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The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a mega-project of primarily infrastructure-related loans and investments in Pakistan. Recently, the official discourse has increasingly shifted to the agricultural sector. For the region of Gilgit-Baltistan bordering China, academic and policy debates highlight the potential boost of fruit exports to China as the most promising opportunity to be leveraged through the CPEC. This paper scrutinizes these promises from a locally grounded perspective, investigating potential benefits and risks for local farmers. To make sense of the complex interplay between external and local actors, interests, markets and (infra)structures, the paper follows an assemblage-inspired approach to map out local trajectories. Contrary to the CPEC narrative, agricultural exports from Gilgit-Baltistan recently came to a halt, due to increasing trade barriers and seemingly competing agricultural developments in neighboring Xinjiang, China. Moreover, the economically most promising local crop for export to China, namely cherries, does not seem too promising for the majority of small farmers. There are other commodities with export potential, but overall, prospects appear to be limited. There is a need for a deeper engagement with the inherent complexities of CPEC trajectories, particularly in regards to local farming contexts in Pakistan and relevant developments in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural modernisation is a longstanding goal of China's Party-state. Since the early 2000s, it has pursued this goal through policies designed to facilitate land consolidation and support the expansion of large agricultural enterprises – 'New Agricultural Operators' (NAOs). In this paper we explore the effect of these policies on the livelihoods of a cohort of smallholder orange growers in the mountainous regions of Hubei province and the local political economy. An analysis of data from a 2019 survey of 266 households and interviews with villagers, agribusiness executives, cooperative leaders, and government officials, we find smallholder farmers are earning good incomes as independent commodity producers, withstanding attempts by local officials at land consolidation, and bypassing NAOs to self-determine their own modes of production and exchange. Our results speak to the ongoing debate about the future of smallholder farming in China, identify the strengths and limitations of recent state-centric analyses of agrarian transition, and re-iterate the pitfalls of the central government's agricultural modernisation agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper utilizes both the national statistics and the survey data from the China Household Income Project to explore the characteristics of land transfer as well as the current state of farmland concentration in rural China. The findings suggest the following. First, China has seen a steady rise in land concentration since the 1990s, and the rapid increase in land transfer since the 2000s has contributed to the rising concentration of land. Second, the rural cadres play an important role in the process of land consolidation and they have rented significantly more land than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances a new framework for analysing agrarian change in rural China and elsewhere in developing Asia, which centres on translocal family reproduction. The framework highlights the crucial connections between rural families' translocal strategies for meeting reproductive (especially care) needs, their changing aspirations for reproduction, and other aspects of agrarian change, including de-peasantisation, de-agrarianisation and social differentiation. In developing this framework, the paper refers to a village case study in central China and draws on a critique of the 'livelihoods perspective' on agrarian change, approaches focusing on 'global householding', and the cultural reproduction of class and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the politics of possibility for rural activism in reform era China. By periodizing rural reforms from 1990, we explore the political-economic changes that have coalesced in the reform era, and how these changes condition forms and possibilities of activism. We argue that the current modernization-urbanization drive that emerged around 2008 is foreclosing opportunities for the pro-peasant cooperative forms that New Rural Reconstruction activists imagined earlier in the decade. Instead, as the process of capitalist agrarian change deepens in the countryside, food- and farming-related activism now resembles the state's focus on markets and consumption, to the detriment of addressing social relations of production. Without a focus on distributional politics and power, this shift has the potential to further entrench existing inequalities within and across rural and urban spaces. The contextual work undertaken in this paper is currently absent from the emerging literature on China's agrifood transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have different views on the nature and pace of capitalist transformation of the Chinese agriculture. In this paper, we have, for the first time, estimated the approximate size of agricultural proletariat in China as well as the prevalence of wage labor in agricultural work. We argue that by comparing with typical capitalist agricultures in the world, China’s agriculture is increasingly capitalist rather than petty producer/populist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid-2000s, rural development and politics in