Capitalization without Proletarianization in China's Agricultural Development

Abstract

Marxist as well as classical and neo-liberal theories expect that the development of capitalist agriculture will be accompanied by the spread of an agricultural proletariat. That was what happened in eighteenth-century England; it is also what is happening in contemporary India. This article asks, first of all: just what is the size of China's present agricultural proletariat? And how do we understand and explain those dimensions? Our finding is that, contrary to our own initial expectations, hired agricultural year-workers in China today total only 3 percent of all labor input in agriculture (and short-term workers another 0.4 percent), in sharp contrast to India's 45 percent, this even while the past two decades have seen very substantial "capitalization" (i.e., increased capital input per unit of land) in agriculture. We term the phenomenon "capitalization without proletarianization," perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of recent Chinese agricultural development.

Bringing Agriculture Back In: The Central Place of Agrarian Change in Rural China Studies

“…These developments have started to attract more scholarly attention in recent years (Zhang and Donaldson , ; Huang ; Huang et al. ; Zhang , ; Huang and Gao ). These studies show that the entry of capital into agriculture – from diverse origins, via different paths and through uneven processes – has not just introduced fundamental changes to agricultural production; it also transforms rural politics and society in important ways.…”

How Has the Chinese Economy Developed So Rapidly? The Concurrence of Five Paradoxical Coincidences

“…At the same time, the self-employed family farm has remained the mainstay of Chinese agriculture: as of 2006 (the latest reliable data available, pending the next decennial survey to be done in 2016), hired agricultural workers still accounted for only a meager 3% of the total agricultural labor force. Even most of the farming of large agricultural enterprises remains under small-scale family farming, by contract or agreement to purchase (Huang, Gao, and Peng, 2012).…”

Rural Wage Employment in Developing Countries

“…In a recent study, Huang et al (2012) use national statistics on the costs of different farm products, which contain the costs of hired labour input, to estimate the extent of wage labour use in agricultural production. In a recent study, Huang et al (2012) use national statistics on the costs of different farm products, which contain the costs of hired labour input, to estimate the extent of wage labour use in agricultural production.…”

“…In recent years, the growing regional specialization in agricultural production and easier availability of means of transportation has made this type of seasonal, migratory wage employment in agriculture more prevalent. Thanks to concerted efforts in recent years to develop new cotton fields in Xinjiang, this north-western province, with only 3.4 per cent of the nation's total arable land, now has 30 per cent of the total sown area for cotton in 2010 (NBS 2011); onequarter of the cotton farms in Xinjiang are larger than 100 mu (6.7 hectares), and thus rely on hired wage labour (Huang et al 2012). For example, the spatial distribution of vegetable production has made a decisive shift from scattered peri-urban areas across the country to a greater concentration in specialized rural production bases, where now 80 per cent of the production acreage is located (Liu et al 2002).…”

“…Zhang also contests the method of using unreliable data on costs of hired labour input to infer labour market participation in agriculture, thus questioning the estimates of agricultural wage employment presented by Huang et al (2012), whose work is based on national statistics. Jha, writing on India, one of the developing countries with the best statistical systems for capturing wage employment, is concerned by how official surveys fail to capture the extent of migration and its changing dynamics; and how definitions of 'gainful activity' or 'work' are not systematically applied or sufficiently adapted, which results in potential biases in estimates of labour market participation, especially among women workers.…”