the goals of the Party to the liberation of the peasantry: ‘If they are not liberated, then our whole nation will not be liberated; their sufferings are the sufferings of our whole nation’ (Meisner 1974, 81). Chen had a much more pessimistic view of the peasantry as backwards, feudal and petty bourgeois in class character, sustaining a consciousness that could not lead in a progressive, revolutionary direction. Chen was clear that ‘the communist movement must rely on factory workers as its main force’, asking: ‘How can the communist movement become a mass movement in the owner-cultivator dominated Chinese countryside?’ (Huang 1975, 279). Chen’s view was dominant in the intellectual ferment of the May Fourth Movement, out of which the Party was formed.

But, thrown into the countryside in the late 1920s, the Party that Li and Chen had formed began to bring these two images of the peasant together in a new dialectical understanding of history (Huang 1975; Day 2013, 20). Mao’s 1927 ‘Hunan Report’ seemed to take Li’s populism even further, arguing for the potential of spontaneous peasant revolt. Yet, conversely, Mao cautioned that the peasantry was not a singular class, but riven with class differences, and only deep investigations into the tendencies of peasant classes would allow the Party to understand how to mould sections of them into a revolutionary force. Peasants were neither spontaneously revolutionary nor inherently conservative; rather, peasant classes contained multiple tendencies that had to be analysed and carefully managed. Crucial were the middle peasants, who had a ‘vacillating attitude’, according to Mao, potentially going either way in support of the revolution or not, depending on many factors (Mao 1965a, 31). This was the ‘dialectic of rural revolution’, as Philip Huang has called it (Huang 1975, 292).

Over time, the Party came to see the complex tendencies of the peasant as crucial to revolutionary success and survival. Peasants exhibited a ‘dual nature’ (liangchong xing 两重性) (Kelliher 1994, 390); there was both a tendency towards rebellious activity and a conservative tendency towards petty-bourgeois protection of individual landholdings. For the revolutionary Party, the goal was to accentuate and direct the former into a powerful force while minimising the latter, which could dangerously lead towards class differentiation and block further socialist development. Thus, in 1937, Mao noted that peasants were the ‘real motive force of historical development in Chinese feudal society’, but that they could not transform rebellion into revolutionary change without the leadership of the proletariat and the CCP (Mao 1965b, 308–9). They were a force that needed directing, as they exhibited dual tendencies: rebellion against feudalism but without fomenting new relations or forces of production that could replace it. Thus, Mao (1965b, 324) declared:

Only under the leadership of the proletariat can the poor and middle peasants achieve their liberation, and only by forming a firm alliance with the poor and middle peasants can the proletariat lead the revolution to victory.

Incorrectly analysing the dual nature of the peasantry during the revolution led to many policy mistakes, from which the Party had to backtrack. This was often a matter of the Party moving too fast, without attention to the interests of particular classes of peasants, especially the crucial middle peasants. For example, as both land reform and marriage reform moved into a more radical phase in the CCP base area of Jinggangshan at the end of the 1920s, it ran into trouble, leading to serious setbacks, as members of the lower-level local elite and intermediate classes resisted changes (Averill 1987; Huang 1975). In the Chinese Soviet Republic of the early 1930s, overly radical policies led to a ‘class coalition [that] effectively excluded most of rural society’ (Opper 2018, 45). A similar but more expansive story could be told of radical land reform in the years after the end of World War II but before 1949 (DeMare 2019, 12–18). More generally, as Qi Xiaolin (2015) has shown, peasants joined the CCP in the civil war for complex reasons, beyond class and nationalist logics, often just looking for better material conditions or seeing the army as a way to move up in status.

Socialist Period

Land reform, completed by the spring of 1953, was a first step in breaking the chains of rural poverty, and it was the most important process for building the Party’s popularity and legitimacy with the peasantry. A crucial goal for the Party, therefore, was that peasant livelihoods not be negatively affected by the transformation of rural society (Shue 1980, 146). Further, from the Party’s historical view, breaking feudal social relations would free up rural productive forces, allowing for an initial expansion of agricultural production. But the Party had always argued that land reform and the agrarian revolution should not be confused with a socialist revolution (Mao 1965b, 330). Land reform also created dangers for the Party, potentially reproducing a petty-bourgeois peasantry with an interest in maintaining their newly won economic positions as landholders. Such a peasantry could either form a block to socialist development – with the revolution stalling at a transitional stage – or, as economic differences re-emerged, produce the sprouts of a new rural capitalism. But there were twin dangers: the absolute egalitarianism of ‘agrarian socialism’, which would be a block to modernisation and economic advancement; and class differentiation, which would block the development of collectivisation.

