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Chinese Agrarian Change in World-Historical Context

INTRODUCTION

The twentieth century was an age of both revolution and counterrevolution. The first three quarters of the century saw revolutionary changes in social relations, mainly driven by the worldwide socialist movement that spread after the founding of the Soviet Union in 1917 and by the national independence movement that erupted after the Second World War. The last quarter was characterized by worldwide waves of privatization and deregulation, sometimes referred to as neoliberalism. This dramatic cycle shaped many crucial aspects of social relations in the contemporary world, in particular the trajectories of agrarian change.

After the Second World War, many countries implemented agrarian reforms that sought to protect peasants to varying degrees from landlords and usurers. One key element of these policies was redistributive land reform. In some places—for example, South Korea and Taiwan—“land to the tiller” was implemented. Land redistribution was relatively well enforced, and most peasants became small commodity producers. In other countries, like Peru and Chile, agriculture was even partly collectivized. Countries like Egypt, with no significant land reform, at least tried to put a cap on land rent and place restrictions on the size of individual landholdings. In socialist states like China and Cuba, the agrarian reforms included collectivization—collective ownership of the land by the peasants—partly to prevent potential class differentiation in the new peasantry.

This period has been called “the Golden Age of land reform.”¹ These agrarian reforms were unprecedented in human history, both in scale and in content. One of the crucial features of agrarian reforms of this period was the reformers’ goal of attacking pre-capitalist, mostly feudal or colonial, relations; this was often called “modernization.” In most countries, the peasants were seen as allies of reform in varying degrees, depending on each country’s internal conditions, while feudal lords or other traditionally privileged groups were the targets. In other words, for the first time in history, factions of the capitalist class compromised with peasants on a world scale.

Keep in mind that the compromise was not static. On the contrary, it was as riddled with contradictions as any social formation and was constantly changing. For example, the capitalist class encouraged compromise with the peasants at the expense of landlords in East Asian countries, while at the same time it quickly crushed the progressive reforms enacted by Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. Internationally coordinated capitalists overthrew the Chilean government of Salvador Allende in the 1970s and quickly undid a large portion of the previous land reform. At the same time, they launched the Alliance for Progress, which encouraged Latin American states to institute land reforms. Capitalists retreated from the compromise only when they sensed that they needed to do so, but in general they kept it and peasants saw improvements in their lives, and peasants benefited from it.

At the same time, agrarian reform in many countries was often constrained, in part because of the bourgeois character of the reform, and peasant proprietors often turned against revolution. For example, in Peru during the early 1960s, rich tenants became reactionary after land reform; similar events happened in a number of other countries as well.² Specific factors, like the form of the state, also matter. In India, for example, although the state has tried to create conditions for capitalist development, the democratic form of the state and class alignment in the society limits the effectiveness of land reforms.³

Both political and economic factors created the capitalist-peasant compromise in the first place. The political forces came from both internal and external class dynamics. Internally, the peasantry usually served as an important force in the revolutions, and the demand for agrarian reforms was a major part of the mobilization campaign for independence or revolution. This was the case for the newly independent states and socialist countries. External pressure was also crucial, especially in capitalist countries where the agrarian reforms came mainly from above.

Given the strong global communist movement and the example of the Soviet Union, peasants became inspired or even mobilized by domestic communists. If the national bourgeoisie was not able to carry out reforms to appease peasants, then capitalists in the rich capitalist countries would intervene. This is what happened in the case of Taiwan, where, in the face of the appealing example of socialist China, land reform was carried out jointly by the U.S. and Taiwanese governments.

Economic factors also played a role in the peasant-capitalist compromise. First, prereform agriculture was inefficient, so changes in agrarian relations were likely to bring a higher growth rate and national self-sufficiency. Latin America’s hacienda system was a typical example. However, in places like India, where some landlords had already adopted capitalist methods of production, the efficiency factor was not so important.⁴ Second, it was argued that a more egalitarian distribution of land would increase domestic demand; this obviously fit in with the industrialization objectives of most national governments. In socialist countries, the economic argument for collectivization followed a similar vein: collectivization would generate a higher growth rate, which would facilitate industrialization; and better industrial support would benefit agriculture in the long run.

