Beneath the China Boom: Citizenship, Welfare and the Making of a Rural Land Market

Julia Chuang

Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Boston College, Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences

 

China has pivoted away from export-oriented development towards a strategy of domestic urban and infrastructural construction.  This pivot is especially visible in rural China, where migrant laborers withstand uniquely low wages by relying on subsistence farming practices.  Yet, at the same time, this low-waged labor system is disrupted by an ongoing urbanization boom which terminates rural land-use rights.  I argue that two political institutions prop up contradictory developmental dynamics.  First, China’s localized welfare policies strip rural workers of social rights in cities, which compel them to maintain rural households to supplement their low urban wages.  China’s decentralized fiscal system, however, simultaneously requires rural governments to fund social expenditures for a labor force employed elsewhere, which they do by commoditizing and acquiring financing through rural land sales.  Such land commoditization disrupts rural-urban labor migration, however, because it removes the rural wage supplement that enables migrants to withstand low wages.

 

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