In the early 1950s, the small peasant economy (xiaonong jingji 小农经济) was not simply judged along the lines of its effect on rural society and peasant livelihoods. More important still was the relationship between agriculture and the overall political economy of socialist development – the Party’s developmental goals of extraction and agricultural modernisation – for agriculture was the only significant source of surplus to fuel the industrialisation process (Walker 1966, 2–4). How to mobilise the productive powers of the peasantry without the short-term, individual interests of peasants interfering with the long-term goal of industrialisation was a key problem for the Party. Some form of collectivisation was seen as a solution to these problems (Shue 1980; Teiwes and Sun 1993, 8; Walker 1966). Party leaders agreed on the long-term goal of agricultural modernisation, meaning the scale-up and eventual mechanisation of agricultural production and, therefore, also the end of the small peasant economy (Walker 1966) – implying the end of the peasant.

Gaining access to rural surplus would not be easy, however. At the time it commenced with its First Five-Year Plan (FYP), the Soviet Union had far larger per capita agricultural production than the PRC did as it began its First FYP (Tang 1967; see also Ash 2006). Despite 300 million peasants receiving over 40 per cent of total arable land during land reform (Ye 2015, 316), in China there simply was not enough land per capita, no matter how equally it was distributed, to create prosperous farming households (Hou 2016, 10–11). This placed a real material limit on industrialisation for the new Chinese state, as the rural surplus available to it was much smaller, and this further meant that the PRC had an even greater need to develop agriculture as it extracted surplus. In other words, it was not good enough to just take control over as large a surplus as possible, the overall production of agriculture had to be increased. By the early 1940s, it was clear to Mao that the development of agricultural production would rely on ‘getting the peasants organised’ (quoted in Hou 2016, 53).

These three goals – sustaining peasant livelihoods, extraction and development – thus implied a fourth: the revolutionary transformation of rural social relations. While a value in and of itself, how this fourth goal was related to the others – and the tension between them – was a key political question for the CCP, and one around which many disagreements formed. It was mainly a question of temporality: How fast should rural society be collectivised? How much would peasants have to sacrifice in current improvements for future gains, and how far off were those future gains? Looking ahead, one long-term reading of these questions might suggest that peasant sacrifices never led to the imagined future gains, as the nation forgot its early promises as it returned to global capitalism.

Whatever one’s political stance on these questions, peasant labour had to be mobilised, and peasant consciousness could make or break the developmental process. While a narrow focus on individual interests was seen as a conservative barrier to the Party’s developmental goals, after 1949, the Party had to worry both about pushing the peasantry too fast towards socialism, leading to flagging incentives for production, and about allowing class differentiation and attendant social instability to re-emerge if socialist progress proved too weak. How to keep peasants producing as the state extracted heavily from the rural economy, while at the same time not allowing class differences to re-emerge, was a complex political question, and one that deeply shaped the Party’s relationship to the peasantry. The 1953 introduction of the unified purchasing and sale system, creating a state monopoly on grain marketing, led to forms of peasant resistance to the extraction of grain, including the hiding of surpluses, attacks on cadre and manipulation of household classification (Wemheuer 2019, 105–6). Political campaigns, class labels and shifting remuneration policies were all attempts to mediate this tension, as were the use of supply and marketing and credit cooperatives, which were designed to help align peasant interests with collectivisation (Shue 1980, 275–8).

The factional mapping of political disagreements over rural policy has probably been overdrawn and overdetermined by the fractures of the late 1960s (Teiwes and Sun 1993, 1999). However, political disagreements did continually emerge during the socialist period. In 1950, for example, Gao Gang, Party secretary of the Northeast Bureau, had argued for rapid collectivisation, but Liu Shaoqi disagreed, arguing that conditions were not ripe and that gains made by the private agricultural economy should be consolidated first. Mechanisation was needed before collective farming (Hou 2016, 80; Bo 1991, 207). Here, Liu was following the then accepted Party theory of ‘New Democracy’, in which freedoms for the petty-bourgeois economy would be allowed for a period of time, though it was to remain somewhat ‘restricted’. New Democracy implied that the Party had more to fear from ‘agrarian socialism’, a historical dead-end in which peasant egalitarian consciousness would infect collectivisation, blocking agricultural modernisation (Day 2013, 22). In this period, in other words, some differences between peasant households should be tolerated; egalitarianism was a greater danger than class differentiation. But, at the time, Mao had begun to shift away from this view. A new dispute involving Liu happened the next year. In response to the decline of mutual aid teams in some areas of rural Shanxi, the province sent a report to the North China Bureau, stating that, as land reform had allowed peasants to improve their livelihoods, some more well-off peasants were pushing not ‘in the direction of modernisation and collectivisation that we demand, but in the direction of a rich peasantry’ (quoted in Kuhn 2002, 104). The province argued that a greater push in the direction of mutual aid teams and collectivisation was needed. However, the North China Bureau and Liu disagreed, maintaining that class differentiation was less of a problem than excessive egalitarianism. Mao sided against Liu in this case, creating a greater space for collectivisation (Day 2013, 23–4; Hou 2016, 107–13).

