Peasant's agriculture in Asia E-Book

Francois Houtart

• Herausgeber: RUTH
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 302

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The necessity of feeding humankind, to save the planet, and the promotion of welfare for people living on agriculture are three main reasons for peasant agriculture. This raises the question of the conditions necessary for an efficient peasant agriculture and that of the necessity of searching for real alternatives and not only an accommodation of the capitalist system. This book focuses on the situation of peasant agriculture in various countries of Asia.

Leseprobe

Original title: Peasant´s agriculture in Asia

Edition: Heriberto Nicolás García

Cover design: Claudia Méndez Romero

Layout: Yadira R. G.

Graphics: Lilia Díaz González

Proofreading: Heriberto Nicolás García

Ebook publishing: Hamlet López García

© François Houtart and Wen Tiejun

© For the present edition:

Ruth Casa Editorial, 2012

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-9962-645-98-6

No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means, electronic, reprographic, or otherwise, or transmitted through either public borrowing or rental, without the prior written permission of the Copyright owners. Details of licenses for reproduction may be obtained from CEDRO (Centro Español de Derechos Reprográficos,www.cedro.org) or www.conlicencia.com.

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FOREWORDS

THE CHALLENGE OF PEASANT AGRICULTURE

François Houtart1

1 (Belgium) A sociologist and professor emeritus of the Catholic University of Louvain, he is the vice-president of the World Forum for Alternatives (WFA).

To raise the question of peasant agriculture in a seminar2organized in China is a real challenge, because of its long tradition in this country. However it has also today a new perspective, because of the rapid urbanization and industrialization process, even if the context is quite different here and in other Asia countries as in the rest of the world.

2 Seminar on Peasant Agriculture in Asia, organized by the Department of Rural Economics of Renmin University (Popular University) of China and the Tricontinental Centre of Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium), between the 15th and the 17th of November 2010.

There are three main reasons for the importance of the topic. First is the necessity of feeding humankind. In the middle of the century, we will have between 9 and 10 billion human beings to feed in an increasing urban proportion, which means that food production will have to be multiplied by two or three. The second reason is to save the planet. This is not only a quantitative question. It means the necessity of developing a type of production respectful of the regenerating capacity of the earth. Every year this capacity is reduced and agriculture, as it is performed today, is part of the problem. Finally the promotion of welfare for about 3 billion people living on agriculture is also at stake. All this is a task for everyone in the planet.

1. The destruction of peasant agriculture

During the last forty years we have been witnesses to an acceleration of the destruction of peasant agriculture in which many factors have intervened. The use of land for agrarian activities has diminished because of a rapid urbanization and industrialization process. Therefore, the rural population has declined relatively. In the year 1970 we had 2.4 billion people in rural areas against 1.3 in urban areas. In 2009, it was respectfully 3.2 billion against 3.5.

At the same time the adoption of a monoculture type of farming has provoked a huge concentration of land, a real counter-land reform, which has been accelerated during the last few years with the new phenomenon of land grabbing, estimated in the southern continents to be between 30 and 40 million ha; and in Africa alone 20 million ha.

This has been linked with the production of cash crops for export. One striking example has been Sri Lanka, where in 1996 a report of the World Bank was proposing to abandon rice production in favor of exports production. The reason is that it was cheaper to buy rice from Thailand and Vietnam than to produce it in Sri Lanka. For more than 3,000 years Sri Lanka has been producing rice as their main staple, but market laws must prevail, without any other consideration.

Therefore the World Bank asked the government to put an end to all regulating measures and institutions for the rice market, to put a tax on irrigation water, increasing the cost of rice production, privatize the common lands in order to make the peasants able to sell their land to local or international companies. In the face of the resistance of the present government, the World Bank used pressures, namely with international loans. The following government, more inclined to neo-liberalism, produced a paper called “Regaining Sri Lanka,” where it accepted the idea, thinking that such a solution would produce cheap manpower for industrial development with foreign capital. But Sri Lanka has been doing this for more than forty years while the working class has struggled for better salaries, social security and pensions. So manpower has become too costly and foreign capital is even leaving the country to go to Vietnam or China, where manpower is cheaper. So the solution was to reduce labor costs by cutting real salaries, dismantling social security and reducing the amount of pensions.

