Can the Small Peasantry Resists the “Big Households' Monopoly”?: Dynamics of Class Formation in China’s Re-Cooperatization Movement

• In Event: Contesting the Future of Chinese Agriculture and Rural Society: Is there Hope on the Horizon for Family Farming?

Abstract

The FAO designated year 2014 as the “International Year of Family Farming” to recognize the contribution of over 500 million family farms that provide at least 56% of agricultural production to the world. Now the family farm has gradually been tokenized by both academics and activists for their potential of bringing food security, ecological sustainability and social integrity to the third world poor.
The agrarian change and smallholder discourse in China have presented a more complicated picture. Since the state de-collectivized agriculture in the early 1980s, the small peasantry, rather than embracing the promise of “letting a small group of people get rich first”, have experienced various new problems, including the fragmentation of farm land, deterioration of irrigation system, and the control by agribusinesses. In the 2000s, amidst the heightening rural crisis, small farmers in China launched the re-cooperatization movement to cushion the increasing risk of market competition. Despite of the fast growth of co-operatives booming from only 100,000 in 2008 to 689,000 in 2012, a lot of them have encountered a pressing problem of ‘big households' monopoly’ as a few elite leaders capture the collective gains for their individual benefits. However, there is not much research on how internal disparity emerges from a cooperative that is initially established on an egalitarian basis. Based on the fieldwork of a nascent aquaculture cooperative that I helped establish in south China, this paper explores the contradictions that the cooperative encountered during its operation so as to understand the dynamics of class formation in China’s re-cooperatization movement.

Author

• Yu Huang, Chinese University of Hong Kong