The Question of Land Privatization in China’s “Urban—Rural Integration”

SAM AUSTIN

English introduction to issue no. 1 of China Left Review. Revised 12 May 2008.

As if by a rude awakening, since the dawn of the millennium China’s top officials and intellectual stars have turned from the glitz of urban development to focus once more on the fate of the peasantry. Still constituting 56-70% of Chinese and about 12-15% of the global population, China’s “rural people” (nongmin) generally belong to smallholding agrarian households precariously integrated into global capitalism through a growing reliance on the market for basic needs, underpaid production of commodities (including labor-power for transnational corporations), and developmental encroachments on their collective resources.¹

Deng Xiaoping’s rural reform (1978-1984) had decollectivized rural production, disbanded the “people’s commune” system, and made increasing use of markets to regulate the distribution of agricultural goods and inputs. Land-use rights were separated from ownership to establish what’s known as the “household responsibility system”: while farmland and other natural resources are still owned collectively by villages or villager teams (groups of several households), use-rights to most farmland are contracted to individual households that are “responsible for their own profits and losses” from what they produce and sell. After several years of rising rural production, income, and diversification, by the mid-1990s, the rural economy had begun to stagnate or even decline in many areas, and rural society was becoming stratified, atomized, and plagued by problems, some of which had been eradicated during the collective era, including diseases such as schistosomiasis, as well as social diseases such as organized crime, prostitution, drug addiction, and rising suicide rates – the latter especially among women and the elderly. Meanwhile, China’s rapidly expanding cities and towns increasingly polluted and encroached on rural resources, frequently involving irregularities in transfer arrangements and compensation, leading to sometimes violent conflicts and exacerbating the antagonism between villagers and local officials, often working in cahoots with real estate developers and industrial capitalists. This antagonism also stemmed from the agricultural tax, dating back to 1958, along with various levies that multiplied after the 1994 fiscal reform, which made local governments likewise “responsible for their own profits and losses” and thus encouraged local officials to take advantage of villagers. By the turn of the century, all these factors combined with China’s integration into the global market to worsen living conditions and stimulate unrest in rural areas.

In the spring of 2000, rural cadre Li Changping petitioned then-premier Zhu Rongji with an open letter “telling the truth” that “the peasants’ life is hard, the villages are poverty-stricken, and agriculture is in crisis.”² A barrage of such appeals coincided with rising unrest and even outright insurgency in the countryside and among migrant workers from rural areas, together comprising a majority of the often cited figures of 58,000 “mass incidents” in 2003, 74,000 in 2004, and 87,000 in 2005.³ In response to these threats to social stability and the smooth accumulation of capital, China’s new round of leaders adopted “the rural problem in three dimensions” (sannong wenti) as their “top priority” (zhong zhong zhi zhong).⁴ In 2004 they began to publish a series of annual “number one documents” on rural policy, abolishing the agricultural tax, raising various subsidies for rural households, and, as part of China’s 11th five-year plan, announcing a blueprint for “constructing a New Socialist Countryside,” mainly through increasing investment in rural infrastructure.⁵

Many of China’s left-leaning scholars and activists have welcomed this new attention to the rural problem while criticizing the continued dominance of neoliberal ideology among both official and intellectual circles. They have proposed alternative approaches to “constructing a new countryside,” drawing on the experiences of China’s traditional peasant economy as well as past and present experiments with mutual aid, collective economy, and urban—rural cooperative marketing networks, some also drawing inspiration from foreign models of “alternative development,” such as that of Kerala, India.⁶