To export cash crops meant also to import cheap agricultural products, especially in many countries of the South which were surpluses of American or European productivist and subsidized agriculture. This in several cases destroyed the local agricultural production, like chicken in Cameroon and beef in Ivory Coast.

Monoculture production developed also a massive use of chemical products and the introduction of genetically modified organisms. All this has been linked with a productivist model of agriculture, legitimated by the growing needs, ignoring all long-term effects and in fact oriented by a profit-making economy.

2. Ecological and social effects

From the ecological point of view, effects are well known. We can mention deforestation (130,000 square km destroyed every year: the equivalent of Greece territory), but also the destruction of biodiversity. It means an irrational use of water provoking droughts in many regions. It provokes contamination of soils (In Nicaragua certain chemicals products used for sugar cane production take almost a hundred years before dissolving), but also of underground water, of rivers and even of seas. The delta of the Red River in Vietnam has started to be polluted in such a degree that fishing is diminishing. In the Gulf of Mexico, before the Mississippi estuary, there is a phenomenon of “death sea” over an area of 20,000 square kilometers (no more animal or vegetal life), because of the amount of chemical products being swept along by the river, in regions where maize for agrofuel has been massively developed. In many cases the end results in fifty or a hundred years will be desertification.

Social consequences are not less damaging. Food production is displaced toward less fertile lands and in various countries is diminishing. West Africa which was self-sufficient until the 1970s has to import today 25% of its food. Indebtedness and poverty of the peasants are accompanying the development of monocultures under the direction of big companies: small peasants are totally submitted to them for credit, inputs, commercialization, food and consumers goods.

Serious health problems are provoked among the workers and their families, because of the use of chemical products and also because of water pollution. In some cases the premature death of agricultural laborers is common.

Millions of peasants are displaced by force from their land, under various schemes and in certain countries, like Colombia, with the violence of military operations or of paramilitary forces at the service of landlords and agribusiness. In Latin America four million have been displaced in Colombia, six million in Brazil, one million in Paraguay, and in Asia six million in Indonesia. This phenomenon is increasing the migration pressure to foreign countries and creating political problems. A special case is the one of the ethnic minorities, losing their land and the basis of their existence.

3. The case of agrofuel

Mankind is facing the necessity of changing its sources of energy in the next fifty years when fossil energy will be exhausted. Among the new sources, agro energy is supposed to provide a solution, with ethanol from alcohol, coming from maize, wheat, sugarcane and agrodiesel from vegetable oil: palm trees, soya, and jatropha. Because Europe and the USA do not have enough arable land to produce what they need, a phenomenon of land grabbing is taking place in the continents of the South. Local governments are often accomplices, because they see the opportunity of diminishing their fuel bill or to accumulate foreign exchanges. According to plans for 2020 (in Europe, 20% of renewable energy) more than 100 million ha will be transformed for agrofuel and at least 60 million peasants will be expelled from their lands.

Huge extensions of land are planned for such a purpose. Indonesia plans a new extension of 20 million ha for palm trees. Guinea Bissau has a project of 500 000 ha of jatropha (one seventh of the country’s territory) financed by the casinos of Macao. An agreement was signed last October in Brasilia, between Brazil and the European Union to develop 4,8 million ha of sugarcane in Mozambique, in order to supply Europe with ethanol. All this involves a tremendous destruction of biodiversity and of social environment.

If agrofuel is not a solution for the climate (because the total process of its production is destructive and produces CO2) and if is not a real solution for the energy crisis (perhaps 20% with the existing plans), why such a project? Because it is greatly profitable for capital in the short term and so it contributes to alleviate the crisis of accumulation and allow speculative capital to intervene.

4. Peasant resistances

All over the world, peasant movements are resisting. It is thecase of the Landless Peasant Movement (MST) in Brazil, of the Indonesian Peasant Movement (SPI), of ROPPA in West Africa, etc. La Via Campesina, an international federation of more than a hundred peasant movements in the world, has been also on the move and has organized several seminars to alert peoples and authorities on the matter. Organizations for the defense of the environment, in favor of organic agriculture (namely in Korea and China) or urban and suburban agriculture (like in Cuba) are acting in the same direction. Finally academic centers of agronomy and social sciences manifest a growing awareness of such a problem and are proposing alternative solutions.

