China’s Urban Question: The Other Side of the Agrarian Question
From the turn of the twentieth century, Marxist socialist thinkers internationally grappled with what was known as the ‘agrarian question’. Initially, this referred to the problem of whether their respective national peasantries were disappearing, transforming into industrial workers as Marx predicted and as was deemed necessary for their revolutionary projects. In the many cases where this, unexpectedly, was not happening, the question became how to organise these peasantries within socialist revolutionary movements. Where these revolutions succeeded, the agrarian question evolved into how best to organise the still existing peasantries within national projects of state modernisation. In many contexts, the peasantry was conceived as a ‘problem’—a hindrance to the achievement of modernity.
In China, the status of the peasant shifted over time from potent guerilla force of the revolution, to idealised collective labourer of the Cultural Revolution, only to return once more to the symbol of agrarian backwardness of the post-Mao market reforms. This notion that China’s ‘peasantry’ is destined to ‘disappear’ has continued to underpin China’s development thinking and policies in recent decades. The post–2008 Global Financial Crisis recovery hinged on an astonishing urbanisation drive, which saw an intensive acceleration of rural–urban land conversions. This was largely fuelled by the needs of capital to find fixed assets and local governments to find revenue, but ideologically it was underpinned by the same old motivation to ‘solve’ China’s agrarian question. Yet, even today, and despite the extraordinary levels of urbanisation witnessed in China in recent decades, there are millions of rural villagers, while millions of urban houses remain empty. While estimates among scholars of the number of small household farms in China vary, the consensus puts the number at more than 200 million of these households living, at least partially, off produce from a few hectares of land (see, for instance, Cui et al. 2018). In what has now surely become China’s ‘urban question’, the presumed rural–urban trajectory continues to meet multiple obstacles and forms of grassroots resistance, causing headaches for urban planners and policymakers at both the national and the local levels.
Observing social transformations in England in the late 1800s, Karl Marx (1990) wrote of an epochal shift in the organisation of production with major ramifications for how society was structured. The large numbers of rural smallholders who had for centuries worked the common land of the English countryside were vanishing. In a process of land enclosures stretching back to the fifteenth century, dispossessed farmers were being forced to move into cities, where they had no means of survival but to sell their manual labour in industrial factories. They had to accept meagre wages and degraded working conditions imposed by the capitalist factory owners. As the numbers of urban workers swelled, this new proletariat became the backbone of what we now know as the Industrial Revolution.
Marx was cognisant of the brutality of the process of forced dispossession and coerced transformation of peasants into ostensibly ‘free’ labourers who, in fact, had no means to escape this harsh fate. He called this ‘primitive accumulation’, the historical cleaving into two separate classes, one with property, one without—a process that, in fact, constituted nothing less than the epochal shift from feudalism to capitalism (see Marx 1990: 874–75). Even so, he saw the seeds of a beautiful future within this violent transformation. For Marx, after all, the peasantry was not a group to be nostalgically salvaged, since they were a relic of a past mode of production now on its way out: unproductive and, mostly, politically backward. Instead, the emerging two classes of downtrodden workers and capitalists engorged with new wealth would lead, he envisaged, to an unsustainable social conflict. From this antagonism would spring forth a united uprising by the workers, a collective seizure of property and production, and the flowering of an equal, emancipated, and plentiful society.
Are the Peasantries Disappearing? If Not, Then What?
By the end of the century, Marx’s inspirational narrative had come to move a generation of socialist thinkers, in various nations, who were witnessing the bleakness of the new industrialising world around them. With eager anticipation, they looked for the dissolution of the smallholding peasantry—a sign heralding the oncoming development of the capitalist mode of production, which was now conceived as the necessary pathway to communist utopia. Yet, despite their hopes, the continued existence of the peasantry posed a vexing intellectual and political problem. Since our own socialist programs require the erosion of the smallholding peasantry, they mused, how do we account for the fact they are still here and, in practical terms, how should we deal with them?
In 1894, reflecting on the peasantry in France and Germany, Friedrich Engels was certain the problem was temporary. ‘[L]ike every other survival of a past mode of production, their time is doomed,’ he declared. Nevertheless, their continued existence (at least for the time being) posed a challenge for Marxist socialists. Large imports of cheap grain were coming into Europe from North and South America and India, undercutting the peasants’ livelihoods. In their straightened circumstances, they were politically allying with large landowners whom they saw as their protectors. This posed a strategic dilemma that Engels called ‘the peasant question’. To break their alliance with the landlords and win them over to the socialist side, should the Marxist socialist parties support the peasantry in their hardship, even though they required them—indeed, actively willed them—to be eroded from existence? Yes, argued Engels, since supporting them with the aim of coopting them to the revolutionary cause would at most only slow the required, and inevitable, historical process.