With this first issue of China Left Review, we have gathered and translated some important writings about China’s contemporary rural problem from a variety of perspectives, with a focus on land tenure and the question of privatization. The latter has recently returned to the forefront of debate about rural China in both English-language news media and Chinese state policy experimentation, after being shelved in the mid-1990s as it became apparent that privatization had contributed to the social problems faced by other post-socialist and “developing” countries. Whether out of historical amnesia or ideological rigor we cannot say, but numerous English-language news services have recently rekindled their decades-old passion for saving the wretched of the earth by calling for privatization of communal resources. This time the journalists claim that China’s peasant masses are rising up like a neoliberal storm to privatize the nation’s “state-owned” land and sweep “Communism” into its grave. Upon further scrutiny of these reports, it turns out that the four confirmed cases of peasant calls for privatization were written by the same urban intellectual among a group of ten who, backed by real estate developers, scoured the countryside for two years in search of villagers engaged in land disputes willing to sign their “manifesto.”⁷ The first section of this issue presents three open letters to the news media explaining both factual errors in such reports and arguments for strengthening, rather than weakening through privatization, villagers’ collective control over rural land.

Meanwhile, and apparently unbeknownst to these well-meaning journalists, local governments have quietly resumed the push towards de facto privatization that the central government had abandoned in the 1990s in light of social instability (mainly due to state-owned enterprise privatizations, closures and layoffs). The second section includes two reports on municipal governments’ experimentation with privatizing rural land by transforming household land-use rights into shares in agricultural enterprises, based outside the village, which appropriate the land and put it to “rational” use – that is, use according to market principles. These experiments, part of several new broadly-defined pilot projects for “integrating urban and rural development” initiated by the central government, have only just begun, so it is too early to assess their implementation and effects. It is not too early, however, to predict that such privatization will only exacerbate the rural problem without first establishing a social safety net capable of replacing the one provided by the present system, so this section also includes a critique of these experiments by agricultural economist Hu Jing. We would add that this new form of “land transfer” poses a challenge to conventional strategies of peasant resistance against direct land grabs. Whereas villagers often organize collective resistance to expropriation, with some degree of success, in the new transfers villagers are being relocated to scattered housing units far from the village, so it will be more difficult to organize resistance, or to control the new companies’ operations, in which they will be unlikely to own controlling shares. Moreover, whereas most expropriation in the past was limited to non-agricultural uses of land surrounding major cities, this new form of transfer opens the door to privatizing and depopulating China’s entire countryside in the name of “modernizing agriculture.” We suspect, therefore, that such privatization is an insidious new form of enclosure, or capitalist “accumulation by dispossession” of peasants’ social safety net.⁸

The third group of articles explores the significance and risks of privatization more generally, including an original English translation of an important 2003 statement by the aforementioned Li Changping, now one of China’s most well-known left-leaning rural activists. The fourth section presents three reports on peasant land-protection movements (better-researched than the news accounts critiqued in section 1), and an English article that introduces some of the findings of the major CASS study reported in Chinese by political scientist Yu Jianrong. These reports agree that direct land grabs by local governments and developers are indeed the major threat to many of China’s peasants today. However, the two detailed case studies by Zhai Minglei and Gao Luli describe a common scenario of such disputes, where villagers appeal not to private ownership of family plots, but to the collective rights of their village as a whole. Such reports illustrate how China’s official policy of rural land tenure often corresponds to peasants’ own ideas about collective property and communal interdependence, so, again, the real problem appears to be how to strengthen, rather than undermine, collective ownership.

The fifth section introduces a major new current of Chinese left-leaning approaches to interpreting and engaging with the rural problem and the land question. As the piece by sociologist He Xuefeng makes clear, this current is diverse, but we find it coherent enough to treat as a single tendency within China’s “New Left.” This current draws on the legacy of China’s Rural Reconstruction movement of the 1930s, especially the thought of neo-Confucian modernizer Liang Shuming,⁹ but also emphasizes specificities of today’s rural problem, and, in their experimentation, takes cues from both the Mao era and foreign experiences of “alternative development.” For these reasons, we find it appropriate label this current “New Rural Reconstruction” (xin xiangcun jianshe pai), a name many of its proponents briefly adopted until the party-state announced its campaign to “construct a New Socialist Countryside” in 2006, when most switched to the official slogan, although maintaining a distinct set of positions on how to “construct a new countryside.”¹⁰