Collectivisation was made a featured aspect of the Party’s General Line in 1953, and, despite earlier disagreements, a Party consensus was developing that the collectivisation of agriculture before mechanisation was both possible and could aid the development of agriculture, although at a measured pace (Teiwes and Sun 1993, 8; Walker 1966). Amid rising tensions, peasant fears of the end of private ownership led to animal slaughter and other activities disruptive of agricultural production (Walker 1966, 20–1). Conversely, the agricultural sector was falling behind in its contribution to industrialisation during the First FYP (Walker 1966, 26–8; Shue 1980, 278–82). After a period of consolidation, the formation of agricultural producers’ cooperatives accelerated from the summer of 1955 with higher-stage agricultural producers’ cooperatives following in 1956 – a ‘high tide’ of collectivisation pushed forward by Mao. This high tide was followed by another period of consolidation and ‘opposing rash advances’ (fan maojin 反冒进) from 1956 to 1957, and then another, even greater, acceleration in the Great Leap Forward (GLF) (Teiwes and Sun 1999, ch. 1).

The GLF combined the rapid collectivisation of rural social and productive life into communes, a decentralisation of planning and industrialisation, and an expansion of extraction from the agricultural sector. It expressed a belief that peasant consciousness had been transformed, and the Party no longer had to fear backlash from a conservative peasantry; rather, according to Mao, it was the Party that had been acting more conservatively than the peasantry. The rapid collectivisation of 1955–56 proved that. As household reproduction, not just the household organisation of production, was collectivised, the rural family form itself was called into question. The socialisation of social reproduction, not just of production, briefly became the communist horizon (Day 2021). But this occurred just as extraction rose far beyond its sustainable material limits, and the socialisation of social reproduction was reduced to yet another form of self-reliant mobilisation of rural resources, of sacrifice for the greater good of socialism. Far from ending the peasant through the transformation of rural collectives – responsible for their own profits and losses, and built through self-reliance – into ‘communist communes’ (Teiwes and Sun 1999, 95) or state farms ‘owned by the whole people’, and far from ending the gendered division of labour through the socialisation of social reproduction, both social forms continued in often hidden forms as yet more sacrifice to the future (Hershatter 2011; Eyferth 2015, 134).

As is well known, the GLF and the collective system collapsed, taking a horrific human toll. The rural legitimacy of the Party was severely damaged, and peasants went their own way to survive, suspicious of collective approaches. Yet, as Felix Wemheuer (2019, 147) argues, ‘neither the CCP nor Mao seem to have suffered terminal reputational damage even in rural areas’. In the short term, the supply system was rebalanced, and the famine subsided (Wemheuer 2019, 164). The more rapid urbanisation of the GLF period was reversed, with more than 20 million people moved back into the countryside in the early 1960s, and a firmer boundary between the rural and urban spheres constructed (Brown 2012, 79). In the early 1960s, a new ‘workable system’ (Unger 2002, 9) was built through political compromise, based on three levels of collective organisation: commune, brigade and production team. While Party centre documents formally discuss the devolution of power from the commune down to the brigade, then quickly amending the structure to place power at the level of the production team, the reality was that rural collective structures were being rebuilt from the ground up. The historical trajectory remained an evolution of power moving up to the brigade, as discussions in the late 1970s show (Teiwes and Sun 2016, 30–6), but now much more gradual than envisioned in the late 1950s, and ultimately the trend shifted in the other direction.

While this workable structure was a political compromise, now leaning towards a stress on incentives for production, the fear of class differentiation did not disappear. Rather than playing a central role in structuring the revolutionary transformation of rural social relations, however, that fear was, for a period, mainly relegated to the sphere of propaganda and political campaign. Mao, in particular, feared that as some did better and others worse, class differentiation and ‘spontaneous capitalist tendencies’ would re-emerge, and more well-off peasants would ‘go it alone’ (Baum 1975, 12). The conservative tendency of petty-bourgeois peasants would block collectivisation. Mao pushed for a ‘bottom line’, with limits on how far experiments with household responsibility systems could go (Wemheuer 2019, 179). At the same time, class differentiation led to the emergence of a rural constituency against household contracting (Unger 2002, 76). Nonetheless, in some rural areas, black markets emerged and private grain traders increased, as did other forms of peasant illegal activity for survival (Wemheuer 2019, 180, 189). The slower collectivisation of this new rural structure, and the problems that it engendered, needed a political complement: the Socialist Education Movement, which began in autumn 1962. It was difficult in this movement to know:

where to draw the line between the legitimate (small-scale) private commercial undertakings of individual peasants and illegal speculation and profiteering by peasants with serious spontaneous capitalist tendencies; and how to classify, analyse, and deal with erroneous tendencies on the Party of members of various class strata in the countryside. (Baum 1975, 48)