The political and economic factors did not work in fixed ways across countries, but for the bourgeoisie and bureaucrats in developing countries, progressive agrarian reform was a matter of necessity, not choice. Ironically, TINA—there is no alternative, the slogan promoted later by former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher to justify neoliberalism—was included then as an organic part of the development packages that were accepted by most national governments. However, the capitalist-peasant compromise came to an end during the 1970s. As Table 2.1 shows, all the countries that adopted progressive agrarian reforms stepped back and undid small or large portions of the previous reforms. In 1992, Mexico, the pioneer in agrarian reform, changed its 1917 constitution to allow land sales.⁵ In 1994, Cuba, as the residualsocialist state, introduced private agricultural markets and divided state farms into smaller cooperative units.⁶ In 1983, Tanzania, which had instituted the radical collectivization known as Ujamaa in 1974, published a new National Agricultural Policy to encourage commercial farming and land consolidation.⁷ The demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the rapid privatization that followed in Russia and eastern Europe needs no elaboration.

It is worthwhile to analyze the global political and economic forces at work during this period. Political factors can be divided into two groups, internal and external. Internally, as the independence revolution faded away and bourgeoisie dictatorship strengthened worldwide, the overall capitalist order survived and more or less stabilized. Such was the case in both Taiwan and South Korea, which both enjoyed rapid growth. In socialist countries the ruling elites gradually became more pro-capitalist.⁸ Peasants as a revolutionary force were no longer needed. Instead, in both capitalist and socialist countries, the ruling class preferred a depoliticized peasantry. This set the ground for breaking down the previous compromise.

Externally, the once strong communist threat was not there anymore; the Sino-Soviet debate, the collaboration between China and the United States in the post-Mao era, and the eventual demise of the Soviet Union greatly undermined the socialist movement. The capitalist class was largely relieved of the necessity of keeping the previous compromise and soon began to fight back. This was manifested ideologically both in academia—the decline of the Keynesians and the rise of the Milton Friedmanites, for example—and in the policies of such entities as the World Bank and the IMF. It was also enforced militarily if need be, as, for example, in the coup in Chile.

TABLE 2.1: Agrarian Changes: Selected Countries

Sources: El-Ghonemy, 1999; Kay, 1998; Mathijs and Swinnen, 1998; Metz, 1988; Daley, 2005; Barraclough, 1991; de Janvry, Sadoulet, and Wolford, 1998; Bush, 2007; Akram-Lodhi and Haroon, 2007; wa Githinji and Mersha, 2007; Hinnebusch, 1995.

The economic forces were also significant. First and foremost, for a variety of reasons many agrarian reforms failed to deliver the high growth rate the reformers once expected. Governments in Latin America failed to provide financial, technical, and other support to agriculture.⁹ Instead industrial accumulation often had a negative impact on internal terms of trade (price of agricultural goods relative to industrial output). In collectivization, it was common to have inexperienced leadership and poorly developed plans. In extreme cases, like the Soviet Union, grain production did not reliably exceed pre-revolution level until the 1950s.¹⁰ It did not take too long for the ruling classes to conclude that the reforms were not productive enough. Second, the debt crisis broke out in many developing countries after the American interest rate hike in the early 1980s, which left indebted national governments unable to finance agrarian reforms.¹¹ Third, with the so-called green revolution starting in the 1960s marked by usage of high-yield varieties and chemical fertilizers, there seemed to be a technological alternative to the institutional reforms. Finally, global agribusiness also played a significant role. In some cases agribusiness directly demanded the reversal of the agrarian policies (as in Guatemala). On the other hand, after the 1970s, the unprecedented development of agribusiness and globalized food markets meant national capitalists could circumvent through trade and foreign investment the problem of food sufficiency and national industrialization, which marginalized peasants even further, both politically and economically.¹²

The gradual change in conditions led to a heightening of the inherent contradictions between the capitalist class and the peasantry. The peasantry remained silent and depoliticized, while the capitalist class became aggressive. The capitalist-peasant compromise became unsustainable, and this led to counterrevolution in the latter part of the twentieth century.

The Agrarian Question and China

The agrarian question refers to the transformation of the pre-capitalist countryside into a productive “modern” one: the development of capitalist or socialist relations of production in the countryside; the creation of surplus for national industrialization; and the role of the peasantry in political movements. Historically, this transformation has been accomplished in different ways. For the countries where small producers are prevalent in the countryside, there are three possible directions. The capitalist-oriented model tries to develop capitalism through differentiated peasant households. The socialist-oriented model develops collective production through organizing small peasants. The populist model tries to protect the small subsistence peasant households against commodity relations and capitalism, but without developing collectives. All these solutions agree on the need to abolish pre-capitalist agrarian relations, but they diverge after this very historical conjunction. While the capitalist path implies the development of the capitalist farmer and wage labor in the countryside, the socialist path means a significant degree of public ownership of land and other means of production; the populists in the classical sense reject both capitalist and socialist visions.