The articles in this section focus on New Rural Reconstruction’s approach to the land question. In general, this current argues that collective village property, including land, is the material foundation of China’s “village communities” and their “peasant economy,” which still constitute the foundation of Chinese society as a whole as well as the “stabilizer” and “reservoir” (of labor-power) fueling and stabilizing China’s continuing process of “development” or “modernization.” There is some disagreement regarding the degree to which land-use rights should be controlled by households, villager teams, or administrative villages, but the current is united in arguing against privatization and for some degree of collective control over land and other resources, both for periodic reallocation among villagers and for use in community projects such as water control. The brief report on a lecture by agricultural economist Wen Tiejun introduces his own argument against agricultural corporatization initiatives like those described above, where agricultural enterprises take over village lands. Wen’s critique centers on his understanding of China’s peasant economy as to some extent antagonistic to purely market-based logic, and his belief that China’s stability depends on preserving village land as a secure means of subsistence not subject to market fluctuations. The second piece is a detailed report Wen co-wrote with sociologist and rural cadre He Huili on their experiments with peasant mutual aid and urban—rural consumer—producer cooperation in Lankao, Henan. This report illustrates various forms of economic and cultural cooperation beyond the household level – forms of the “collective” tendency within peasant society that New Rural Reconstruction aims to strengthen.¹¹ Third is He Xuefeng’s clarification about this current’s internal diversity (in particular, his difference from Wen Tiejun) and coherence (versus their common foil, Justin Yifu Lin, representative of “mainstream” approaches to “constructing a new countryside” and now Chief Economist of the World Bank), as well as a strong argument for strengthening the “village community” as an essentially non-capitalist space outside the global market, albeit “supplemented” by limited use of the market. The last piece in this section is sociologist Wang Ximing’s report on the Chengdu Plain system of villager teams, whose control over land and mechanisms for cooperation underlie one of China’s more successful systems of rural public goods supply today, despite limited state support in recent years.

Sections 6, 7, and 8 attempt to push this growing wave of concern, discussion, and experimentation about China’s rural problem further than the limits of New Rural Reconstruction by introducing some ways in which villages have used their common land and other resources to carry out more ambitious projects in “rural collective economy.” These projects include both the “people’s commune” system in China’s socialist context from 1958 to the early 1980s, as well as re-collectivized villages, such as Nanjie, Henan, within the present capitalist context. We use the term “rural” because both kinds of organization started in rural areas on the basis of agriculture, but in most cases an explicit aim of these projects has been economic diversification and industrialization in order to improve quality of life while maintaining some degree of self-sufficiency.

Some Chinese leftists use the term “socialist” to describe not only the Mao-era communes, but also some of the post-Mao collectives, especially Nanjie, often called the most important remaining “bastion of socialism” in China.¹² They emphasize that both forms of organization involve at least the formality, and in some cases the substance, of collective ownership and management at a larger and more inclusive scale than the village or sub-village management of resources discussed above. They also emphasize the degree to which both communes and collectives distribute goods and services according to need, rather than merely according to labor or capital input. (In Nanjie the official ratio is 2/3 distribution according to need, 1/3 according to labor, for villagers, and 1/3 need, 2/3 labor for non-resident employees, but, according to the interview with Nanjie leader Wang Hongbin in section 7, the village plans to expand its benefits to achieve nearly 100% distribution according to need within the next ten years.)

We present the pieces in sections 6 through 8 in order to inform readers who may not be aware of the positive aspects of both these collective models, and to extend the discussion about their lessons for the present task of solving China’s rural problem and the global problem of which it’s a part. Section 8 adds to this discussion the ecological dimension that’s often overlooked.

However, lest we be dismissed as harboring romantic misconceptions about either of these collective models, and in the hope of stimulating more critical analysis from the left, we should briefly note our awareness of their limits – limits we believe not to be inherent in collective ownership, management, or distribution according to need, but in the social contexts that define both the communes and today’s collectives.