In the early 1960s, at a moment of economic rebuilding in the wake of the GLF, most members of the Party leaned towards more liberal interpretations, in which the vast majority of peasants were to be seen as part of the productive forces, and to be educated but protected as such (Baum 1975, 49). As in the revolution, a class analysis of peasant tendencies, specifically focusing on the middle peasants, was vital. Care needed to be taken to make sure middle peasants were not ‘pushed over to the side of the landlords and rich peasants’ (Baum 1975, 51). During this period, however, as ‘peasants learned the hard way that they could not rely on the state to survive’, ‘the state’s ability to mobilize peasants for political campaigns of any kind seems to have been diminished’ (Wemheuer 2019, 184, 186).

Yet, if a more ‘liberal’ line on peasant tendencies emerged in the early 1960s, this was to change with the Cultural Revolution in the second half of the decade, even if the weight of that movement was more urban than rural (Unger 2002, 51; Baum 1971). As I have argued elsewhere, the peasant dialectic reached a breaking point, in which more static images of the peasant as either a revolutionary carrier of socialism or a conservative class of small property owners contended with each other, and concrete material analysis suffered (Day 2019, 171). Even before the Cultural Revolution had begun in 1966, the developmental gains from the ‘workable’ collective system in the countryside were pushing against their limits. By the late 1960s, incentivising peasant production without giving producing class differentiation was increasingly difficult to maintain. The Dazhai system of remuneration, which worked by team members judging each other’s attitude towards work, was one of the more developed systems. Yet, mutually judging attitudes led to contention between team members and, as Jonathan Unger (2002, 83–5) found in Chen Village, over time, teams moved away from carrying out such evaluations, allowing the system to become a rigid structure that no longer offered much incentive to work harder or better.

Likewise, political motivation largely channelled through the rural class status system did not prove effective. As Unger (2002, 48) puts it:

The Party had been unable to live up to its economic promises of the collectivisation ‘high tide’ and Great Leap Forward; throughout the 1960s and 1970s most of the countryside remained impoverished. In lieu of prosperity, the Party could provide the majority of good-class peasants with marginal advantages (both material and nonmaterial) offered by the class line.

In the 1970s, policies increasingly shifted towards investments in mechanisation and farmland capital construction, with a 1975 goal of mechanising 70 per cent of agriculture by 1980 (Teiwes and Sun 2016, 21–3). This included the period of Hua Guofeng’s leadership following Mao’s death, with a big push towards mechanisation, irrigation and fertilisers; an increase in state investment; changes in agricultural pricing and taxation; and discussions of raising accounting from the team to the brigade level, leading in 1979 to big increases in agricultural production, especially for grain, and rising peasant incomes (Teiwes and Sun 2016, chs 1 and 3, 119 for production increases). But the Party continued to worry that raising the accounting level to the brigade would hurt peasant incentives to produce and the legitimacy of the Party in the countryside; likewise, while the Dazhai system advocated for the end of private plots, the Party cautioned against their removal (Wemheuer 2019, 248).

Reform Period

This big push proved unsustainable, politically if not economically, with the emergence of the reform period. In part to reduce the costs of agricultural modernisation and the state deficit, agriculture was de-collectivised and farming shifted back to household farming in the early 1980s: the ‘burden’ of agriculture on the state had to be reduced, with sharp decreases in state investment in agriculture in 1980 and 1981 (Teiwes and Sun 2016, 148–53, 203 for investment figures). While experiments in responsibility systems had existed for a long time, the main push towards de-collectivisation, despite narratives to the contrary, came from above (Teiwes and Sun 2016, 282; Unger 2002, 95–106). With an increasing use of markets to make economic decisions, a relinking to global capitalism, and the depoliticised developmentalism of the reform period, the historical dialectic of peasant tendencies was reversed. The petty-bourgeois focus on individual interests, and a degree of class differentiation, came to be seen as progressive, supposedly leading to entrepreneurial dynamism and economic development. Over time, this went even further than the rural developmentalism of early 1950s New Democracy. The individual land ownership of petty-bourgeois peasants was increasingly interpreted positively as a progressive force. Here, the fear of class differentiation largely fades from view, as does the goal of transforming rural social relations. For Wang Xiaoqiang and Bai Nansheng, the reform period was defined by the shift to a commodity economy with a focus on efficiency of production, instead of simple quantitative expansion. In their famous formulation of the time, peasants were differentiated by their ‘quality’ (sushi 素质), indicating ‘the quality of engaging in commodity production and management’ – the degree, in other words, to which they had an ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ (quoted in Day 2013, 41). This formulation aligned with a growing general discrimination against peasants, who were considered of ‘low quality’; peasants were only to be valued when they broke from their peasantness and took on entrepreneurial qualities through class differentiation. Although Deng Xiaoping thought that class ‘polarisation’ could be avoided, he commented in 1985 that ‘some people will become prosperous first, others later’.² Nonetheless, in the early 1980s rural poverty receded, but then rose again in the late 1980s.

