ILPC 2027

Pre-reform, the agricultural production in China was organized through a collectivized system which rested with the effort to limit farmers on the agricultural production, and limit labour force in rural area by various institutional barriers. Also, by adopting series of administrative interventions over distribution & redistribution on agricultural outputs, it has been twisted the patterns of layouts between agriculture and industry.  The priority that had given to the development of industrialization was at a huge expense of a long-term development of agriculture, which not only induced a persistently slow growth of agricultural output, but also accumulated a profound and structural conflicts in rural areas. 

Under the changing of economic systems from the planned to the market, when the agricultural reform kicked off the whole page of economic reforms in the 70s, the production relations of agriculture based on the model of “the Household Contract Responsibility System (HCRS)” was a striking feature of agricultural reform in the contemporary China. However, along with the accession of neo-liberalism and profound influences by the accelerated globalization, its social relations of production was pushed to be changed accordingly: the model based on the household unit is not any longer able to meet the requirements of production relations of the non-traditional standard of agriculture with large scales of production in terms of mechanization, modernization, informatization, and technicalization; plus with operations under the global value chain in terms of commercialization, capitalization, and globalization. Furthermore, along with its intrinsical layouts maintained unchanged, as to social relations, relations between farmers and land, between urban and village, between migrant workers and land, so on and so forth, a newly-combined relations of production is developed from a bottom-up approach and left the traditional model of the agricultural production much more marginalized along the process. And it is where this paper intend to analyze. 

The analytical method of production relations marks one of the most powerful analytical tools of Marxism, which offers most profound methodology for us in understanding the ever-changing complexity, dynamics and specificity in the course of China’s agricultural development. Three aspects lie in, the social relations of property rights; the social division of labor; and the social distribution of income, serving the fundamental analytical framework for this paper, investigating various topics, like, changes models of production; changes relations of production in terms of part-time farming, Agricultural Enterprization, Circulation of Rural Land, Bidirectional Flows of Rural Labour Mobility, so on and so forth.