5. The reasons of such a development

The first origin of such a development has to be found in a philosophical approach, the one of a linear conception of progress without end, thanks to science and technology on an inexhaustible planet. Applied to agriculture, this means the “Green Revolution,” as we have seen in Asia, particularly in the Philippines and India, with a high productivity, but the concentration of land, soil and water contamination and growing social inequalities.

The second reason is the logic of the economic principles of capitalism. In this vision, capital is the driving force of the economy and development means accumulation of capital. From there the central character of the rate of profit leads to speculation. Financial capital has played a major role in the food crisis of 2007 and 2008. Capital concentration in the agricultural field means monopolies, such as Cargill, AMD, Monsanto, etc. Agriculture becomes a new frontier of capitalism, especially with the failing profitability of productive capital and the crisis of financial capital.

Such logic of the economic model ignores the “externalities,” i.e., the ecological and social damages. They are not paid by capital, but by the collectivities and by the individuals. Liberalization of the exchanges has increased the mercantilization of agricultural products as commodities and encouraged Free Trade Agreements, which in fact are treaties between the shark and the sardines.

6. Necessity of a transformation

Everyone sees that it is not possible to go on with agricultural policies based on the disappearance of peasants. The World Bank published in 2008 a report recognizing theimportance of the peasantry to protect nature and to fight against climate changes. It advocates a modernization of peasant agriculture, through mechanization, biotechnologies, genetic modified organisms, etc. It envisages a partnership between the private sector, civil society and peasant organizations. But all this remains within the same philosophy (see the introduction paper of Laurent Delcourt). No structural transformation is envisaged. It is a transformation within the system. One recent example is the AGRA Program in Africa, promoting hybrid seeds, genetic modified organisms, etc. The project was initiated by Rockefeller and the Bill and Melina Gates Foundation is founding several of the projects, including one of Monsanto’s, which received more than 100 million US dollars from the Foundation.

On the contrary, another type of transformation can be envisaged. Very soon after the 2008 report of the World Bank came a report of the “Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Sciences and Technology for Development (IAASTD), where the four hundred specialists consulted came to the conclusion that peasant agriculture was not less productive than industrial agriculture and has an added value: its cultural and ecological functions (see Laurent Delcourt).

This raises immediately the question of the conditions necessary for an efficient peasant agriculture. It is no more necessary to prove its agricultural productivity. But there are also other economic, social and cultural conditions to make of village life a dignified and valuable milieu, especially for the youth. It will be also necessary to revise the relations between urban and rural areas. This is what we will discuss in the following documents, after the description of the situation of peasant agriculture in various countries of Asia.

All this also raises a more fundamental question: the necessity of searching for real alternatives and not only an accommodation of the capitalist system. This means a revision of the paradigms of collective life for mankind on the planet: its relation with nature (from exploitation to respect), the production of the bases for life of any kind: physical, social, cultural, spiritual of all human beings in the world (an economy based on use values and not primarily on exchange values); a generalized democracy for all social relations, including the one between men and women and all institutions; and finally interculturality, which means a possible role of other cultures, knowledge, philosophies, and religions other than the western ones to define development and propose an ethics.

Participants at the Seminar on Peasant Agriculture in Asia,

Renmin University (Popular University) of China, November 2010.

UNDERSTANDING PEASANTRY AND LAND REFORM IN ASIA

Wen Tiejun1

1 He is the Executive Dean of the Institute of Advanced Studies for Sustainability of Renmin University, China.

In the 1930s, the intellectual circles in China went through a period of self-reflection. A group of scholars, focusing on the context of the Chinese situation, started a discussion of the Asiatic mode of production. They referred to the self-reflective writings of Karl Marx (1818-1883) in his late years concerning his limited knowledge of ancient societies in Asia. He admitted that his theory, derived from the tradition of English anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) and English natural scientistCharles Robert Darwin (1809–1882) on the five historical epochs, namely primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and lastly, socialism or communism, in the West, was not applicable to the unique character of China. For example, the western institution of slavery never appeared in China.

Self-sufficient communities based on social groups emerged when tribesmen irrigated their land together along the Yellow River and the Yangtze River. The Xia Dynasty (ca. 2070 BC–ca. 1600 BC) that emerged more than 4,000 years ago as the first dynasty in China was a result of Xia Yu’s success in developing an irrigation system preventing the flooding of the Yellow River. Such historical processes were neither related to class oppression nor pillage.