Many developing countries started to tackle the agrarian question by choosing noncapitalist paths in the revolutionary phase. Most of them at least tried to guarantee peasants’ access to land, and many had redistributive land reforms or even encouraged collectivization to build socialism. However, these countries started to move to the capitalist path in the second phase. Former small-producer states like Egypt removed their protection of peasants; former socialist states like Soviet Union saw massive privatization and the emergence of capitalist agriculture.

How does this shed light on the agrarian changes in China? It is clear that the change in agrarian relations that we observed in China mirrored the general history of other developing countries. China had land reform and collectivization in the first phase and dismantled the collectives in the second phase. Although collective ownership of land is still preserved in legal terms, China has recreated small-producer agriculture through decollectivization. The rural economy is gradually becoming more oriented toward the market, and there is a clear tendency of further movement along the capitalist path.¹³ Let us now look at how this change took place.

When the CCP first started the revolution in the 1920s, China was an extremely backward country marked by low productivity and a highly unequal distribution of land. It was widely accepted that 20 percent of the population owned more than 60 percent of the land. Between 50 percent and 70 percent of peasants’ annual output went to the landlord as rent.¹⁴ Unlike his peers, Mao did not see the peasants as passive—he saw in them the possibility of a dramatic revolutionary tide. He convinced his comrades of the importance of the peasant question, and the CCP finally took power because of the peasants’ support. After the revolution, the CCP carried out extensive land reform nationwide and peasants became small landowners. However, the small plots and still existing pre-capitalist social relationships, not only just barely provided for peasants and their families but resulted in many farmers losing their land or ending up deep in debt because of illness, natural disaster, and other shocks inherent in the general backwardness of Chinese agriculture.

The CCP leaders agreed on the need to eliminate pre-capitalist relations, but they disagreed on the best solution going forward. Liu Shaoqi, then the second most powerful figure in the CCP, advocated for a capitalist-oriented solution. Liu once made the comment that small cooperatives cannot develop into socialist collectives and that the decline of cooperatives was good because it implied peasants were now better-off and could rely on themselves. Liu even quoted the example of Saint-Simon to argue that one can still be a socialist while being a capitalist.¹⁵

In the early 1950s, collectivization was not yet on the agenda, but in some places peasants spontaneously organized themselves into small cooperatives. Provincial leaders in Shanxi Province reported to Liu, suggesting that peasants should be further mobilized to build collectives; otherwise the rich peasants and exploitation would revive.

However, Liu was very much opposed to the idea of collectivization without a strong national industrial base and mechanization, calling such an idea “dangerous and utopian.”¹⁶ He even explained his vision of rural development: “now the countryside has class division, that is the basis of future revolution; in the future we can directly appropriate it [the new rich part of the peasantry].”¹⁷

At the same time, some other leaders preferred a more populist solution.¹⁸ Deng Zihui, then the head of the rural work department of the CCP, was one of the outspoken members of this faction. Deng had a pessimistic view of peasants’ “socialist consciousness” and argued that peasants preferred family farming to collective labor. He clearly disagreed with the capitalist solution, but he was skeptical about the socialist solution because of the lack of an industrial base and experience.¹⁹

In spring 1955, the relationship between the CCP and the peasants grew intense. Some peasants even commented that “the communists were worse than the nationalists.”²⁰ At least two reasons were behind this attitude. First, new collectives were rapidly organized without sufficient mobilization and the middle peasants were afraid that their precious means of production would become publicly owned. Second, the state’s grain procurement quota was so high that peasants did not have much left for their own consumption.

