Moreover, the results of the study can be a foundation for future research, helping in tracking antimicrobial resistance changes over time. Finally, the results of the study can have implications for public health and policy decisions to limit the spread of AMR.Recent English literature on China’s agrarian change is on the rise. Besides the two special issues previously alluded to in The Journal of Peasant Studies and The Journal of Agrarian Change , other individual studies have been published by Trappel ; Van der Ploeg and Ye ; and Zhan . So far, all of these studies focus on the period since market reforms , and their consensus is that agricultural capitalism is indeed present in China’s vast countryside. However, these scholars diverge about the varied impacts on rural populations and, also, about the origins of capital . For example, taking demography and diet change as the contexts for China’s recent “hidden agriculture revolution” towards high-valued fruits and meat consumption-led agricultural production, counter to the narrative of small peasant economy demise, Huang and Huang et al. argue that small-peasant family farms actually out compete big agricultural capitalists and demonstrate much greater resilience in this new agricultural age. In other words, cannabis grow equipment the small peasant household is better suited to produce the new agriculture that is both capital- and labor-intensive.
Beyond the homogeneous portrayal of the small peasantry, others scholars have argued that the impact of agricultural capitalism is manifested in class differentiation into five agrarian classes: the capitalist employer, the petty-bourgeois class of commercial farmers, two laboring classes of dual employment households and wage workers, and subsistence peasants . Still others interested in locating the source of capital have more or less come to acknowledge that both transnational capital from above and indigenous capital from below are present and contribute to the rise of agricultural capitalism in the countryside . My research differs from above mentioned authors. I contend that agrarian capitalism is a specific form of accumulation and is not a natural process. In other words, agrarian capitalism is produced in specific history and interconnected geography. As such, my research denaturalizes the assumed universal agrarian capitalism by showing the interconnected and constitutive processes of forestry, family reproductions and small town development that produces China’s agrarian change.However, the rise of agricultural capitalism is only a small part of a larger transformation in the countryside. Feminist critiques of agrarian change and literature on rural-to-urban migration have revealed the importance of gendered reproductive work . Since China’s economic reforms in the 1980s, rural-to-urban migrants have fundamentally and continually contributed to the rapid economic development in coastal and urban regions and to rural development through remittances .
With internal migrants reaching over 287 million in 2019, split households are believed to have become the defacto “way of life” for many rural populations. This geographically dispersed situation recasts gender, age, and reproductive care work in the context of the “split household” strategy . As a result of this strategy, Chuang argues that rural women are expected to exit factory jobs to maintain the migration system. Chuang suggests that the phenomenon of “left-behind women” is not caused by the traditional patriarchal system but rather by the gendered calculations of elderly rural women faced with no social security. In particular many elderly rural women urge their daughters to stay home and secure remittances from their sons-in-law by stigmatizing further female migration as licentious behavior. Thus, young women after having married and given birth, are expected to exit factory work and take responsibility for elderly care and child rearing so that husbands can continue to migrate, especially since men earn higher wages than women in general. Beyond stressing rural women’s own agency, Jacka sharply criticizes the narrowly focused political-economy aspect of China’s current agrarian change and offers an analysis of agrarian transformation focused on gender, intergenerational ties, and family reproductive work. Jacka shows that translocal families encompass strategies that are more than “livelihood” driven. Translocal families’ strategies are simultaneously geared towards reproductive care work and “new social expectations and aspirations for family reproduction” . As many villagers’ income has increased, most families have invested little in agriculture, but rather poured their savings into building a modern house or buying a new apartment in county seats.
Modern housing is not only seen as materialized wealth and evidence of upward social status but also a must for any young man seeking to marry. Investment in housing is a key strategy for family reproduction. In addition, sending children to better urban schools in county seats or provincial capitals is another key strategy for family reproduction. My studies build on these insights and emphasize the variability and diverse lived experiences of the mothers and children in both rural and urban settings, as families have extended themselves to multiple spaces.The “urban question of China’s agrarian transformation” is explicitly probed in an unpublished manuscript by Hsing and Li . In particular, they suggest that the important role of urban ideology or tendency towards urbanism animates rural residents even in peripheral of rural peripheral regions. This urban ideology is an indispensable aspect of the process of urbanization that is tightly interconnected between three typological places: urban core, urban fringe, and rural fringe . Arguing against the mainstream thesis of “state-led urbanization,” Hsing proposes the opposite, namely the force of urbanization commands local governments’ development agenda and politics. This thesis of the “local state urbanized” also puts a final end to China’s once vital rural industry—the “Sunan model”— as local governments have shifted to a much more lucrative land-based revenue regime driven by rapid urban expansion in Jiangsu Province . As rural industry became like yesterday’s flowers, migration routes to TVEs ended. Meanwhile, the rural construction sector had risen up thanks to the force of urbanization . Chuang argues that China’s construction boom is based on two main ingredients: cheap rural migrant labor and cheap rural land. She reveals that China’s current economic development is based on a double accumulation: accumulation without dispossession and accumulation by dispossession . Following Arrighi’s argument, Chuang states that all of the industrial and service sector in general, and the construction sector in particular, need rural migrant labor that tolerates low wages because family reproduction cost is born through the possession of farmland and the gendered care work at the migrants’ place of origin. On the other hand, following Harvey’s thesis, urbanization is also supported by the expropriation of rural land for high profits. My contribution to this literature is to underline the agency of the rural population, indoor grow cannabis not as mere victims of the process, but rather as a constitutive part of China’s regional development, and of the current small town construction boom in particular.In addition to the force of urbanization, rural China has been influenced since 2005 by the central government’s campaign to build a “New Socialist Countryside.” The campaign entails a series of initiatives—“productive development, comfortable livelihood, civilized villager morale, clean and tidy villages, and democratic management”—that the Chinese government set as its policy priority for the 11th and 12th five-year plans. In its initial phase, Chinese scholars have complained of the top-down policies and implementation that focused on superficial village “beautification” projects, advocating instead for peasants’ participation in more meaningful rural change . In contrast to this depiction of a “superficial” political campaign, Perry studied what she saw as the central government leaders’ adaptive and pragmatic approaches to formulating “New Countryside” policies. In addition to central leaders, the active role of county and township government officials as key actors in the implementation of these policies leads to a “win-win” scenario for the state, the local government, and the villagers . Still others have pointed to the role of social activists who functioned as key actors in bridging the gap between the state and the villagers in successfully implementing sound policies for the “New Socialist Countryside” .