As Wen Tiejun’s monograph on the origin of China’s rural problem demonstrates,¹³ since the 19th century, foreign imperialist aggression has compelled China to imitate to some extent the industrialization paths of “developed” capitalist states in order to survive as a nation, but China could not, like the “developed” states, plunder other countries to acquire the primary capital to begin national-scale industrialization. The only solution was “self-exploitation,” that is, for the Chinese state to temporarily increase its extraction of surplus from the pre-industrialized agricultural sector to a level sufficient to support the gradual expansion of industry. The post-1949 state-run economy and the post-1958 commune system helped this to happen by minimizing the “transaction costs” for transferring surplus from one sector to another. From our perspective, the main political value of this analysis is to show (as Tan Tongxue’s letter in section 1 suggests) that many of the problems popularly associated with the communes stem from their subsumption under this process of “primitive accumulation,” rather than any inherent problems with collective ownership or distribution according to need. In the spirit of Mobo Gao’s essay in section 7 and the book it summarizes, we would also like to add to Wen’s analysis an awareness and invitation to more serious study of the ways that China had begun in the early 1970s to reverse the process of surplus transfer, contributing in many rural areas to a significant rise in living standards and capacities for future improvements (some of which have actually fallen since the 1990s with the marketization of health care and education).¹⁴ The combination of Wen’s analysis and studies such as Gao’s provides a starting point for developing an analysis of the communes that divorces their exploitative aspects from the positive, properly “communal” aspects that were beginning to develop in some areas when the communes were abolished (often against the will of commune members) by state fiat in the early 1980s. We therefore invite readers to doff their ideological blinkers and look seriously at the commune experience for solutions to today’s rural problems.

Similarly, we feel that today’s relatively socialistic collectives, such as Nanjie, should be studied for solutions to generalized rural problems, but should also be understood as limited by the capitalist context in which they operate. As Liu Yongji’s analysis of Nanjie in section 6 makes clear, such collectives are first and foremost commercial enterprises competing on the capitalist market. To put this in Marxian terms, such collectives, if they are to survive, must operate according to the capitalist logic of constantly accelerating exploitation – either self-exploitation of the collective owners, or, in the case of Nanjie, “collective capital’s” exploitation of non-resident employees, who happen to do most of the value-producing work and have little say in the collective’s management.¹⁵ Moreover, as Liu and many advocates of New Rural Reconstruction both highlight, the Nanjie model as a whole could not be reproduced in most other Chinese villages under the present conditions. However, as with the Mao-era communes, we believe that today’s successful collectives possess a dual nature, both exploitative and communal, and that the latter aspect can be disentangled from the former and strengthened – perhaps by some of the reforms proposed by Liu, but more importantly, by transforming the external context so such collectives can better afford to be more democratic, inclusive, and so on.

Like the mutual aid promoted by New Rural Reconstruction, we think both the Mao-era communes and some of today’s rural collectives offer important lessons about egalitarian, in some cases participatory and democratic, management of production and distribution, often according to need, geared towards sustainably improving member’s living standards on the basis of limited resources — especially land owned in common. We believe these experiences should be studied by anyone interested in overcoming today’s rural crisis. The readings in these three sections offer a few starting points for this important investigation and reflection, which has only just begun to emerge from the swamp of ideology that has characterized most publication on this subject in both Chinese and English.

We would especially like to highlight William Hinton’s preface to the Chinese translation of Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village, republished here in preparation for the book’s forthcoming, long-awaited publication, and in celebration of the posthumous publication of Hinton’s final book, Through a Glass Darkly: American Views of the Chinese Revolution (Monthly Review Press, 2006).¹⁶ Hinton’s works remain some of the most important documentation of rural institutional change and experimentation during the Mao era.