Deng Zihui believed that although the problem with grain procurement was significant, the fundamental problem was collectivization. He then pushed forward a policy of “contraction” in Zhejiang Province that aimed to dramatically reduce the number of collectives and the level of grain procurement. Within less than two months, the number of collectives had dropped sharply, by 30 percent.²¹

Unlike the previous two factions, Mao and his allies aimed to transform the agrarian relations by developing rural collectives. In an influential report, Mao laid out his arguments for collectivization.²² First, as a response to Liu Shaoqi, he argued that agricultural collectivization served as the basis of mechanization, not the other way around. His rationale was that the mobilized and collectivized peasants could better resist natural disasters and manage their labor power and establish better conditions for the adoption of new technology and crop varieties. Collectivization would also increase peasants’ purchasing power and thus increase demand for national industrial products. Mao also pointed out that the CCP would lose its political base among the poor peasants if they again suffered from the development of capitalism. He criticized Deng Zihui for overlooking the strong incentives of the poor peasants to work collectively owing to their lack of means of production. No single peasant family could afford or economically use a tractor, but a collective might be able to do both. Moreover, Mao critically examined the issue of “lack of experience,” arguing that the peasants could only gain experience in building collectives by doing it themselves. Finally, the Soviet Union, the socialist state role model at that time, also gave important support to Mao’s claim. Drawing on the Soviet Union’s achievements after collectivization, Mao argued that collectivization was crucial for socialist industrialization and the development of agriculture itself. Mao further argued that the CCP could do a better job than the Soviet leadership by learning the lessons of its mistakes.

On the surface, these were merely different views on the sequence and pace of rural development, but they had profound political economy implications. Like Liu, many CCP leaders thought socialism and collectivization would come in the distant future, and they did not want to develop it until they felt its historical necessity. Implicitly, they were assuming the countryside had to go through a capitalist transformation before it became socialist.²³ Other people, like Deng Zihui, wanted neither capitalism nor socialism and preferred to stabilize the petty-producer economy.

These pro-capitalist and populist views actually gained significant support from the new Chinese elites. In the early 1960s, after the failure of the Great Leap Forward, most of the central leaders supported decollectivization.²⁴ It was estimated that 20 percent of the rural population adopted varieties of private household farming.²⁵

This time, the pro-capitalist and pro-populist factions seemed to march hand-in-hand. Liu Shaoqi was very pessimistic and predicted that grain output under collectives would decrease for a long time.²⁶ Deng Xiaoping, who became national leader after Mao’s death, was also in favor of decollectivization; he claimed that it should be officially encouraged nationwide, while collective agriculture must be “pushed back enough.”²⁷ Deng also made the famous claim that “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or yellow [usually “white” in English quotations of Deng], as long as it catches mice.” In other words, it did not matter what method is used as long as it works.²⁸ The whole reform package implemented by these leaders was later called sanziyibao, which promoted private household farming.²⁹

Mao defended the rural collectives. First, he argued, grain production under the collectives began to recover in 1962, which was much sooner than the pessimistic expectations. Second, Mao pointed out the growing polarization in several poor provinces that had adopted decollectivization, with some peasants becoming landless and others becoming usurers. It was in this context that Mao later commented: “Why do I regard baochandaohu [decollectivization] as a serious threat? China is an agricultural state. Once agrarian relations change, our socialist industrial base will shake. Urban production relations will change inevitably and polarization will grow rapidly. How could we communists defend workers and peasants?”³⁰

In the end, China pursued the socialist path like many other countries, despite the strong support of the nonsocialist path among the leadership. This was due to socialist politics and ideology (plus direct influence from the socialist bloc), the need for industrialization, and, finally, Mao’s unquestionable authority. At one point, it seemed that “only socialism could save China.” However, as in other countries, the nonsocialist path eventually ruled, and the Chinese proverb was ironically twisted to read “only China could save socialism.”

FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS

As China pursued the socialist path, the three alternative solutions to the agrarian question were translated into two major factions in the CCP: those who wanted to continue developing the collectives (socialist path) and those who wanted to go back to the pre-collectivization stage (the historical intersection of capitalist and populist paths).

These solutions did not “fall from the sky”: they appealed to different classes in Chinese rural society. In general, poor peasants and ordinary workers (the majority) were likely to benefit more from the socialist path, while the middle and rich peasants (potential capitalist farmers) and bureaucrats (potential capitalists) might gain more from the other models, as the later reforms partly illustrated.

