Scale of peasant dispossession in China

Between 1990 and 2008, about 88 million Chinese peasants lost their land and became part of the "dispossessed peasants" (shidi nongmin). This number exceeds the entire population of Germany. Chun Peng, a law professor at Peking University and author of a significant study on this transformation, describes the scale of these land expropriations as "unprecedented in human history."

China's economic transformation

To understand China's economic rise, it is necessary to grasp the scale of this upheaval. What England took three centuries to achieve at the start of the industrial revolution, China accomplished in one generation, on a completely different scale and in the opposite direction.

Historical comparison with England

E. P. Thompson's work, The Making of the English Working Class, helps to illuminate this contrast. This classic study vividly portrays the emergence of a working class consciousness in England, particularly during the decisive years from 1780 to 1832, and places it in the context of the "enclosure movement" which, from the end of the 15th century, had dispossessed peasants of their land, leaving them with no choice but to sell their labor.

Chinese working class and proletariat

Since Marx, the English working class has been considered the quintessential proletariat of nascent capitalism in the West, the one that paved the way for industrial capitalism. At the other end of the Eurasian continent, the Chinese working class represents a different kind of proletariat, emblematic of advanced capitalism, and confronts us with the natural limits of development as China recently transformed into a superpower.

New enclosure movement in China

The term "new enclosure movement" (xin quandi yundong) is used in China to describe the dispossession of the peasantry. However, the sequence of events is reversed. In England, peasants were first driven from their land, then reduced to wage labor; in China, since the 1990s, the commodification of industrial labor, which gave rise to the glittering urban horizons of the country, was accompanied by an apparently inexhaustible influx of internal migrants to the cities: peasants who retained their rights to their land.

Formation and disintegration of Chinese working class

The formation and disintegration of the Chinese working class went hand in hand with those of the peasantry. Marx believed that communism would abolish the opposition between city and countryside. However, the socialist industry of the Maoist era, as well as the rapidly growing megalopolises of today, were built on an impoverished hinterland.

Resource transfer from countryside to cities

It is the different relationship of peasants and urban workers to land and labor that allowed the state to organize a continuous transfer of resources from the countryside to the cities, first to support industrial labor under state socialism, then to subsidize global capital after China's turn toward state capitalism in the 1990s. It is the evolution of this relationship that allows us to understand the astonishing - and astonishingly rapid - transformation of China, as well as its global repercussions.

China's capitalist development

Unlike England, China did not need agrarian capitalism or the dispossession of the peasantry that accompanies it to launch its industrial development. Paradoxically, capitalism flourished in China largely because it was built on socialist foundations. To this day, it continues to be subsidized by various legacies of socialism, themselves often rooted in imperial-era kinship institutions. And since China occupies a central place in global manufacturing, this socialist subsidy benefits economic actors around the world, allowing consumers to buy more, and at lower costs, than they otherwise could, accelerating the destruction of the environment on which our existence depends.

Public ownership of land in China

The comparison with England also highlights the determining role of distinct forms of public ownership of rural and urban land in the People's Republic of China. Because there has never been a single People's Republic of China: there has always been, at least, two peoples, if not two republics in the strict sense. Since the collectivization of agriculture that followed the land reform in the early 1950s, every plot and every individual has been classified on the legal and administrative plane as urban or rural. Unlike its socialist counterparts, China has never expropriated its peasantry by nationalizing all land. It always distinguishes two forms of public ownership: urban land owned by the state and rural land, owned by the collectives that cultivate them.

Ideological justification for peasant ownership

Allowing peasants to own the land they cultivate provided an ideological justification for charging them with ensuring their own subsistence and social protection. In parallel, China drew inspiration from the Soviet model to set up a national heavy industry. Lacking access to foreign capital, the state extracted resources from the countryside to create, in the cities, elite production units that took the form of state-owned enterprises. It was thus that the Chinese working class was first forged, with a major difference: while the English working class formed a subordinate industrial proletariat, the workforce of state enterprises constituted a privileged class, a sort of socialist working aristocracy. Unlike peasants, these urban workers benefited from guaranteed employment and lifetime social coverage, funded by the countryside.

Household registration system in China

The People's Republic of China introduced a strict household registration system (hukou) in 1955. It was essentially a caste system enshrined in law, which subordinated a series of public benefits, from food rations to education and medical care, to the place of residence. In this system of segregation between cities and countryside, being classified as "peasant" (nongmin), rather than "worker" (gongren), did not only mean wearing a social label, but also occupying a legal and administrative status. Most importantly, once established, the registered place of residence was practically impossible to change and was passed down through the maternal line, thus transforming rural poverty into an inherited condition. Unlike England, the foundations of industrialization were not laid by expropriating peasants from their land, but by binding them to it. What was previously a peasantry composed of small holdings was feudalized.

Post-Mao economic transformation

The post-Mao economic transformation of China began in the countryside, with agricultural reforms followed by rural industrialization. It was the spectacular rise of rural entrepreneurship, from the 1980s to the mid-1990s, that lifted millions of peasants out of poverty and fueled the country's exceptional growth during this period. In a reversal of fortune, the following years saw the countryside stagnate while the cities took the lead and dazzling megacities came to define the horizon of the new millennium. Nevertheless, during the first two decades of the reform era, when foreign observers spoke of the "Chinese economic miracle," they were actually referring to a rural industrial revolution, and not the Chinese economy as a whole.

Rural reforms and TVEs

The economic reforms of 1978 initially aimed to reduce rural poverty. Each household was granted a temporary right of use over a small plot, as well as the right to sell anything it produced beyond the quota allocated. Although rural land remained collective property, this modest reform gave rise to a market - albeit limited - for agricultural products. At the same time, a new rural industry emerged, organized in rural cooperatives known as "village and township enterprises" (TVE).