Likewise, although Mobo Gao’s Chinese essay, “Writing History,” has been published before and widely distributed on the internet, we include it here in preparation for the also long-awaited Chinese translation of Gao Village: Rural Life in Modern China, and in celebration of Gao’s new book The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (Pluto Press, 2008).¹⁷

Finally, section 9 presents commentaries on two other current affairs whose representations in both Chinese and English-language news media have likewise been monopolized by ideology, namely, China’s role in Sudan and the Tibetan protests that began on March 10 of this year. We do not intend to defend the growing aspirations of Chinese capital to imitate the imperialist projects of “developed nations,” but only to point out that today’s world is still very much dominated by the US empire, and that such Chinese aspirations pale in comparison to the hegemonic and overwhelmingly malevolent role of the US capital-state complex on the global stage.

We regard China’s present rural problem to be part of a global crisis manifested in increasing unrest over the past few years, especially by dispossessed people from rural areas who are unable or unwilling to integrate into the standing army of labor for capital.¹⁸ Our tentative understanding of this crisis is as a contradiction between capital’s growing reliance on dispossession (including dispossession of peasant land) as a fix to its own drawn-out crisis of over-accumulation, on the one hand, and capital’s apparent inability to support an increasing portion of the people being dispossessed, on the other.¹⁹

With this first issue of China Left Review, we hope to stimulate the small but growing dialogue between Chinese scholars and activists trying to understand and solve China’s “rural problem in three dimensions,” and people throughout the English-speaking world grappling with similar problems in other places.

In our understanding, China’s peasants are being simultaneously subsumed and excluded by global capitalism much like peasants and proletarians, urban and rural, employed, unemployed, and semi-employed, almost anywhere on the planet. Very few of China’s peasant households can satisfy their basic needs today without participating in the global market, and when they do, whether it’s by selling rice at exploitative prices or selling labor-power at super-exploitative wages, or paying interest on loans to buy fertilizer, education, or health care, local and foreign segments of the same global capitalist process exploit them much like capital exploits peasants and proletarians in India, Mexico, or the US. And capital likewise threatens all with dispossession, illegal or legal, of any assets we’ve managed to keep or acquire through decades of struggle, such as collective rights to resources. The difference in degree of exploitation and resistance to dispossession is political, reflecting not only the uneven geography of capitalist accumulation, but also the degree of oppositional organization among different groups of peasants and workers. The past few years of intensified globalization have seen a historic revival of transnational peasant organizations, such as La Via Campesina, and networks bringing peasants together with their sometimes rival proletarians, in their common struggles against transnational capitalist institutions like the WTO.²⁰ Chinese peasants, workers, and their advocates have gradually begun to enter these networks. We hope that CSG and our publications such as this can help to promote the linking-up of these Chinese rebels with potential allies elsewhere. We feel that Chinese peasants have a lot to offer the alternative globalization movement because of their experiences with both oppositional politics and the sort of cooperative and collective experiments introduced here. We offer this set of readings as a starting point for studying these experiences as a guide toward coordinating the sustainable use of the world’s resources on village, regional, and global levels, in such a way that everyone can enjoy the fruits of industrialization without being worked to death or destroying the earth in the process.

Notes

¹ According to national census data from 2005, 57% of China’s population, or nearly 800 million people, were “rural” (nongcun renkou). According to He Xuefeng (see his article in this issue), this figure refers only to people currently living in rural areas, whereas most migrant workers counted as urban cannot afford to raise their children or retire in the city, even if they wanted to. Instead they leave their children in the village and eventually retire there. Even if they work most of their life in the city, they still “depend on farming land in the country for the livelihoods of their parents and children”; they are “transient guests in the cities who must rely on the village to reproduce their labor-power, establish their value system, and give meaning to their existence.” He therefore estimates China’s “rural population” at 70% or 900 million, and he predicts that this number will not drop to under 50% within the next 30 years, even if China manages to sustain its present fast pace of urbanization and economic expansion. On the concept of the “peasant household” and “village community” as units of the “peasant economy” (organized around small-scale agriculture for a combination of direct consumption and sale or tribute), and on their integration into global capitalism to the effect that most peasant households become underpaid producers of labor-power and other commodities (that is, unpaid household labor covers the costs labor-power’s reproduction so peasant workers can be paid below their value, and unequal terms of trade enable other peasant products to sell below their value as well), see Ann Lucas de Rouffignac, The Contemporary Peasantry in Mexico: A Class Analysis (Praeger, 1985); Hamza Alavi, “Peasantry and Capitalism: A Marxist Discourse,” in Teodor Shanin, ed., Peasants and Peasant Societies (Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 185-196; Karl Kautsky, The Agrarian Question (Zwan 1988); and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).