After de-collectivisation, land remained owned by the village but contracted to households, with contracts growing in length over time. Thus, while this returned rural production to the household, without the sale of land, class differentiation was limited, effecting a compromise land policy that aimed at social stability, even as greater crop diversification and new rural markets opened a space for greater peasant profits. With this the 1980s saw the emergence of the celebrated 10,000-yuan households (wanyuanhu 万元户), with incomes far above the rural average. This de-collectivisation, together with higher prices for agricultural goods, also gave a one-off boost to agricultural production, and it further allowed surplus labour to work outside of the household in burgeoning local industries (Unger 2002, 112). The rural economy was helped by the rapid expansion of these township and village enterprises (Oi 1999). But the new land system produced a block to the further scale-up of agriculture, with land fragmented into tiny plots worked by household labour, even if the Party continued to envision that future. As Du Runsheng, a key Party leader tied to the policy of the household responsibility system, said in 1983: ‘We do not want to maintain petty production forever; we will move on to big modern production’ (Xu 2014, 198). The institutional divide between the rural and urban spheres also remained in place, even if the movement of migrant labour into the cities was loosened. Through the early 2000s, the Party continued to use the rural–urban divide as a way to shift urban problems, whether economic, environmental or social, onto the rural population, most notably, the reproductive costs of a cheap manufacturing, assembly and construction workforce. In any case, with the initial boost to agricultural production in the early 1980s and the costs of a scaled-up, modernised agriculture on hold, the state shifted focus to reforming the urban, industrial economy.

The early 1990s was a period of rapid economic growth in the countryside that took on an independent dynamic, driven by rising farmgate prices and the development of rural industries. This period of economic growth again reduced rural poverty, and in the years of urban recession after the suppression of the 1989 protests, the resilience of the rural economy allowed the Party to lean on the peasantry for legitimacy. The question of scaling up agriculture also continued on hold as the Party extended land contracts to 30 years in 1993, even as Deng Xiaoping argued that, in the long run, agricultural modernisation and mechanisation was impossible without scaling up agriculture (Xu 2017). Yet both the rural and urban economies quickly began to overheat, leading to dangerous inflation and retrenchment from the central state (Keidel 2007, 55), which in turn led to a prolonged period of stagnation in the countryside from 1997 into the early 2000s. This period of stagnation made it hard for the state to modernise and scale-up the agricultural economy, as it would mean the loss of land for a large number of farming families and the production of a great deal of inequality, harming the legitimacy and popularity of the Party. In the process, the income differentials between the rural and urban spheres were exacerbated, and many villages came to be hollowed out as more and more rural workers migrated to cities for work (Day and Schneider 2018).

Further, this was a period in which the Party shifted problems of urban unemployment onto the rural sphere. Here we see the key tension within state policy towards the countryside during the reform period; the Party saw the countryside both as a site of potential capital accumulation (i.e. of profits) and as a place onto which the state could push urban social, economic and environmental problems. But it was hard to do both at the same time, and, in the 1990s, the Party leaned towards the latter in its treatment of the rural sphere. During periods of economic or political stress in China, this tension comes to the fore, and the autonomy of the rural sphere – the degree to which it was institutionally insulated from the rest of the economy – was a double-edged sword. In the late 1990s moment of stagnation, agrarian modernisation had to wait yet again; the compromise system of land property relations would hold. However, the general long-term aim of the Party remained to push towards modernisation and the scale-up of agriculture when the time was right, and experimentation in that direction was ongoing (Ye 2015, 320–1). In the process, the Party’s relationship to the peasantry, especially for the local party-state, was in tatters and rural protest were on the rise (Day 2013). Yet peasant anger often focused on local governments, and as they protested against tax burdens and corrupt land expropriation, peasants often called on the Party and state to intervene on their behalf.