Meanwhile in Russia, the Narodniks—nationalist agrarian populists—were rivalling the Marxist socialists. They proclaimed that, on account of the obschina (the strong and enduring agrarian commune on which village life was founded), capitalism could not take hold in Russia and the peasantry was not, in fact, going to disappear. The young Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin was having none of it. To prove the Narodniks wrong, he scoured the vast collections of regional statistics on landholdings. In the resulting lengthy 1899 treatise, defiantly titled The Development of Capitalism in Russia (an F-you if ever there was one), he deployed all the numerical data he could to demonstrate that the erosion of the peasantry was indeed under way. They were fragmenting as a social group, he maintained, into entrepreneurial farmers (a ‘rural bourgeoisie’), on the one hand, and dispossessed labourers (a ‘rural proletariat’) on the other (Lenin 2004: see p. 177 for a useful summary).
The socialist theoretician Karl Kautsky (1988) conducted a similar investigation as he debated agrarian policy within Germany’s Social Democratic Party but reached different conclusions. The livelihood of the smallholding peasant was being degraded along with the development of urban industry, he found, but they were not disappearing as expected. Instead, they were clinging on, trapped in the position of necessary suppliers of menial labour to large capitalist farms—a doom loop in which each sustained the other. This presaged a whole new set of problems for revolutionary theorists. If the longed-for peasant dissolution, on which the hopes of international communism now hinged, was not turning out as planned, then what?
The Agrarian Question in China
In fact, while the pre-capitalist, or feudal, understanding of the peasant was certainly most prominent in Marxist thought, ideas about the peasant nature, or its place in history, had never been fully settled. Even Marx had detected, he thought, a dual nature in the peasant. In his Eighteenth Brumaire, which was remarkable for its scathing critique of peasant backwardness, he had noted that the mostly conservative traditional peasant also possessed revolutionary potential (Marx 1937). This was of particular significance in China, where, by the 1920s, the peasantry was very much in the majority and the fledgling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was struggling to find its footing. Thus, Engels’ ‘peasant question’ from three decades earlier—whether to ally with the peasantry as part of a revolutionary strategy—was crucial. For Party leader Chen Duxiu, the feudal, reactionary peasant could not be counted on as a suitable ally since their violent potential would likely lead to destructive barbarism (Huang 1975: 279; see also Day 2013: 19–20). In contrast, peasant organisers in the CCP pointed to the strong grassroots movement in rural Hunan and foresaw in this the very future of the revolution. As Mao Zedong (1927) famously put it: ‘[S]everal hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back.’
Even as Mao wrote this, CCP leaders, following advice from Stalin and the international advisors in the Comintern, were attempting to hold on to a fractious alliance with their own rivals, the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT). The hope was that, together, they could see off the powerful warlords who had entrenched themselves in various localities across China. Following intense discussions at the CCP’s Fifth Congress in 1927, it was decided, in practical terms, not to ally with the Hunan peasant movement, despite its evident revolutionary potential. On paper, the peasant movement was to be supported and land redistribution condoned, but only for landlords with holdings of more than 500 mu (1 mu is about 0.667 hectares). Since only 20 per cent of landholdings were more than 100 mu, this meant that, in practice, most landlords were to be left untouched, denying the peasant movement any real power (Huang 1975: 284). Behind this rationale was the fact that a large part of the military on the KMT’s left wing (the wing with whom the CCP was still attempting to collaborate) was made up of Hunanese landlords whose interests would be directly threatened (Huang 1975: 283-4). This policy was evidently misguided, as leading figures on the KMT’s left turned violently on the Hunan peasant movement shortly afterwards (Huang 1975: 285). Within three months, Chen Duxiu was removed as leader of the CCP, largely due to ‘his failure to give proper leadership to the peasant movement’ (Huang 1975: 288).