As a matter of fact, the socialist model had remarkable achievements. Due to the introduction of technologies such as new crop varieties and better fertilizer as well as their rapid diffusion via collective-based networks in the countryside, agricultural production improved significantly.³¹ Massive social welfare programs were set up in the collectives that greatly improved overall public health and literacy in the Chinese countryside.³² Many peasants still had faith in collective production despite various problems with the existing models. In a widely read book on the history of Chen Village in China, the authors interviewed the people in the 1970s who fled to Hong Kong from the mainland illegally. Many of these people, despite their flight, remained convinced that socialist agriculture was better than the private model and few of them felt hostile to the CCP.³³

However, neither the achievements nor the potential support of the majority meant the state would necessarily pursue the socialist path. In Lenin’s vision, under socialism,“there remains for a time not only bourgeois right, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!”³⁴ Mao’s analysis confirmed Lenin’s vision: “China now still has an unequal eight-grade wage schedule, equal exchange, allocation to one’s labor, etc. It would be easy to launch capitalism.”³⁵ Mao was correct. In Lenin’s mind, the bourgeois state machine will be small and democratically controlled by armed proletarians; however, this was not the case in China (and most other socialist countries). Partly due to the influence of the Soviet model, China developed a large state machine with a strong, powerful, and conservative bureaucracy, which meant that there would be no democratic control of the state by workers and peasants.

Thus, the bourgeois state machine in China was able to develop its own interests and political power and reproduce itself by decreasing the power of workers and peasants. But within the state socialist regime, the party-state elites still faced various constraints on their personal wealth and power. Their income was much lower compared to their counterparts in the Western world, and they could lose their privilege anytime in consequence of the mass movements and intense political struggles that occurred.³⁶ Although there was no real bourgeoisie, the group that controlled the state machine had more than enough incentive to become one. The separation of the workers and peasants from the state also implied that the decision of development paths would largely be determined within the state machine, which tended to be pro-capitalist. That was why Mao used “capitalist roaders” to describe a significant portion of the upper-level cadres.

In the first seventeen years of the PRC, 1949 to 1966, these cadre, along with a portion of the elite workers and intellectuals, gradually established their control of the state. Although Mao and his allies resisted this tendency, which was parallel to that observed in the Soviet Union, they were not very successful. This constituted the major reason why Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution. It was only during the radical era (1966–1976) that the old state machine was partly smashed and Lenin’s vision of democratic control of the state machine was partly realized. However, the Cultural Revolution did not successfully establish peasant and worker control of the state, and the old state apparatus was restored gradually in the 1970s.³⁷

Since the anti-socialist coalition had significant political muscle during most of the time Mao was in power, his intervention and personal charisma and authority played a crucial role in the pursuit of a socialist path in China. Sometimes it even seemed that Mao just by himself overturned the bureaucratic state machine.

Partly as a prophecy, the famous 1975 movie Breaking with Old Ideas (Juelie) told a story about collective versus private farming. The socialists had the popular support of the rank-and- file CCP members and most of the peasants, but they lacked political power. The capitalist roaders had the support of rich peasants, but most importantly, they were supported by the majority of the local CCP cadres, who received underground instruction from top central leaders. The socialists lost the political battle. They were forced to leave their positions and were even jailed. It looked as though decollectivization was going to happen when Chairman Mao directly intervened, writing a letter to show his full support for the socialists. In the end, the capitalist roaders were defeated and sunshine came back to the countryside. However, if we follow the movie’s logic, without Mao’s intervention, decollectivization would have been inevitable, given the political structure.

And this was exactly what happened after Chairman Mao died in 1976. There were no major obstacles for the anti-socialist coalition, and the palace coup just added some novel flavor, although it still took some years for them to figure out how to destroy Mao’s legacy.³⁸ Interestingly, Breaking with Old Ideas was banned three years after Mao’s death and was condemned as “poisonous weeds.”³⁹ Starting from the early 1980s, the CCP implemented nationwide decollectivization despite considerable resistance from the peasants and local cadres (for more details see chapter 4). The Chinese peasants, now forced away from the socialist tradition, returned to the status of small producers.

Most working people did not immediately see the implications of all these change for themselves. But artists often did. Only seven years later, in another highly influential film, The Herdsman (Mu Ma Ren), a poor herder is talking with an intellectual who had been a herder in Mao’s era and became a teacher in the post-Mao era: “You were once among us; now we folks are all done.”⁴⁰

THE STORY CONTINUES IN THE NEOLIBERAL AGE

The triumph of the anti-socialist camp has marked the start of a new era, with socialism semiofficially taken off the political agenda. Nowadays the post-Mao leaders repeatedly claim that China will “never go back to the old road.”⁴¹ Yet what will the “new” road be?