Responding to the rise in rural protests, the early 2000s – coinciding with the early years of the Hu–Wen administration – was a mixed period in rural reform. On the one hand, Party policy documents continued to push for agricultural modernisation and structural reform. On the other hand, the Party issued a series of ‘number one documents’ filled with pro-peasant ameliorative reforms and agricultural subsidies that aimed at stabilising rural society, leading to a renewed reduction of rural poverty but seeming to contradict the calls for a scaling up of agriculture. The latter held the day in the early 2000s, at least in terms of public pronouncements; seemingly, before it could turn back to agricultural modernisation, it first had to set about stabilising the rural scene with a series of reforms, including, most famously, the abolition of the agricultural tax by 2006. This new attention to the peasantry on the part of the party-state was partially in response to public criticism of the conditions of rural life coming from the countryside as well as pro-peasant activists and intellectuals, but it also opened space for more public debate on the conditions of the peasant (Day 2013; Day and Schneider 2018). However, this more open space was short-lived, and by around 2008 not only had Party policy shifted back towards agricultural modernisation, but the more open political environment was closed off as with the new Xi administration. While the compromising land policies of the household responsibility system, which placed limits on the transfer of land and thus the re-emergence of unequal landholding, was a check on class differentiation, the reform-period logic of the Party’s relationship to the peasantry implied an eventual move in that direction, and, by the late 2000s, capitalist agrarian change (Zhang and Donaldson 2008) in China was clearly accelerating.

Post-Reform Period

By the late 1990s, the commodification of the urban and industrial workforce was largely complete, effecting the capitalist transformation of the urban sector, with China entering the World Trade Organization in 2001. But agrarian capitalism took a little longer, emerging more fully in the late 2000s. With that transition largely under way, from the perspective of rural China, the reform period is now over. In this time of capitalist agrarian change, while ‘the peasant’ remains a necessary political category for the CCP, if for no other reason than its importance to Party history and legitimacy, its original dialectical meaning has been lost.

The post-reform period emerged following the turn of the millennium with the weakening of the check on class differentiation that the household responsibility system provided and an embrace of capitalist agrarian change and scaled-up agriculture. With this latest shift, Party policy aims at pushing many less entrepreneurial peasants to give up control over their land and labour, becoming agricultural or urban workers, without the Party losing legitimacy. Conversely, rural and urban entrepreneurs alike are invited to invest in agricultural and rural industrial enterprises. Whether one works in agriculture in the countryside or as a migrant worker in the city, the category ‘peasant’ has less and less purchase.

In the new era of capitalist agrarian change, the structural self-containment of the rural sphere, which the state had used for crisis management and which rural activists of the early 2000s believed could be aligned to help protect peasants, is being significantly weakened. In its place, the state is in the process of transforming the rural sphere into another site of capitalist accumulation, one in which investments in efficiency and productivity are to lead to food security on the one hand, and in which class differentiation will lead to the divergent production of workers and capitalists on the other. Since the ameliorative rural policies of the early Hu–Wen administration, especially the abolition of the agricultural tax in 2005–06, the Party has undertaken deeper structural and ideological changes that affect the countryside and the Party’s relationship to the peasantry, expressed in a series of new rural policies and institutions. These changes can be grouped under four general categories, discussed below, with the capitalist agrarian change the main driving force of policy alteration: scaled-up capitalist agriculture, urbanisation and rural–urban integration, food security and poverty relief.

While many of these individual policies and institutions emerged at earlier times, they have become more coordinated and their implementation accelerated following the abolition of the agricultural tax, first under the umbrella of the New Socialist Countryside policy framework of the Hu–Wen administration (Looney 2020) and now under the framework of Rural Revitalisation for the Xi administration. The long-term strategy for realising capitalist agrarian change was most clearly announced in the 2018 National Strategic Plan for Rural Vitalisation (2018–22), with the aim of basically completing agricultural modernisation by 2035 and full rural revitalisation with wealthy farmers by 2050. With the Party finally completing this goal, the peasant and the rural sphere as separate categories would come to an end and rural land and labour would be more fully commoditised.