² CSG translated this letter and published the English version as A Letter to Premier Zhu Rong Ji.

³ For an excellent overview and analysis of reports on rural protests and insurgency over the past two decades, see Kathy Le Mons Walker, “‘Gangster Capitalism’ and Peasant Protest in China: The Last Twenty Years.” Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 33, no. 1 (2006):1-33. Also see the reports on peasant land struggles in section 4 of this issue, including the English overview by Zhao Ling.

⁴ As suggested by the preceding quotation from Li Changping, since around 2000, government and intellectual discourse have framed a variety of problems they associate with rural residents in terms of “the rural problem in three dimensions,” theorized most influentially by economist Wen Tiejun in a book summarized in English as Reflections at the Turn of the Century on Rural Issues in Three Dimensions. Here he explains that this “three-dimensional” formulation, adopted from CCP jargon, highlights that China’s rural problems “cannot be simply treated as an agricultural issue, but are interrelated with rural people (income/ migrant/ etc.), society (social capital development and multiple socioeconomic and political issues), and production (agricultural vertical integration/ township and village enterprises development)” (11). These writings also locate China’s contemporary rural problem within Wen’s re-narration of modern Chinese history, introduced below.

⁵ See the plan for “constructing a New Socialist Countryside” in the 2006 no. 1 document, along with the no. 1 documents for 2004, 2005, and 2007 (all focusing on rural development), here.

⁶ For an example of the Kerala influence in China, see He Huili’s article 印度卡邦的乡村建设——知识分子对改善乡村状况的作用. For background on Kerala, see Govindan Parayil, ed., Kerala: The Development Experience (London: Zed, 2000).

⁷ For examples of these reports see Mure Dickie and Jamil Anderlini, “Double challenge to Beijing orthodoxy,” Financial Times, 26, December 2007; John Garnaut, “Farm grab sows seeds of rebellion,” The Age, 2 January 2008; Jamil Anderlini, “Losing the countryside: a restive peasantry calls on Beijing for land rights,” Financial Times, 19 February 2008; and Simon Elegant, “China’s fighting farmers,” Time, 6 March 2008. The term “manifesto” comes from Garnaut. In section 1 of this issue, Tan Tongxue’s letter refers to Anderlini, Yan Hairong’s to Elegant, and in section 3, Erickson’s essay traces the probable links between such pressures for land privatization and certain US imperialist institutions and their histories.

⁸ On the “new enclosures,” see Midnight Notes, 10 (1990) and The Commoner, 2 (2001), which re-theorize enclosures as “a regular return on the path of accumulation and a structural component of class struggle” (MN 10, p. 1). In MN’s reading, the ongoing new global round of enclosures is part of a “large-scale reorganization of the accumulation process which has been underway since the mid-1970s” aimed at “uproot[ing] workers from the terrain on which their organizational power has been built, so that, like the African slaves transplanted to the Americas, they are forced to work and fight in a strange environment where the forms of resistance possible at home are no longer available” (3). David Harvey elaborates on how such enclosures help capital to resolve its periodic crises of over-accumulation in The New Imperialism (Oxford, 2003; a condensed version of the argument is online here), coining the term “accumulation by dispossession” to distinguish these enclosures from Marx’s primitive accumulation). Loren Goldner makes a similar point in Fictitious Capital for Beginners

⁹ On Liang Shuming and the Rural Reconstruction movement, see Guy Alitto, The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity (University of California Press, 1979).