In ancient countries like China and India, irrigation-intensive agriculture was the primary mode of subsistence. This mode of production required small social groupings such as family or village to be the basic unit of society. Their historical development therefore differs from some western societies which consisted primarily of hunter-gatherers and herdsmen, with the individual being their basic social unit.

China has close to 20% of the world’s population, but only 9% of its arable land and a mere 6% of its fresh water. Over the centuries, China had its share of drought or flood-induced famines. But if not for a 6,000-year history of irrigated agriculture, with its related “village rationality” based on traditional indigenous knowledge—which internalizes risks by its multifunctional rural cultures of sustainable self-reliance—China would have been a land of perpetual hunger.

In Asia, unlike India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, China has never been completely colonized by the West. Following the 1949 land revolution in China, all arable land in villages was distributed in the form of use rights to all households according to the number of people in the family. Since there was no private ownership of land and water in rural China, no one could be laid off in the course of the village’s economic development, and no one wanted to leave the village because, without private land rights, they would also be leaving their economic security behind. Periodic redistribution of land use rights by village collectives guaranteed the rights for those who had not transferred their residence away from the village. Such a kind of multi-functional right naturally created a rationality that could absorb the cost of external risks through mechanisms within the villages.

Village rationality was originally derived from traditional rural culture that stressed resource sharing, income parity, cooperative solidarity, social justice, and the morality of village elites. Although it is true that village elites and large landholders were not always moral and human relations in villages were frequently far from ideal, these indigenous cultural features were originally created in response to extreme constraints of limited natural resources during the thousands of years of rural China’s history of irrigated agriculture.

The rural institutions based on the historical cultural elements, in addition to the equity of village members’ use rights to the land, created by the land revolution in the Maoist period, assisted in village resiliency and helped overcome natural disasters. Stemming from the 1980s rapid growth of ownership and township-village enterprises (TVEs), more than eight thousand villages in rural China underwent successful capital accumulation for rural industrialization in the name of a socialist collective system. They benefited from village rationality based on traditional culture, with much lower institutional cost than urban industry.

China has in great part accomplished the historical process of transition from capital accumulation for the formation of high-risk urban industry—although at an extremely heavy internal cost to rural society. It is unique in being the only emerging industrialized nation among the “underdeveloped” countries that has been able to pass through an industrial revolution while retaining an “indigenous” population larger than 100 million.

But China has continued to suffer after entering the period of industrial expansion. Its problems were not just caused by the severe crisis of the mid-1990s, when government debt to GDP was 140 %, and 30 million urban workers were made jobless, hence stirring up a big noise from the Western media about “China collapse.” These problems were also related to the impact of the East Asian financial turmoil in the late 1990s, at the same time as China was in the process of joining the World Trade Organization, and thus becoming increasingly integrated into the world competition of financial capital.

In 2007 the Chinese central government issued a national strategic document to transform the industrial capital-oriented economic mode, with its heavy pollution burden, into a new historical period of “Ecological Civilization.” The government’s long-term agricultural policy in 2008 also followed suit; the new sustainable target became “resource conservation and environmentally-friendly agriculture.”

Recently, developed countries with agriculture based on small farms in the European Union or households in Japan and Korea have given up capital-intensive agriculture based on big farms in the United States. They have gradually reformed their policies and now promote both multifunctional agriculture and comprehensive agrarian regional development. There is some emphasis on organic production for food quality and safety, as well as rural ecological environmental protections combined with traditional rural cultural regeneration. Increasingly people understand that traditional agriculture and indigenous knowledge, developed before the domination of modern chemical-intensive agriculture, were derived from experiences in different climatic zones and environments, and were maintained by the rural households. Although most of these traditional systems have minimal economic returns, they frequently have optimal positive effects in protecting the environment and providing for sustainable livelihoods.

Over thousands of years traditional multifunctional agriculture, originally maintained by village and small household farming, was able to develop and apply what are essentially systems of eco-environmental sustainability. This has been gradually recognized as important, not because of modern education or mainstream institutions, but because of the challenges of global warming in adversely affecting yields and incidents of low food safety and quality.