Impact of TVEs on urban public sector

The expansion of the TVE in the 1980s and early 1990s quickly reduced the living standard gap between peasants and city dwellers. But it also increased pressure on the urban public sector, which was increasingly in difficulty. In the middle of the 1990s, the state made a decisive turn, abandoning rural reform in favor of urban reform, favoring state industrial capitalism over collectivized rural industry. It is this state capitalism and the spectacular urban landscapes it has created that now serve as the showcase for China in international media.

Urban reforms and state-owned enterprises

The state launched a new wave of urban reforms by redefining its legal relationships with capital and with the labor of industry. Under a new company law enacted in 1994, state-owned enterprises were transformed into private law companies. While remaining the majority shareholder, the state called on international capital to transform its enterprises into profit-making companies. As for the employees of state-owned enterprises, who did not own land, they were deprived of their main socialist right: lifetime employment security. It is this commodification of industrial labor, known as "breaking the iron rice bowl," that marked the end of the Chinese working class as a privileged socialist layer and initiated its transformation into an ordinary urban proletariat, similar to the one described by Thompson.

Migrant labor and urbanization

However, especially after China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, its cities were flooded with foreign capital, and urban labor was no longer enough. The countryside, on the other hand, was full of unemployed or underemployed peasants. A wave of migrant labor then flowed in increasing numbers to the cities. The dismantling of state-owned enterprises was accompanied by the commodification of urban land for housing and private real estate promotion - a process that fueled a gigantic real estate bubble threatening the Chinese economy today. Once housing and other essential goods became available on the markets, peasants could settle in the city without being registered as residents. They remain, however, second-class citizens, excluded from many of the benefits reserved for registered urban residents. They therefore make round trips between their workplace and their village, always relying on the land that their families continue to cultivate to meet their needs when they lose their job, are not paid, or get injured.

Hybrid nature of migrant labor

The key to this reputed "cheap" Chinese labor force lies in the hybrid nature of its migrant workers. Under socialism, the state extracted the product of peasant labor. Today, it is urban capital that appropriates the most qualified peasants - albeit temporarily and on a rotating basis, while their villages continue to support them. Migrant workers in fact form an army of reserve labor that assumes the costs of its own reproduction - like, for example, undocumented immigrants in the United States. It is the permanent dependence of these workers on the support of their relatives remaining in the countryside that allows urban employers to pay them meager wages. The question is therefore not how these migrants escaped expropriation, unlike the English industrial proletariat: it is precisely because they remain owners of land that the Chinese state capitalism can exploit them.

Enclosure of rural land

After the first commodification of urban land in the 1990s, the enclosure of rural land mainly took the form of the absorption of peri-urban villages by neighboring cities. The current wave of enclosures aims to transform the countryside itself. The state's goal is to consolidate agricultural land into large industrial farms and relocate displaced peasants to urban areas, particularly in "new cities" (xincheng) built for this purpose. To achieve this, rural land becomes a commodity: members of rural cooperatives are now authorized to transfer the right of use of their land to third parties, including agribusiness companies. Officially, households can only transfer the right of use of their plots - subject to certain authorizations and land use restrictions. The Party can thus continue to claim that all land remains public property. The consolidation of family plots into industrial farms thus appears as freely consented market transactions, but in reality, they are often forced, "facilitated" by the intervention of officials. With the arrival of agribusiness, the countryside also integrates into Chinese state capitalism and ceases to be the "other" rural area.

Global implications of Chinese capitalism

Since its accession to the WTO, China no longer lacks either capital or labor - the former flows from global markets, the latter from the countryside. What it now needs most to sustain its growth, including on its own territory, are markets. The problem with migrant labor is that its proletarianization remains partial. It depends on capital for its wages, but as long as it can fall back on subsistence agriculture, it does not depend on it exclusively. Moreover, not only do peasants remain partly independent of the markets, but their economic and social precariousness pushes them to save every cent, so they consume even less than they otherwise would. In short, they are first-rate workers but second-rate consumers. The commodification of industrial labor has already made them a reserve army of labor. With the entry of rural land into the market, they could also become a reserve army of consumers, dependent on capital for their survival, they would have no choice but to buy everything they need. The enclosure of Chinese countryside thus completes the proletarianization of the peasantry.

Planetary limits of capitalism

The consequences of the enclosure of the countryside go far beyond China's borders. What will happen when the Chinese state capitalism can no longer rely on the subsidy represented by migrant workers from the countryside? Marx saw the primitive accumulation as the equivalent, in economics, of the "original sin" of theologians. The revolutionary socialist Polish-German Rosa Luxemburg, on the other hand, argued that even a mature capitalism cannot produce surplus value from nothing - it is not alchemy, after all. To reproduce itself as a system, capitalism must continuously pursue primitive accumulation, and it has always needed an "unequal exterior" from which to draw resources.

Globalization of Chinese capital

While the "new enclosure movement" continues, Chinese capital - public and private - is increasingly seeking to invest abroad, for example in extractive projects in Africa. With the New Silk Road, China is expanding its investments. Running out of land to enclose and populations to dispossess on its own territory, Chinese capital is also globalizing, and weaving production chains centered on China, from the Indian Ocean to Latin America. Hence this question: what are the planetary limits of capitalism?

Future of capitalism and China

Understanding the rise and fall of the Chinese working class is therefore essential for thinking about the future of capitalism. We are overwhelmed with information about China, but we will have great difficulty giving it meaning if we fail to embed it in a broader total, at once structural, historical, and global. Better understanding the central role of China in advanced capitalism will force us to rethink our relationship to work and land, to production and nature, and ultimately, to the future of the planet on which we travel through space and time.