In 1949, just as Mao had predicted, the communist revolution now under his leadership swept to victory on the backs of the peasant masses. The pertinent ‘agrarian question’ at this point became not what was the role of the peasantry within the revolutionary movement, but how should the vast peasantry be configured within the new national project of state modernisation? In other words, how best to utilise the peasantry as a source of accumulation (Byres 1986: 15)? The solution—once more, based on Soviet advice—was the collectivisation of rural land and, by the late 1950s, large collective farms, or ‘people’s communes’ (人民公社), had been set up across China’s countryside (Gao 2019). To consolidate the peasantry’s new role as a resource to be utilised for state-building, the national rollout of a household registration permit, the hukou, divided the population into two: agricultural and non-agricultural (or urban) citizens. Those with a non-agricultural hukou were eligible for state-provided public goods and welfare provision, including children’s schooling and health care; those with agricultural hukou had to rely on the communes where they were registered for such amenities. Employment and abode were also fixed to the hukou—a measure to prevent rural people from migrating to cities. The goal was to preserve state resources for the cities and for collective agricultural production to support the growth of urban industry by supplying cheap grain to the state (Hayward 2022b).
By the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, the dominant understanding of the peasantry was that, under Party guidance within the communes, their supposedly revolutionary tendencies could be nurtured to produce a model socialist agrarian labourer devoted to building the communist future. A long way now from the original Marxist narrative of feudal peasant disappearance, the peasant in this political vision was conceived as central to national socialist modernity.
The Feudal Peasant Returns
The death of Mao and the official end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 led to a change in policy direction and an embrace of market reforms. By 1983, most communes had been dismantled and agricultural land nationwide was reorganised, with production rights redistributed to individual households—known as the household responsibility system. As the 1980s progressed, national policymakers’ attention shifted from the countryside to urban growth. Accompanying this shift, understandings of the peasant as backward and feudal returned to the fore in a prominent discourse that held the peasantry largely responsible for China’s developmental failure, though now often presented within a liberal, pro-market framing rather than a Marxist one (Day 2013: 47–69). This discourse was widely fuelled in public discussions by the broadcasting in 1988 on Chinese national television of River Elegy, a six-part documentary about Chinese culture that strongly supported this feudal peasant trope (Day 2013: 13–14).
This narrative of the peasant as historical relic and developmental obstacle fit well into what was now an era of worldwide hegemonic neoliberalism characterised by widespread processes of peasant dispossession across the Global South (McMichael 2006: 408–9). It was also highly compatible ideologically with the new form of land-based capital accumulation that was emerging in China. Fiscal reforms in 1994 had reorganised national budgetary allocations so that local governments further down in the bureaucratic hierarchy could no longer rely on distributions coming from higher up, but instead had to fend for themselves. The consequences for China’s countryside were profound. Cash-strapped local governments layered extra taxes and fees on to rural households and, in addition, turned systematically to processes of converting collective rural land to state-owned urban land that could then be leased to developers for revenue. Processes of rural to urban migration—already under way as China opened to foreign investment and national policymakers embraced China’s new identity as ‘factory of the world’—accelerated. China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 exacerbated these processes. As numbers of rural–urban migrant workers soared to world historic levels, conditions in the countryside deteriorated. City government officials had by now become accustomed to turning a blind eye to the still existing hukou, welcoming the supply of cheap labour that appealed to outside investors. Rural migrants in cities were typically treated as second-class citizens, however, lacking access to the city’s resources and barred from settling there permanently. Yet, with fewer people at home in the villages and some agricultural plots now abandoned entirely, the land conversions—in fact, structurally determined land grabs—only became easier (Li 2003).
Even as these processes met widespread grassroots resistance from villagers, in what Sally Sargeson (2013) termed ‘violence as development’, they were commonly regarded in policy and official circles as inevitable and necessary processes of modernisation. In this view, the obstinate peasantries were finally being uprooted and agrarian modes of living swept into the past. According to Sargeson (2013: 1068), more than 4.2 million hectares were converted in this way between 1990 and 2008. In a triumphant echo of Marx’s earlier narrative, the disappearance of the peasantry was now not so much expectantly searched for as forced through by an enthusiastic state bureaucracy in alliance with an increasingly powerful construction and real estate industry. Prominent historian and public intellectual Qin Hui (1998: 37) wryly observed how the term ‘primitive accumulation’ had now found its way into common parlance not as a horror of capitalism, but as commendatory—a welcome sign of China’s long overdue development.