The central strategy for attaining these goals is the capitalist transformation of agriculture, producing scaled-up farming, although households remain the dominant farm operator. While reform-period agriculture was defined by the compromising land policy of the household responsibility system, which aimed at limiting class differentiation and maintaining the rural sphere as a place onto which urban problems could be shifted, the post-reform period is shaped by a new political economy of farming built around the transfer of land from smallholders to larger-scale commercial and entrepreneurial farmers (Zhang 2015).³ Peasant farmers are being replaced by these ‘new-style subjects of agriculture’ (xinxing nongye jingying zhuti 新型农业经营主题). Because the fragmentation and abandonment of fields limits the development of agricultural productive forces, according to the Party, ‘the form of dividing land to the households is unable to sustain agricultural modernisation’ (Xu 2017). While village-owned and household-contracted agricultural land had been transferred to some extent since the 1980s, the process has accelerated dramatically from the late 2000s, clarifying three different levels of property rights: village collective ownership, household rights with long-term contracts and shorter-term leasing of managerial or use rights (Ye 2015). The transfer of agricultural land use rights occurs through several different mechanisms, managed individually by households, by the local state, village collectives or new specialised cooperatives. By 2018, the use rights of about 40 per cent of contracted farm land had been transferred, and transferred land is now responsible for about 10 per cent of rural income.⁴ The construction of ‘high-standard fields’, irrigated land with good soil that allows for concentrated modern agriculture, has become a central priority for the state and its largest agricultural investment expense, mirroring somewhat the agricultural policies of Hua Guofeng in the late 1970s, but this time with capitalist social relations. Problems remain, however, as many large-scale operators enter farming at least in part for government subsidies, and land and bill abandonment abound when profits are not made.⁵

The modernisation and capitalisation of agriculture was further promoted by the expansion of dragonhead enterprises (Schneider 2017) and contract farming (Zhang 2012). Dragonheads, capitalist agricultural enterprises, are supposed to lead farmers to modern agriculture through a contracting relationship with households and specialised cooperatives, leading to the use of modern inputs, a focus on quality production as well as yields, increasing control over the labour process and the vertical integration of agricultural production. This last point is key. China is moving towards an agro-food system in which farming is integrated into value chains facilitating the production of higher-value food goods, and in which profits increasingly accrue in the food processing and marketing industries. Specialised cooperatives, which were codified by a 2007 law, further enable the integration of rural households into land, input and product markets; village land shareholding cooperatives have become an especially common way for villages to lease land to scaled-up farmers, with rent dividends then being paid to villagers, who also sometimes work for wages on the new farms. This was a defeat for early 2000s pro-peasant activists who hoped to use comprehensive cooperatives as a way to insulate peasants from the market (Day and Schneider 2018). In the wake of these changes, the populist category of ‘peasant’, representing a unified category, is quickly losing its political efficacy. More rapid rural class differentiation has emerged among China’s roughly 280 million people who work in farming (Zhang 2015), with commercial, contract and entrepreneurial farmers and semi-proletarian and proletarian farm workers increasingly taking the place of peasants.

Rural–urban integration has been promoted heavily since the early 2000s. The Third Plenary Session of the Seventeenth Party Congress in 2013, for example, specifically targeted the integration of rural and urban non-agricultural land markets while keeping agricultural land as a separate and protected category, with a red line at 120 million hectares of farmland. In other words, the real divide in land markets is increasingly between agricultural and non-agricultural land rather than between rural and urban land markets, although this has not stopped the requisitioning of agricultural land for urban and industrial uses, which also accelerated from 2008. The reform of the hukou, the resident permit system that separates agricultural and non-agricultural workers, continues, though at a slower pace than the reform of agricultural land use rights. Nonetheless, rapid urbanisation proceeds, facilitated by new policies since the beginning of the Xi administration. The urban population first surpassed that of the rural in 2011, and in 2020 it was 64 per cent of the total, up from less than 20 per cent at the beginning of the reform period.⁶ During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, at least 50 million migrant workers were sent back or returned to the countryside, showing that the state still uses the rural–urban divided to maintain social stability, especially in the cities, when necessary,⁷ even if the capacity to do this has weakened over time. Further, rapid urbanisation does not mean inclusive urbanisation, and rural migrants still face a lot of discrimination in cities, with larger cities even setting population caps. While rural migrants may shed the category of ‘peasant’ to take on new identities in the cities they move to – ‘new workers’ (xin gongren 新工人) or ‘low-end population’ (diduan renkou 低端人口) – these categories still express class differentiation and forms of discrimination (Day 2019, 173).

During the reform period, food security policies, which aim at largely maintaining China’s self-sufficiency in food and, in particular, grain, often contradicted the Party’s long-term goal of agricultural modernisation. For example, in the late 1990s, a time at which the urban economy was undergoing a painful transformation of state-owned enterprises encompassing massive layoffs, the rural economy was administratively made to compensate by producing cheap grain through the provincial governors’ gain responsibility system (Hou and Liu 2010; Keidel 2007). In other words, at the time, food security impeded the shift to a profitable modern agrarian system. But this is changing in the post-reform period, in which food security is seen as premised upon the scale-up, mechanisation and technical modernisation of agriculture, and the state has allocated numerous incentives for these transformations. Further, in the contemporary moment, grain security ‘has been used to empower and enrich large agrarian capital’ at the expense of household farmers (Zhan 2017, 152).