¹⁰ Our understanding of this “New Rural Reconstruction” current comes largely from vol. 39, no. 4 of the journal Chinese Sociology and Anthropology (2007); Alexander Day’s article “The End of the Peasant? New Rural Reconstruction in China,” boundary 2, vol. 35, no. 2 (2008); and Chinese materials such as the articles in section 5 of this issue.

¹¹ This use of “collective” refers to Marx’s 1881 analysis of the contemporary Russian peasant commune (obshchina), where he observed that it contained two opposing tendencies that he called “collective” and “property,” either of which might “gain the upper hand” and determine the commune’s fate – either “disintegration” or integration into a communist revolution, depending on “the historical context” (Marx’s other writings on this are collected and discussed in Teodor Shanin, ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road, Routledge, 1984). A similar interpretation of Chinese peasant society today can be found in New Rural Reconstruction discourse (minus the communist politics), for example in Wang Xiaoyi’s analysis of “the paradox of Xiaogang village,” 小岗村的悖论.

¹² As this introduction is being written, Nanjie is being forced to privatize as the Agricultural Bank of China calls in its loans in preparation for listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange. The bank reported that Nanjie’s relatively egalitarian prosperity was to a significant extent founded on 1.7 billion yuan (US$243 million) in debt, which one reporter estimates will take 200 years to pay off. Neoliberal analysts such as Poon Siu-tao are now attempting to use Nanjie as a fable about the danger of straying away from market logic, warning that “any artificial distortion of market operations goes against economic laws and cannot last long.” Poon is forgetting that these “economic laws” are neither natural nor inevitable – they have themselves been “artificially” imposed on societies by governments around the world acting in capitalist interests with renewed force over the past three decades. One could just as well use this state-enforced restructuring to the opposite effect, as a fable about the danger of market logic, warning that capitalist economic laws conflict with the interests of the working class, and that any attempt to build a sustainable basis for the egalitarian prosperity Nanjie was aiming for will have to confront these “laws” head-on and transform them. But it is not yet clear exactly how Nanjie’s management and distribution structure will be affected by the privatization. For more detailed reports in Chinese, see 南街村私有化故事 (瞭望东方周刊，2008年4月1日), 南街村：一时的迷途，还是神话的破产 (南方新闻网，2008年04月08日), and ‘南街村之变‘调查：艰难自救后‘经济正在复苏’ (大河网，2008年04月17日). Also see the ongoing discussion about Nanjie on the broad-left forum Utopia.

¹³ Wen’s monograph is 《中国农村基本经济制度研究——“三农”问题的世纪末反思》，北京：中国经济出版社，2000. The argument is summarized in English in Reflections at the Turn of the Century on Rural Issues in Three Dimensions (pdf) and China’s Century Long Quest for Industrialization. We should note that such application to China of Preobrazhensky’s theory of “primitive socialist accumulation” has been disputed, but the arguments in favor seem to have the upper hand at this point. See, for instance, Sun Laixiang, “Price Scissors, Rationing, and Coercion: An Extended Framework for Understanding Primitive Socialist Accumulation,” Economics of Planning, vol 34, no. 3 (2001): 195-213.

¹⁴ On the improvement of rural living standards and capacities under the commune system, their recent decline, and institutional explanations, see, for example, Chris Bramall, In Praise of Maoist Economic Planning: Living Standards and Economic Development in Sichuan since 1931 (Oxford University Press, 1993), Sanjay Reddy, Death in China: Market Reforms and Health, New Left Review 45 (2007), Wang Shaoguang , People’s Health Matters Too (CSG, 2005), and Azizur Rahman Khan and Carl Riskin, Inequality and Poverty in China in the Age of Globalization (Oxford University Press, 2001).

¹⁵ See Sharryn Kasmir, The Myth of Mondragon, for an ethnographic study of the transformation, with Spain’s increased integration into the European market, of an originally egalitarian and democratic cooperative into something more like a conventional capitalist enterprise, while similar cooperatives in the region went out of business due to their refusal to compromise their egalitarian principles. For one starting point for theorizing why this happens to cooperatives, see Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, chapter 27. Also see Bertell Ollman, ed., Market Socialism: The Debate among Socialists for arguments for and against the possibility of non-capitalist enterprises remaining non-capitalist in a market.