The Origins of China’s Urban Question
In 2008 the Global Financial Crisis hit. The export industry that had sustained the jobs of millions of rural migrant workers sputtered as the crisis hit overseas consumers, particularly in the United States. The Chinese Government estimated that 20 million migrants lost their jobs, more or less overnight (Sanderson and Forsythe 2013: 12). In an emergency bid to keep the economy going and create employment, China’s then premier Wen Jiabao famously announced a stimulus package of RMB4 trillion (US$586 billion). Only a small portion of this, however, was to come directly from the government via state banks. The rest was to be made up via a complex system of loans and bonds, often via local government finance vehicles (LGFVs). Set up by local governments, LGFVs are unregulated companies that can obtain loans from commercial banks or sell bonds themselves to raise funds off the books so that local governments can bypass their official spending limits. Underpinning this whole system was the collateral required for the loans: rural land. The rural–urban land conversion process, already well under way since the 1990s, took off again with renewed vigour. The idea, which was entirely logical on paper, was that, once the construction projects were completed, the newly developed urban areas would bring new sources of revenue along with a thriving economy fuelled by homeowning consumers. This should both allow the payback of the loans and help to raise living standards across the country. A dramatic surge in local government spending ensued over the next several years, channelled largely into urban construction projects. At the time, as the rest of the world struggled to get their economies back on track, China’s government stood out for its determined action and impressive ability to weather the storm (Sanderson and Forsythe 2013).
As some of those engaged in the original agrarian question debates at the turn of the twentieth century had recognised, however, the assumed historical trajectory from agrarian peasant life to modern industry and burgeoning cities had rarely run smoothly. China’s building boom led to a ‘debt mountain’ and a ‘housing bubble’ along with an array of new challenges for policymakers. One of the most remarkable of these is what have become known as ‘ghost cities’: a vast number of empty residential buildings. Some of these are in small areas distributed around otherwise occupied cities and some take the form of ‘new towns’: newly built areas up to the scale of small cities, largely uninhabited. In what Sorace and Hurst (2016: 306) aptly termed ‘phantom urbanisation’, ghost cities entail the construction of ‘an urban façade, which resembles a city externally, but lacks basic infrastructural and economic requirements for city life, or, in some cases, even people, behind its showy exterior’. The number of empty homes was estimated at 65 million in 2017, according to data from the China Household Finance Survey (Ariano 2021). In September 2023, former head of China’s statistics bureau He Keng stated that there were likely more empty homes than could ever be filled (Kelter 2023).
This unusual pattern of development was supported all the way by policymakers’ deep faith in the inevitable transformation of China’s millions of rural smallholders into urban dwellers and, furthermore, a belief that this constituted the hallmark of modernisation. As a result, the original ‘agrarian question’ has given way to the ‘urban question’, which is, in a sense, the other side of the same coin. Not ‘are the peasantry disappearing as expected and, where they are not, what should we do?’, but instead, ‘are the cities filling up as planned and, where they are not, what should we do?’
The Embattled ‘Tiered-City’ System
Phantom urbanisation is often accounted for using ‘local governments gone wild’ types of explanations, with implied images of lower-level bureaucrats off their heads on excess fiscal stimulation. For instance, the front cover of The Economist announcing China’s 2008 Financial Crisis recovery package, emblazoned with the title ‘China Seeks Stimulation’ and complete with a photo of a large syringe embellished with the Chinese flag, is particularly striking (The Economist 2008). In fact, though, just a few years after the 2008 crisis, an overarching national planning strategy emerged that appeared to provide a rationale for it. This strategy, based on years of localised policy experiments, was set out in two key central planning documents released in 2014, one on hukou reforms, the other on urban planning (State Council 2014a, 2014b). Together, these documents consolidated the nationwide hierarchical ordering of cities based on population size—popularly known as the tiered-city system. Urban hukou status was to be extended to a further 100 million people over the following few years. Welfare access in cities for rural migrants was to be improved and hukou requirements relaxed in smaller cities. Cities of fewer than 500,000 people were to have restrictions lifted completely to encourage rural people to move there. The eventual goal was the elimination of the urban–rural distinction on residency permits altogether.
On the other hand, entry to the best-equipped and most desirable cities—most notably, the largest megacities such as Beijing and Shanghai, was becoming harder. Here, hukou applications would only be granted based on a stringent and highly selective point-based system. Only those able to demonstrate certain levels of income, education, professional skills, or other factors marking them out as ‘high-quality’ individuals would qualify. Meanwhile, disincentives, such as barriers to accessing suitable housing or schools, would keep less affluent and less-educated migrants away (for an overview, see Hayward 2022a: 1028–29). By clear central government design, the tiered-city system required that people once considered ‘peasants’ were expected to move into lower-tier towns and cities where their life prospects were limited and facilities and public goods of low standard. This nationwide plan for cities relied on the taken-for-granted assumption that urban living, rather than rural life, was both an inevitable historical process and, obviously, the preferable option.
