Exchange of Agricultural Land in China: From Involution to Path-dependent Transformation.

China?s fast rural industrialization and massive rural-to-urban migration are believed to have shifted the agricultural sector from involutionary expansion to real economic growth. I try to document and analyze these changes in this study and contend that, despite substantial transfer of agricultural surplus labor to non-farm employment, the real transformation of the small-peasant agrarian economy itself does not necessarily follow. The empirical data come from a recent random survey of peasant households and villages in Zhejiang Province. Both labor and land have gained mobility to allow more profit-oriented and market-mediated allocation of these factors of production. Many peasant households leased out their contracted land and moved out of farm employment to seek higher income in entrepreneurship or wage employment. At the same time, other households contracted more land to expand agricultural production. Some even ventured into large-scale managerial farming. However, the transition is far from a clear-cut one. Regression analysis shows that although non-farm wage employment does promote outflow of land, many of these peasant laborers experience ?semi-proletarianization? by still keeping at least some family land as a safety net. On the other hand, the market allocation of land leads more to the sustaining of family-farming than to the rise of capitalistic managerial farming. Although Zhejiang?s rural industrial enterprises are among the most developed in the country, it is actually accessibility to non-local or urban non-farm jobs, rather than localized industrialization, that significantly affects the likelihood of leasing out land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]