¹⁶ See Robert Weil’s review of the latter in Were Revolutions in China Necessary? People unfamiliar with Chinese academia may be surprised to learn that Chinese scholars of both left and right persuasions still look to Hinton’s work for details about the Mao era that Chinese academia’s restricted ideological atmosphere (even more restricted, in some ways, than mainstream China studies in the US) has prevented Chinese scholars from publishing. Likewise, many Chinese scholars from rural backgrounds who grew up during the collective era say that Mobo Gao’s work conveys what they would like to write but dare not publish – that is, honest reflections on the virtues of the commune system in light of the present rural crisis.

¹⁷ We regret that we can include in this issue only a few short texts, mainly in Chinese, on past and present experiences of rural collective economy. At present there are still surprisingly few reliable and systematic studies, regardless of political perspective. On the Mao-era communes, in addition to the works of Hinton, Gao, Meisner, Sanders, and Dale Wen sampled here, we also recommend The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Educational Reforms and their Impact on China’s Rural Development by Dongping Han (Garland, 2000), a synopsis of which can by found on the CSG website as Reexamining the two models of rural education and their impact on rural development in China ; In Praise of Maoist Economic Planning: Living Standards and Economic Development in Sichuan since 1931 by Chris Bramall (Oxford, 1993); The Red Earth: Revolution in a Chinese Village by Stephen Endicott (Tauris, 1988); and 告别理想：人民公社制度研究 by Zhang Letian （上海人民出版社，2005）. Chinese readers may also consult various works by Lao Tian. On Nanjie, also see Cui Zhiyuan, How Did Nanjie Village Overcome the Free-Rider Problem?, ; Joshua Muldavin, “The Paradoxes of Environmental Policy and Resource Management in Reform-Era China,” Economic Geography, Vol. 76, No. 3 (2000), pp. 244-271; Lao Tian, 左右派在“南街村争论”中的误区 ; and Liu Qian, 南街社会 (学林出版社, 2004).

¹⁸ The Zapatista uprising of 1994 has become a major symbol of this new round of unrest, including in China, where moderate leftists use it as an example of the danger of land privatization and the need to protect the “peasant economy” and “village community” from neoliberal globalization. See, for example, Wen Tiejun, 现场目击墨西哥‘蒙面军’. On the increasing rural unrest over the past two decades in general, see Reclaiming the land: the resurgence of rural movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America, edited by Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros (Zed, 2005).

¹⁹ On capital’s increasing reliance on dispossession as a fix to its crisis of over-accumulation, see Harvey, op cit. On capital’s apparent inability to incorporate an increasing portion of the people it’s dispossessing into formal wage relations, and on the increasing rebelliousness of this excluded population, see Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (Verso, 2007), Georgi Derluguian, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography (University of Chicago Press, 2005), and Mute, vol. 2, no. 3: Naked Cities: Struggle in the Global Slums.

²⁰ Rural unrest is clearly in the air. After this introduction was written, we learned that the Journal of Agrarian Change and the Journal of Rural Studies have both just published special issues, on “transnational agrarian movements” and “social movements and rural politics,” respectively (JAC vol. 8, nos. 2 & 3, April & July 2008; JRS vol. 24, no. 2, April 2008). Both include articles on La Via Campesina, and the JAC issue includes an article addressing peasant land struggles in China and their implications for transnational agrarian movements by Kathy Le Mons Walker. We encourage readers to combine the lessons introduced in these issues with those introduced here to develop a more complete analysis of the global rural crisis that will help give direction to the transnational circulation of anti-capitalist struggles among peasants and proletarians, urban and rural. For more on La Via Campesina, see La Vía Campesina: globalization and the power of peasants by Annette Aurelie Desmarais (Pluto, 2007).