The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988

Front Cover
Stanford University Press, 1990 - Political Science - 421 pages
How can we account for the durability of subsistence farming in China despite six centuries of vigorous commercialization from 1350 to 1950 and three decades of collectivization between 1950 to 1980? Why did the Chinese rural economy not undergo the transformation predicted by the classical models of Adam Smith and Karl Marx? In attempting to answer this question, scholars have generally treated commercialization and collectivization as distinct from population increase, the other great rural change of the past six centuries. This book breaks new ground in arguing that in the Yangzi delta, China's most advanced agricultural region, population increase was what drove commercialization and collectivization, even as it was made possible by them. The processes at work, which the author terms involutionary commercialization and involutionary growth, entailed ever-increasing labor input per unit of land, resulting in expanded total output but diminishing marginal returns per workday. In the Ming-Qing period, involution usually meant a switch to more labor-intensive cash crops and low-return household sidelines. In post-revolutionary China, it typically meant greatly intensified crop production. Stagnant or declining returns per workday were absorbed first by the family production unit and then by the collective. The true significance of the 1980's reforms, the author argues, lies in the diversion of labour from farming to rural industries and profitable sidelines and the first increases for centuries in productivity and income per workday. With these changes have come a measure of rural prosperity and the genuine possibility of transformative rural development. By reconstructing Ming-Qing agricultural history and drawing on twentieth-century ethnographic data and his own field investigations, the author brings his large themes down to the level of individual peasant households. Like his acclaimed The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (1985), this study is noteworthy for both its empirical richness and its theoretical sweep, but it goes well beyond the earlier work in its inter-regional comparisons and its use of the pre- and post-1949 periods to illuminate each other.
 

Contents

A Socioeconomic Profiles of Eight Yangzi Delta Villages
337
Cultivated Acreage Per Capita in Songjiang and Suzhou
342
E The Changing Composition of Gross Output Value in Huayang
354
Introduction I
i
TO 1949
ix
and Rural China 354 F Incomes of Collective Joint and Private
x
The Yangzi Delta Ecosystem 21
21
Commercialization and Family Production 44
44
Restructuring the Old Political Economy 165
165
Collective Family and Sideline Production 199
199
Growth Versus Development in Agriculture 222
222
Rural Industrialization 252
252
Capitalism Versus Socialism in Rural Development 266
266
PeasantWorker Villages 288
288
A Summing Up 305
305
Some Speculations 325
325

Commercialization and Managerial Agriculture 58
58
Commercialization and Involutionary Growth 77
77
Peasants and Markets 93
93
Imperialism Urban Development and Rural Involution 115
115
Two Kinds of Village Communities 144
144
Eight Yangzi Delta Villages 338
338
Composition of Gross Value of Output of Huayang Commune
355
The Village Informants 370 Sources Cited 372
372
Character List 391
391
Index 407
407

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