Finally, poverty alleviation is a supplement to capitalist agrarian change, with the Chinese state announcing the elimination of extreme rural poverty by the end of 2020,⁸ meeting its 2015 goal. With a sharp rural–urban divide in incomes, extreme poverty in China has been mostly situated in the rural sphere, and when the rural economy did well during the reform period – such as in the early 1980s, early 1990s and the 2000s – poverty was dramatically reduced there. The target set in 2015 announced a more activist response by the Party to rural poverty, leading up to the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Party in 2021, and it comprised a sharp increase in state spending as well, raising the question of its sustainability. This entailed raising the poorest of China’s farmers out of subsistence farming and integrating them into markets through road and infrastructure building, cash payments and subsidies, the provision of new social services and, in many cases, moving residents wholesale out of isolated villages and into new housing. It is important to note what ‘extreme rural poverty’ means. The United Nations (1995, ch. 2) characterises it as a ‘severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information’. By China’s standards, it amounts to about $2.30 a day, higher than the World Bank’s global standard for poor countries of $1.90, but somewhat low for an upper-middle-income country such as China, for which the World Bank sets a standard of $5.50.⁹ About 17 per cent of China’s population remained under that higher UN standard as of 2018.¹⁰ By this higher standard, the rural poor are supposed to disappear on China’s road to fully modernised, wealthy farming by 2050. Following the elimination of extreme poverty, the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development was replaced by the National Administration for Rural Vitalisation (guojia xiangcun zhenxing ju 国家乡村振兴局) in early 2021, pointing to those longer-range goals.¹¹ At the same time, as the Party began to celebrate overcoming extreme poverty and securing the basic welfare of rural residents (wenbao 温饱, indicating that people are clothed and have enough to eat), it increasingly focused on the construction of ‘modern villages’, with attention to the rural environment, a more ‘civilized’ rural living style, and cleaner and more hygienic villages. First proposed in the early 2000s under the framework of the New Socialist Countryside, this policy was also oriented towards developing the rural tourism market, with an aim of integrating agriculture, the processing industry and the rural service sector as rural capitalism advanced (Day 2022, 225). This integration is facilitated by a shift in rural governance, with lower levels, namely the village and the township, increasingly dominated by county or even city governments. Overall, this period entailed the weakening of the rural–urban dual-structure divide that has characterised PRC society since the 1950s, a state-directed process of capitalist agrarian change.

Conclusion

In some ways, the key principles shaping the Party’s relationship to the peasantry seem to have remained remarkably stable over the last 100 years. On the one hand, improving rural livelihoods has persisted as a basic principle of Party rural policy. On the other hand, the peasant was a social form and political category that could only be understood in relationship to the historical trajectory of China’s political economy and its directed transformation. Peasant surpluses would help determine the speed of the national economy’s development, but that development would, in the long run, lead to the transformation of the social relations of rural production, ending the small peasant social form. In other ways, however, how these two aspects – the improvement of peasant livelihoods and the social form’s historical trajectory – relate has changed dramatically.

During the civil war, the Party connected peasant interests to national revolutionary interests through a peasant revolutionary dialectic. After 1949, that dialectic continued in modified form during the socialist period, with revolutionary transformation linking improving peasant livelihoods to progressive national development, industrialisation and agricultural modernisation. The temporality of improving livelihoods was linked to the trajectory of the developing political economy of the nation; both helped to determine each other as the social form of rural production moved through a series of transformations.

However, with industrialisation well underway and a relinking to global capitalism, that dialectical revolutionary link was replaced with a depoliticised developmentalism during the reform period. As household farming re-emerged, the clear link to national developments began to fade while a compromising land system put some restrictions on rural class differentiation for the time being. This was accompanied by a growing social discrimination against peasants. This system began to be restructured in the early 2000s, especially following the abolition of the agricultural tax in 2005–06, and a new set of rural institutions – in particular, dragonhead enterprises, specialised cooperatives and land transfer – now shape rural interests. The post-reform period thus entails the re-emergence of capitalist agrarian change, with a celebration of class differentiation and the complete disappearance of the Party’s original aim of revolutionising rural social relations. In other words, while peasant livelihoods and extreme rural poverty relief are at the forefront of Party rural policy and propaganda, they have become a supplement to the Party’s goal of modernising agriculture and the countryside. Instead of moving through a progressive series of social forms, rural producers are disintegrating into classes. Through this historical process, the potentiality of the peasant as a political figure, discovered in the revolutionary dialectic almost 100 years ago, melts away.

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