However, it has not been working out as planned. Researchers in Chinese universities have identified a dual dilemma: those able to settle permanently in cities are unwilling to and those wanting to settle permanently in cities are unable to (Cheng et al. 2022).
Three Aspects of the Urban Question
The urban question is manifest across many current policy debates and I can only scratch the surface here by way of introduction, but there are three major issues with which policymakers are currently grappling. First, the appeal of urban hukou for many rural villagers has fallen far short of expectations. The 2014 plan to implement 100 million rural–urban hukou conversions did in fact succeed. However, the flow of migrants into some cities has exceeded expectations and, crucially, many do not plan to settle there permanently or convert their hukou. In 2020, according to official figures, 18.5 per cent of China’s urban population were still rural hukou holders (Chan 2021). The reasons for this are complex and still being researched. Many rural hukou holders do not have high enough, or stable enough, income to purchase an urban home and therefore see no long-term prospects in the city. Moreover, in an ironic twist, the incremental extension of welfare benefits to non-local migrants staying in cities temporarily, which was intended to encourage the rural to urban movement of people, appears to have disincentivised rural–urban hukou transfer. Since these migrants can already benefit from the city’s resources without transferring hukou, some are opting to keep their rural hukou so they can benefit from the urban resources without giving up the added security of their rural land, to which they may intend to return (Tang and Hao 2018).
Second, and relatedly, who gets to live in China’s largest megacities and whether the ‘peasants’ (now as low-paid migrant workers) should be allowed in are hotly contested questions. The intentions set out in planning documents to keep first-tier cities as the preserve of wealthy elites and ‘high-level talent’ are being robustly challenged in policy circles. Over the past decade, this played out over the issue of urban villages (Hayward and Jakimów 2022). These are formally farming villages that stayed in place as the metropolis expanded around them. Often having lost their farmland, but still living recognisably in villages contrasting with the high-rise skyscrapers around them, the inhabitants (still with their rural hukou, despite now being inside cities) began to rent out spare rooms to low-paid migrant workers. With their dilapidated appearance and unregulated micro-economies, urban villages were deeply unpopular with city planners, not least due to their enabling of large numbers of low-paid migrants (disparaged in official documents as the ‘low-end population’, 低端人口) to have an affordable life in the city. Many such villages have been demolished and the migrants evicted. Yet, these demolitions and evictions were often fiercely opposed, not just by the migrants themselves, but also from within policy circles, where many argued that burgeoning city life requires freedom of labour mobility, not excessive top-down state planning.
Though many urban villages are no longer standing, the disagreement continues, now in the form of the street-stall debate: the question of whether the informal labour of street-stall vendors (many of whom are from the countryside) should be allowed in China’s larger cities. This dispute has proved so heated that, in 2020, the division between China’s top two leaders, Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, broke into the open at such a volume that it made the international media (The Economist 2023). Despite Xi speaking out loudly against street stalls, they continue to receive statements of support from large cities, and the unresolved issue continues to occupy policy discussions in what appears to be a direct challenge to the neatly formulated top-down plans of the tiered-city system.
Third, with the rise of the urban question, policymakers are increasingly asking: given that rural smallholders, despite our best efforts, are not urbanising as we presumed, how do we organise the millions that still exist? This requires a reconsideration of the role of the countryside. Large-scale corporate farming has for years been idealised and envisaged as the future by many in Chinese policy circles. This way of thinking fit well with the plans for urban developers, who appeared to have forged an alliance with agribusinesses as they worked together to shift rural people out of their villages and into tower blocks (Zhan 2017). Unsurprisingly, this was justified by the belief that the scattered plots of the household responsibility system—essentially conceived as a holdover of backward smallholdings—were not compatible with a modern economy. Yet, as sociologist Shaohua Zhan (2019: 141) observed: ‘The previous strategy of urbanization, which is vividly depicted in China as “to enrich peasants by reducing peasants (jianshao nongmin jiushi fuyu nongmin)”, seems to have reached its limits.’
Policy discussion on the role of smallholding farms appears to be fuelled by renewed momentum. An op-ed in the China Daily last year entitled ‘Unlocking the Potential of Smallholder Farmers’ (Wang 2023) extolled their importance both to global agriculture and to China’s national economy and advocated for their increased support and investment. Thus, with urban and rural always inseparable, the urban question leads back to where we began: the peasantry has not disappeared as expected and, since they have not, what should we do?
Featured Image: China 2017, by @pentium_six, Flickr.com (CC).
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