Most developing countries and regions in Asia, like rural China, have regional agriculture that can be congruent with the characteristics of nature of heterogeneity and diversity that will be essential for an ecological civilization. Some progressive intellectuals in the West also recognized that agriculture in Asia bears the characteristics of sustainability and permanency. In 1909, Franklin Hiram King (1848–1911), an Americanagricultural scientist, visited China, Korea and Japan and learned about their agricultural practices and customs. Two years later, he published his pioneering book, entitled Farmers of Forty Centuries or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan. In the first paragraph of the introduction, he criticizes the western industrial agriculture that was imposed on China, Korea and Japan, and then to the world:

It should be borne in mind that the great factors which today characterize, dominate and determine the agricultural and other industrial operations of western nations were physical impossibilities to them [referring to China, Korea and Japan] one hundred years ago, and until then had been so to all people.

On the other hand, the question of land reform in Asia has never been seriously discussed by Asians: that the land reforms in South Asian countries have not yielded any “successes,” even if they have been scientific and legal whereas the land reforms in East Asian countries and regions have not yielded any “failures,” whatever ideologies or political systems the countries or regions claim to be.

It is necessary to study the differences of land reform experiences in the different regions of Asia. In South Asia, despite the fact that land reforms “scientifically” set different ceilings to the land holdings and “legally” compensated landowners for the surplus land which was then distributed to landless peasants, the land reforms were conducted for the purpose of land reform only, and so they were part of the unsuccessful policies of the national bourgeoisie which by nature were subordinate to a colonialist economy.

It was a different situation in East Asia. Whether it was the “institutional change by coercion” pushed through with violence by three wars for land in mainland China, or the “institutional change by incentives” practiced in Chinese Taiwan whereby the government compensated landowners with future shares of state industries and commerce, the land reform was a unified policy implemented in the whole country or region, and based on equal distribution of land at the village level. Land reform is never a question of agrarian institution in itself, but the most fundamental core relations of property for the national economy of the country or region in East Asia to get rid of colonialism and struggle for independence and autonomy.

Hence, land reform for the peasants is simply land to the tillers, but land reform for the country is fundamentally and institutionally building, instrumental to the strengthening of the national economy. In East Asia, it was implemented in countries or regions that claimed to be either “socialist” or “capitalist”—China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Chinese Taiwan. The nature of land reform is of democratism and not of socialism. Hence, the success of the land reform in East Asia was not a result of ideology or institutional legislation borrowed from the West. In a word, land reform should not be an independent change of the agrarian institution, but should be a basic component of a comprehensive program for building the national economy.

EAST ASIA 

PEASANT AGRICULTURE IN CHINA

Tsui Sit1

1 (China) She is a Post-doctorate Researcher, Renmin University of China.

1. A historical review

(1.1) Peasant agriculture

Liang Qichao (1873-1929), a renowned modern politician, visited Europe in 1918 and 1919. He had been involved in pushing for western democracy and parliamentary government. But he changed completely after witnessing the destruction wrought by the First World War in Europe. He then went back to study the Chinese traditions again. InA History of Chinese Culture(1923), he concluded that Europe was based on urban governance, whereas “China is based on village governance but not urban governance.” Village governance is composed of two main factors: small peasantry and village community. He argued that small peasantry has been the nature of China’s society for at least two thousand years, which is derived from the practice of dividing up property among family members. He further elaborated that during Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), it was stated legally that family property should be divided up equally among the offspring. In that sense, the majority were small property owners or small landowners.

Moreover, Wen Tiejun, one of the most influential experts on rural China, argues that China traditionally has practiced dual land ownership for thousands of years. “Dual structural property rights“ means that the villagers can hold the membership right of the village resources as shareholders. He further explains:

The “separation of rights in land ownership and land use“ is a system derived from the internal structural logic of the rural society: on the one hand, the increase in population, which led to a tension of land-population ratio, had prevented the land ownership from falling into the hands of a few. On the other hand, as a result of a high rental rate, the right in land use was limited to kulak and mid farmers, who had the capability to manage agricultural production. These property rights systems maintained a balanced distribution of land resources and rural labor that supported an extremely stable social structure of the Old China for centuries.

