Title: China's rural reform: the state and peasantry in constructing a macro-rationality.

POPLINE Document Number: 081386

Author(s):

Chang KS

Source citation:

ECONOMY AND SOCIETY, 1992 Nov;21(4):430-52.

Abstract:

As a critique of the popular perspective on China's rural reform centered on microinstitutional problems of collective farming such as work incentive and monitoring, this paper places an alternative emphasis on the distinct organizational characteristics of the peasant family in production, distribution, and welfare. What the Chinese state saw in family-based peasantry was not a typical market-oriented private economy operating mainly in pursuit of short term profits, but a multipurpose, morally governed unit in which the rural population maintains stable work relations, pursues diverse entrepreneurial activities, and satisfies basic subsistence needs; i.e., a organizational unit which could take over most of the social and economic functions of the pre-reform collective. In a sense, China's rural decollectivization has been a process of deceptively transferring the burden of absorbing and supporting the huge rural surplus labor to individual peasant families for whose economic activities the state is not directly responsible. (author's)

Keywords:

China
Agrarian Reform
Rural Population
Agricultural Development
Political Factors
Economic Development
Industrialization
Development Planning
Family and Household
Developing Countries
Asia, Eastern
Asia
Rural Development
Economic Factors
Population Characteristics
Demographic Factors
Population