From Labor Commodification to Land Dispossession: The Changing Foundations of Chinese Development, 1978 to present

• In Event: 031 - Section on Asia and Asian America Paper Session. Social Change and Resistance in Asia and Asian America

Abstract

What are the foundations of China’s rise? This dissertation argues that two central mechanisms are foundational to the Chinese economy. First, enterprises suppress labor prices to low levels through the employment of rural migrant laborers who hold generalized rights to rural village land, an arrangement which outsources the full social cost of labor reproduction to villages. Second, rural governments, bankrupted from absorbing these costs, raise revenues by expropriating village land for urban construction. These two mechanisms – one labor-based and the other land-centered, both driving discrete mechanisms of capital accumulation in China today – are interdependent but mutually antagonistic. The migrant labor system has bankrupted the rural governments that absorb labor reproduction costs, thus necessitating their turn to profitable land redevelopment for fiscal recovery. Yet rural-urban land conversions are gradually undermining mechanisms for the reproduction of the Chinese labor force.

Author

• Julia Chuang, Boston College