Village community is also the cornerstone of rural society. Chinese ancestors lived along two main rivers, i.e., Huanghe (Yellow River) and Changjiang (Yangtze River). The formation of the Xia Dynasty (ca. 2070–ca. 1600 BC), the first dynasty in China, was a result of Xia Yu’s success in developing an irrigation system preventing the flooding of the Yellow River. A village or a peasant cannot individually solve the problems of irrigation such as flooding and drought. The driving force of survival requires a cluster of villages along the rivers to work together to discuss public affairs and to deal with the external crisis. So it is about an arrangement of collective labor and a protection of common property. Local governance is derived from village community building that paves the way for the development of nation-building. Chinese civilization is based on irrigation, agriculture, small-scale peasantry, and village communities.

Moreover, village communities usually contain three crossed layers of relations: kinship (blood), neighborhood (locality), and agricultural fellows (farmers). Village communities not only solve external crises such as natural disasters, but also turn the crisis into the reinforcement of the capacity of crisis management. This nevertheless requires mass mobilization among peasant families and village communities. Thus, the practice of sharing common property as well as solving common problems is inclusive and cooperative.

(1.2)The thread of modernization

Wen Tiejun, in his classic and controversial article “Centenary Reflections on the ‘Three Dimensional Problem’ of Rural China” (1999), originally published in Dushu, a well-known intellectual journal in the mainland, argues that the rural area is always appropriated and exploited for national modernization: “China’s problem is the tension aroused by an agrarian society, characterized by overpopulation and limited resources, in the process of internal and primitive accumulation of capital for state industrialization.”

Wen explains firstly that rural problems in China cannot be simply treated as an agricultural issue, but should also involve the interrelations between “rural people (income/migration), society (social capital development and multiple socioeconomic and political issues), and production (agricultural vertical integration/township and village enterprises development).” Then he further elaborates two basic paradoxes of China’s development: the constraint on land reform under the pressure of high population density, and the constraint of an agricultural surplus-distribution system under the binary system dividing the urban from the rural. He believes that the essential problem is the means of extracting capital from a highly scattered and low surplus agricultural economy. To put it simply, in Wen’s eyes, China is “a cluster of villages” but not “a financial city.”

Taking a historical perspective, Wen examines the thread of modernization in China from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. He summarizes China’s development as “four phases of industrialization of a peasant state,” with the ultimate aim of becoming a modern powerful state to counter European and Japanese imperialism, and the United States’ embargo during the cold war. First, the Westernization Movement initiated by the Qing dynasty from 1850 to 1895; second, the industrialization policy pursued by the Republican government from the 1920s to the 1940s; third, the “State Capitalist Primitive Accumulation” practiced by the Chinese Communist regime from the 1950s to the 1970s; and fourth, Deng Xiaoping’s promotion of the reform and open-door policy starting from the 1970s.

Wen not only criticizes the recent policy of market-oriented industry, but also the state policy of industrialization in Mao’s period:

China was forced to carry out an unprecedented self-exploitation led by a highly centralized government: in the villages, they implemented the symbiotic system of people’s communes and state monopoly for purchase and marketing, whilein the cities they established a system of planned allocation and bureaucratic institution. By controlling all surplus value produced by both rural and urban labor, the central government redistributed resources to expand heavy-industry based production.

The desire of erasing the shameful memory of being a defeated semi-colony and the anxiety of lagging behind as a backward peasant country underlie in the drive for modernization. Thus, the exploitation of the rural is rationalized in terms of a vision of building modern China in the world, countering the West. Hence it is not surprising to see that the rural in China is being appropriated for the realization of industrialization which, in view of the pre-emptive measures against communist China during the Cold War era and continuing even up until now, could only find a short cut in the capitalist world market by conceding to it access to China with the Open Door Policy. In other words, industrialization as the means to secure independence and safeguard sovereignty, leads to marketization and the subjection to not only the values of capital but also the dominant discourse and practices of developmentalism that sees the capitalist trade and market as its precondition.