China has entered a new phase that revolves around what the central government calls 'agricultural modernization'. Transforming the once-dominant smallholding, family-based agriculture has become a focal point of the government's programme of rural rejuvenation, where a range of economic changes unleashed by urbanization and industrialization also converge. We argue that in this new context, agrarian change has become the key vantage point from which to study rural China. We review key contributions of the papers in this special issue and highlight their insights on rural differentiation, land politics and rural livelihoods. We discuss how studying the ' Chinese path' of agrarian transition can contribute to ongoing debates on key themes in agrarian studies, including both the agrarian questions of capital and of labour, and how agrarian political economy offers unique perspectives on the overall processes of capitalist development in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land expropriation is a major source of conflict in contemporary rural China. Existing research tends to frame land expropriation as 'dispossession'—local governments expropriating land to pursue economic growth at the expense of villagers' welfare. However, systematic evidence on the livelihood impacts of land expropriation is limited, which has made assessing this interpretation difficult. This study uses nationally representative longitudinal data to examine the immediate effects of land expropriation on villagers' livelihoods as well as how they evolve over the following years. It finds that households with migrant workers saw significant socio‐economic gains after land expropriation through both increased wage income and government compensation. Households without migrant workers, on the other hand, experienced a small deterioration in their socio‐economic position as their income remained stagnant while their living costs increased. These findings cast a different light on the dispossession thesis not only because a significant portion of the rural population makes socio‐economic gains after land expropriation but also by problematizing assumptions that smallholding agriculture is necessarily the most desirable source of livelihood for villagers. Instead, it calls for attention to villagers' increasingly diversified livelihood strategies, as well as the multifaceted role of the state in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agriculture is now more dependent on pesticides than ever. The value of global pesticide imports increased 3x faster in the 2000s than in the 1990s. Structural transformations in the industry – including reduced innovation, increased regulatory costs, consolidation, and a dramatic shift to generic pesticides largely produced in China – have shifted prices, supply chains and formulations. The 'supermarket revolution', migration, and rising labor costs are driving an increase in demand. The result is a pesticide complex that is multipolar, where commodity chains and environmental impacts are less legible, requiring a hard look at the chemical nature of agrarian capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A high-profile debate is taking place in China concerning the organization of agricultural land and production, with profound implications for China’s countryside. This debate is between those advocating for agricultural production to be taken over by large-scale agribusinesses, and those against this. Proponents regard agribusinesses as embodying modernity and progress, while those against forewarn of the channeling of profits out of peasant hands, the loss of peasants’ autonomy over labor and land, and the destruction of rural life. Recent English language publications on China’s agrarian change highlight the growing power of agribusiness and related processes of depeasantization, implying the Chinese debate on “who will till the land?” is futile. But this view obscures efforts by Chinese scholars and policymakers to promote forms of agricultural organization conducive to maintaining peasant livelihoods. By examining the Chinese debates on agribusinesses, family farms, and cooperatives, this article highlights points of contestation among policymakers and alternative possibilities, which may yet shape the course of China’s agrarian change. This article contributes to scholarship on China’s agrarian change, broader questions concerning depeasantization, and developmental possibilities under collective ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ten years ago, China and several African countries began to develop agricultural training centres, and opened the door for a cascade of optimism and pessimism on why China is interested in developing agricultural partnerships in Africa. Seldom has the appeal of such partnerships for African countries been explored, hence limiting our capacity to fully understand the dynamics of Sino–African agricultural relations. This article addresses the issue by examining why some African countries are interested in partnering with China in agricultural development. This article is based on 44 interviews that were conducted in 2015 at the Sino–African agricultural training centres in Rwanda and Uganda. I argue that Rwanda and Uganda seek to partner with China, as China can offer intermediary agricultural technologies that enable these respective countries to implement aspects of their domestic agricultural development plans. The article also provides reason to challenge the existing optimistic and pessimistic conventions about Sino–African agricultural affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]