China S Peasants And Workers

This unique and fascinating book explores three decades of economic change in China and the consequent transformation of class relations and class-consciousness in villages and in the urban workplace. The expert contributors illustrate how the development of the urban economic environment has led to changes in the urban working class, through an exploration of the workplace experiences of rural migrant workers, and of the plight of the old working class in the state owned sector. They address questions on the extent to which migrant workers have become a new working class, are absorbed into the old working class, or simply remain as migrant workers. Changes in class relations in villages in the urban periphery _ where the urbanization drive and in-migration has lead to a new local politics of class differentiation _ are also raised. Presenting new, original field research detailing social and socio-economic change in China, this book will prove invaluable to scholars, researchers and postgraduate students with an interest Asian studies, public policy, regional and urban studies, political science or sociology.

The seven articles in this collection all deal with the topic of “peasants, migrant workers and informal labor,” but each has a different emphasis on one of these elements.

This landmark study of Zengbu, a Cantonese community, is the first comprehensive analysis of a rural Chinese society by foreign anthropologists since the Revolution in 1949. Jack and Sulamith Potter examine the revolutionary experiences of Zengbu's peasant villagers and document the rapid changeover from Maoist to post-Maoist China. In particular, they seek to explain the persistence of the deep structure of Chinese culture through thirty years of revolutionary praxis. The authors assess the continuities and changes in rural China, moving from the traditional social organization and cultural life of the pre-revolutionary period through the series of large-scale efforts to implement planned social change which characterized Maoism - land reform, collectivization, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. They examine in detail late Maoist society in 1979-80 and go on to describe and analyse the extraordinary changes of the post-Mao years, during which Zengbu was decollectivized, and traditional customs and religious practices reappeared.

The largest migration in history is taking place in China today, off the radar of the world's major media. Since the 1990s at least 120 million Chinese peasants have left the countryside for the big cities to work in factories, on construction sites, in catering and prostitution - typically without the most basic rights or protections. Here van Luyn relates the remarkable tales of migrant workers who have helped fuel the explosive growth of the People's Republic of China.

Socialism and capitalism in the Chinese countryside -- Chinese agrarian change in world-historical context -- Agricultural productivity and decollectivization -- The political economy of decollectivization -- The achievement, contradictions, and demise of rural collectives

The author presents a convincing new interpretation of the origins and nature of the agrarian crisis that gripped the North China Plain in the two centuries before the Revolution. His extensive research included eighteenth-century homicide case records, a nineteenth-century country government archive, large quantities of 1930's Japanese ethnographic materials, and his own field studies in 1980. Through a comparison of the histories of small family farms and larger scale managerial farms, the author documents and illustrates the long-term trends of agricultural commercialization, social stratification, and mounting population pressure in the peasant economy. He shows how those changes, in the absence of dynamic economic growth, combined over the course of several centuries to produce a majority, not simply of land-short peasants or of exploited tenants and agricultural laborers, but of poor peasants who required both family farming and agricultural wage income to survive. This interlocking of family farming with wage labor furnished a large supply of cheap labor, which in turn acted as a powerful brake of capital accumulation in the economy. The formation of such a poor peasantry ultimately altered both the nature of village communities and their relations with the elites and the state, creating tensions that led in the end to revolution.

Case study of a rural area village in Hong Kong as an example of the effects of social change and economic development within a capitalist framework - covers historical aspects, the occupational structure, rural workers, cultivation techniques, farm management, property ownership, land tenure, family budgets, the standard of living, cultural factors, etc. Bibliography pp. 207 to 212.