With the socialist solution now considered politically incorrect, all that remains is populism and capitalism. An abrupt transformation from socialist collectives to capitalist farms would have been risky in the 1980s, since it might have stirred serious doubts from the masses, created landless peasants, and nurtured political unrest. Therefore, at that moment, a populist solution, with stable small landownership and family farms, seemed more feasible. The decollectivization campaign began in the late 1970s, although it was camouflaged under the guise of “socialist development.” But it actually took the Chinese countryside back to the pre-collectivization historical compromise between populist and capitalist factions that existed in the early 1950s.

If the populist camp in the Mao era was only arguing for a relatively gradual transition to socialist collectives, their contemporary counterparts were looking to something different. Given the changes in the overall political economy, the populist solution was now more aligned with capitalism. In essence, this type of neo-populism or promarket populism portrays a homogenous peasantry with a strong preference for family business and the market.

The ambiguous dividing line between the two factions found its best example in Du Runsheng, the architect of the new agrarian relations and then-head of the National Agricultural Committee.⁴² Du argued that given the uniqueness of Chinese agriculture—which was “sensitive,” “vulnerable,” and “undermechanized,” in his words—small producers would take better care of the crops than collectives could. In a report published in the People’s Daily, Du claimed that “the contemporary world” has proved that family farming is perfectly compatible with modernization.⁴³ Clearly, this “world” only referred to the United States and Western European countries. In his later years, Du admitted that his ideas came partly from his positive impression of the United States, Japan, France, and other developed countries that he visited after 1979, in particular the widespread presence of family farming and modern technology.⁴⁴

Despite the seeming superiority of small family farms over all other forms of agricultural production, in Du’s argument, the populist solution did not preclude a gradual transition to large-scale capitalist agriculture. As Du himself emphasized in the same report, “we do not want to maintain petty production forever; we will move on to big modern production.”

Only a few years later, Du revisited the question of agrarian change, adopting an even more pro-capitalist stance. In his speech at the CCP’s Central Party School, Du openly criticized family farms for their inefficiency and claimed that Chinese agriculture should develop economies of scale.⁴⁵ However, Du denied the advantage of developing collectives, claiming that “the peasants would not support collectives.” Du’s argument implies only one choice: capitalist farms. In line with his idea, Du later made several policy suggestions, including transferring rural labor to urban industries and encouraging gradual land concentration to the advantage of fledgling capitalist farmers.

Soon after the decollectivization campaign, the honeymoon between the populist and capitalist factions came to an end. The scholars and policy makers in the capitalist faction mainly focused on the development of capitalist relations of production in the rural areas (that is, “efficient scale farming”), and they often tended to overlook the suffering and dispossession of the small peasant families during the process. The national policy became more urban and industry-oriented after the mid-1980s; the rural-urban income gap increased dramatically; and public investment in rural areas dropped significantly from the level of the Maoist period.⁴⁶ In1999, a local cadre, Li Changping, wrote a famous letter to Premier Zhu Rongji, stating that “the life of the peasants is extremely hard, the rural areas extremely poverty-stricken, and the prospect of agriculture extremely precarious.”

Those on the populist side do not oppose capitalism in principle, but they are more cautious about its disastrous impacts and, to some extent, represent its humane side: equal rights for urban and rural residents, tax cuts for peasants, price protection for agricultural products, and other welfare policies for the countryside. In the view of Wen Tiejun, a leading scholar in the populist camp, the Chinese intellectual should “deconstruct” the concept of modernization in order to protect the “unavoidable” petty peasant rural economy.⁴⁷

The split redefined the mainstream political spectrum from the 1980s onward. On rural issues, the supporters of the capitalist solution became the right wing, while the populist opposition—however mild—formed the left wing. Sometimes, the populists and socialists have even found common ground in opposing policies of the capitalists. For example, on the issue of land privatization, those supporting socialism strongly defend the last remaining legacy of collectivization; the capitalist faction favors complete rural land privatization to facilitate land concentration; and the populist faction favors a more gradual approach and also supports maintaining a de jure collective ownership of land to protect the de facto small ownership.⁴⁸

The contemporary historical process of agrarian change could be understood as a dynamic compromise between the populist and capitalist factions but with heavier weight on the latter. Since the beginning of this century, the populists, claiming that they represent the voices from below, have succeeded in persuading the central government to provide certain welfare supports and tax reductions for rural residents.⁴⁹ Yet the capitalist faction, representing “efficiency” and “advanced forces of production,” has also won the upper hand on crucial issues. For example, the Third Plenary of the CCP’s 17th Central Committee in 2008 passed a resolution on rural development that explicitly encouraged peasants to trade land use rights to concentrate land for more large-scale efficient agricultural production.