As Wen Tiejun explains, China adopted four kinds of industrialization strategies: (a) extracted surplus value from the agricultural sector through low purchasing prices of agricultural products and high pricing of industrial products; (b) forced the modernization of agriculture to absorb domestic industrial products through rural collectivization; (c) mobilized intensive and massive labor input to substitute for capital factor under conditions of extreme capital scarcity. When faced with economic crises, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tried to ride them out by transferring the redundant labor force to the rural sector through ideological mobilization. He even concludes:

In China’s sixty-year history of industrialization, it is observed that as a rule whenever the cost of crisis could be transferred to the rural sector, the capital-intensive urban industry sector could be much abated, allowing it to achieve “soft-landing” thus maintaining the pressure on the existing institutions. Otherwise, a “hard-landing” in the urban sector would be incurable. Consequently, major reforms in the fiscal and even economic systems would become necessary to defense discontent.

Furthermore, according to Kong Xiangzhi’s research, the contribution of peasants to nation building in the first sixty years of the People’s Republic of China is around RMB 17.3 trillion, made possible by policies such as the instituting of the methods, the price scissors system of agricultural and non-agricultural products, the mobilization of cheap labor, and land acquisition.

Yet despite all these, the peasants are still willing to support the state’s industrial policy which exploits peasant labor and land. This is so partly because the CCP had completed Land Reform (1949-1952).

CCP used the traditional slogan of “land to the tillers” to mobilize hundreds of thousands of peasants to fight for land revolutions and the national independent liberation movement. After 1949, CCP took power and then completely implemented land reform. Land is equally distributed among peasants. At least 85% of peasants obtained the benefits of land distribution. Each peasant has a small plot of land. The per capita arable land was 0.11 ha in 2008. In other words, around 900 million small landowners are highly dispersed throughout the whole nation.

Now the total population is 1.3 billion. The total of arable land is around 122 million hectares. Land is mainly for food production in order to maintain self-sufficiency.According to FAO’s statistics, of the total cultivated land of China, around 86% was cropped for food. Of these food crops,78% were cereals (rice, maize, wheat, barley, sorghum), 10% beans, 8% sweet potatoes and 4% other crops. China’s arable land, which represents 10% of the total arable land in the world, supports over 20% of the world’s population. Although China’s agricultural output is the largest in the world, only about 15% of its total land area can be cultivated. There are around 240 million small rural households and 680 thousand villages. Each peasant has a piece of land but is actually managed and controlled by the village committee. As a whole, the majority of the population of China is small property owners or small landowners.

Strictly speaking, the peasant workers are not the proletariats, who have nothing for sale but only their laborpower. The peasant workers still have their own small plot of land for survival. They are not landless people. This is absolutely the legacy of the 1949 Revolution: one of its political achievements has been the realization of the material gain for the majority of people, i.e., the peasants. Nowadays, peasants and workers are increasingly suffering from exploitation and social injustice, but the residual socialist practices still more or less prove themselves to be a hindrance to the neo-liberal globalization and its destructive projects of modernization. At present, it is of utmost importance and urgency that we should safeguard the gains of thesuccessful land revolution of 1949 for small peasants.

2. Challenges for peasant agriculture

(1.2) Loss of arable land

In 2010, China stood as the second largest economy after the United States. According to international financial statistics of IMF, China foreign reserves reached 3.1 trillion in March 2011, which accounted for nearly one-third of the share of the world foreign reserves. According to the WTO secretariat, China’s GDP was 9.6% in 2008, 9.1% in 2009 and 10.3% in 2010. But this kind of “rise” is achieved at the expense of the small peasantry and rural society.

The loss of arable land is one of the problems. Government estimates that the current amount of arable land is roughly 122 million hectares, which has been unchanged since 2005. According to Tan Shuhou’s research, the ratio of construction land in arable land occupation has continuously increased from around 10% in 2002 to 80% in 2008. The Ministry of Land and Resources disclosed that in the loss of arable land 77% goes to construction projects.

According to2011 China Urban Development Reportby China’s Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), currently the number of Chinese peasants who have totally or partially lost their lands amounts to 40-50 million. The number is going to increase by 2-3 million per year. Land expropriation is propelled by local governments and speculative financial capitals. Since 2000, only 20-30% of the capital gain obtained from value added to land has been distributed to the village level and merely 5-10% is eventually allotted to be shared by the peasants as compensation. Local governments take away 20-30% of the added value whereas real estate developers take the lion’s share of 40-50%. Sixty percent of peasants’ petitions were about land disputes. A third of these cases are about land confiscation. Sixty percent of those surveyed are facing difficult living conditions, particularly related to problems of income, retirement and health care.