At the village level, Looney traces the rise and decline of the role of peasant councils in projects of the “New Countryside,” and points to shifting central policy priorities towards rural housing and the demolishing of old houses and “hollow villages” created by rural-urban migration. This shift of central policy priorities reflects a leadership transition to President Xi. Focusing on housing, other scholars point to the increasing role of rural planning for “new villages” or, as Bray puts it, “urban planning goes to rural.” According to Bray, rural planning is a political technology of governance. To govern better is to provide social welfare and services to rural populations in an efficient manner through the creation of concentrated “New Style Rural Communities” . Notwithstanding the contradictions and conflicts among the actors involved, it is no exaggeration to conclude that the Chinese state is actively involved in shaping and simultaneously being shaped in the process of producing China’s “New Socialist Countryside”.At the same time, the scholarship on the politics of conservation points to another important force in the production of China’s new countryside. Rural land dispossession is not always converted into real estate for housing projects as special economic zones, but can also involve the creation of cultural and nature conservation projects. Issues of environmental and ecological degradation, such as deforestation, soil erosion, and desertification, have been keenly appreciated in China since the late 1990s, by both the state and environmental activists . The Chinese government’s efforts to become “an environmental state” are demonstrated in the state’s two large-scale conservation programs: the Natural Forest Protection Program and the Sloping Land Conversion Program in the early 2000s . Yeh places conservation within a broader framework of agrarian transformation and environmental politics. In particular, she argues that nature reserves across China’s rural regions “are fundamentally about access to and control over resources” . Following the global trend toward neoliberal schemes of “selling nature to save it” through the Payment for Ecosystem Services, thousands of national parks and nature reserves have been created since the 2000s, creations that not only affect local people’s livelihood by placing “logging bans”, “grazing bans”, and “replacing grain for green” on steep slopes, but also by uprooting local communities through the imposed process of “ecological migration” to newly created resettlement villages . Equally important, cultural heritage projects have been utilized as powerful strategies for modernization and development in rural China by both local governments and rural residents themselves . Both nature conservation and heritage preservation schemes have been implemented in the part of rural China examined in this dissertation. Chapter Four will explore how both natural and cultural heritage projects are entangled with the township governments’ agendas of increasing revenue through rural tourism and at the same time alleviating poverty. By considering the multiple processes involved, the production of China’s new countryside can be understood as a complex process of competition, contradiction, and accommodation between the state, the market, and the family/community on the one hand, and the spatio-historical conjuncture of increased globalized interconnections on the other.Most scholars tend to emphasize a distinctive driving force behind specific elements of China’s rural change, whether it be the rise of agricultural capitalism, migration, urbanization, the “New Socialist Countryside” campaign, or the rise of natural and cultural preservation. Yet to some extent each unilateral interpretation appears limited when confronted with the other explanations. My theoretical and methodological approach is different in that it centers on the interconnected, multiple processes at play that have changed the material and social conditions producing new forms of everyday life in the rural countryside and small towns. In the region considered here, the changing material and social conditions include private forestry, semi-mechanized rice cultivation, translocal family reproduction, and small town development, particularly in the context of the post-2008 global financial crisis in southwest Jiangxi. Following the steps taken by many critical human geographers, my argument is enabled by a conceptualization of space and place as a relational product within an on-going process of power struggles that are both material and meaningful . In addition, I follow Lefebvre’s “regressive-progressive” spatio-temporal method and Hart’s method of relational comparison and interconnected historical geographies. Both methods provide key analytical frames to understand the research sites not as separate ‘cases’ or as passive recipients of global impacts but rather as historical specific nodes in the production of global processes . Specifically, Lefebvre’s “regressive-progressive” methodology and his concept of production of space are critical to my understanding of the hill country and China at large.