Despite any possible differences, the two factions share in common the denial of any socialist rural project. After all, the populist faction does not really oppose the market and capitalism, and the capitalist faction is not arguing for the immediate abolition of small producers.

Again, the political subtlety in China in the second phase has found its counterparts and connections in other countries, although often in a twisted way. According to Brass, the rhetoric of the latter half of the twentieth century held that the new rural movements in Latin America and other developing countries abandoned the means of mass mobilization and the goal of socialism.⁵⁰ As for the actual ongoing highly political and anti-neoliberal peasant movements in Mexico, Brazil, and other countries, Petras and Veltmeyer note that the mainstream either perceives the movements in recent decades as premodern, arguing that the homogenous peasantry was fighting a losing battle; or treat the struggles as postmodern, seeking cultural and ethnic identities.⁵¹ In fact, Chinese intellectuals like Wen Tiejun also explicitly refer to these movements as evidence of support for the populist notion of a homogenous above-class peasantry. As in China, the political and academic mainstream in other third world countries has managed to take socialism off the agenda, leaving the neoliberal capitalist program (the right) and a populist program (the left) to occupy the political center stage. Keep in mind that the two visions are not mutually exclusive. To paraphrase Brass, neoliberalism accepts small peasants as long as agricultural goods are produced efficiently for the market.

If we consider the overall effect of agrarian change, we can find its entanglement within the larger global context of neoliberalism. Decollectivization and the changes that followed led to the largest migration in human history, creating a new working class for the urban industries (the number of migrant workers was more than 280 million in 2016).⁵² This huge reserve army further disempowered the old urban working class and facilitated the massive privatization of the last two decades. Globally, the world labor force saw a significant expansion in the last few decades, owing to the radical reversal in agrarian relations: depeasantization in the peripheral countries by means of agribusiness as well as integration of the labor force in former socialist states into the world economy.⁵³ Obviously, the increase in the global reserve army greatly contributes to the power of the world capitalist class and plays a crucial role in the neoliberal order. And Chinese agrarian change has been an integral part of the entire process.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

China’s changing agrarian relations have always been an important part of the world-historical process. In the Maoist era, the struggle was primarily between the pro-collective (socialist-oriented) faction and the anti-collective (both capitalist and populist-oriented) faction. In the post-Mao era, the tensions within the anti-collective camp have taken center stage, with their resolution largely in favor of capital. The pattern in China shares similarities with other countries, but it has its particularities, mainly owing to Maoist radical policies.

As we can see, since the end of the Maoist era, China has been gradually integrating itself into the contemporary capitalist world, not only in economic terms but also politically and in terms of scholarly work. In other words, contrary to mainstream claims of “Chinese exceptionalism,” China has, in fact, become more and more “normal” compared to other developing countries in terms of agrarian relations (and overall social relations) as it has digressed from Maoist radicalism.

With decollectivization and further neoliberal reforms, the current Chinese state faces a dilemma in representing capitalist class interests and simultaneously maintaining legitimacy among peasants and workers. On the one hand, the dominant interests of the urban capitalist class and the multinational businesses require a consistent supply of workers and land, thus implying the further consolidation of rural land and development of capitalist relations. On the other hand, the government needs to appease the peasants and workers by protecting them from dispossession and sweatshops. Another aspect of the state’s legitimacy concerns is the need to guarantee a high level of food sufficiency. China’s increasing food demand is so large that it cannot be met by international food market, which contributes to the state’s hesitancy in pursuing any dramatic changes in the countryside. The result of this dilemma remains to be seen, but the chance of a peaceful solution is slim. China could find itself in both political and economic crisis if the labor supply begins to decrease and labor’s bargaining power begins to increase, or if the state cannot address the concerns of the working class.

Future socialist projects can draw at least two lessons from Chinese agrarian history. First, without democratic control of the state by the workers and peasants, the already challenged socialist project (or any progressive project) will be even more fragile. This has been the case with China and many other countries that have gone the full circle in their agrarian relations. Second, the struggle for socialism is a long-term project, with contradictions and opposition along the way. When the Chinese Revolution succeeded in 1949, Chairman Mao declared that we had only finished one step in the Long March. This is indeed so. To paraphrase an ancient Chinese saying, building socialism is like rowing against the current, and no advance means retreat.