The following is part of Cornell Contemporary China Initiative Lecture
Series under the Cornell East Asia Program.
The arguments and viewpoints of this talk belong solely to the speaker.
We hope you enjoy.
We're very happy to have our visitor today.
Professor Julia Chuang who comes to us from Boston College.
She graduated from University of California Berkeley
with a PhD in sociology in 2014.
She then took a couple of years of a postdoctoral fellowship and was able to
do- was that the moment you were doing most of that intensive field work, or
no it was earlier than that.
>> No that was during grad school, yeah.
>> But was able to do additional research, has spent something like 10 years
doing research on the topic we're going to hear about today.
And the topic that is also the subject of her new book which will be
out in the spring.
The book titled as the talk is "Beneath the China Boom: Labor, Citizenship,
and the Making of a Rural Land Market" and really quite a crucial question and
a crucial way way of looking at some of the economic and social changes going on
in China over the last 2, at least or a little bit more maybe, decades.
So we're very happy to have her here.
Just keep in mind there will be one more talk in November in the series.
We hope to see you back then as well.
But for tonight please join me in welcoming Julia Chuang.
>> Thank you.
Well first thank you to Professor McNeal for inviting me here today.
I'm very happy to be here.
My talk is gonna be based on my book which is forthcoming on UC Press.
And this is the cover, "Beneath the China Boom: Labor, Citizenship,
and the Making of a Rural Land Market." So today I'm gonna talk about
a recent transformation in the Chinese political economy.
As we all know since the early 1990s manufacturing, particularly for
export manufacturing, has generated much of China's GDP.
In 2005 35% of the GDP came from the export sector and
we all kind of know about this kind of labor intensive
production model that's been behind this growth.
In the early 2000s however, sorry more like the late 2000s,
much of this started to change.
So real estate, construction, they became new growth areas.
Exports have since been declining.
During that decade the constructive area of Chinese cities has
grown by over 50% and by 2010 77% of local government revenues came from taxes.
I'm sorry, not from taxes on enterprise production but
rather from the financing of land development.
So my talk today is very simply put on this very transition.
And it asks what are the causes and
what are the consequences of this transformation.
So I'm gonna argue that this transformation was actually caused
by interactions and contradictions between two underlying models of development.
The first of this is this labor intensive development and it's enabled as we
all know by rural regions supplying low cost labor for urban development and
also then subsidizing the labor costs that was born by urban economies.
The second is this new form of land-centered development.
It's based on the process of urbanizing formerly rural regions.
And I argue today that the first model has actually led to the second model.
And here's how.
In the 1990s China had a development model which I call kind of the migrant merry-go.
It's relying on enterprises in cities, mainly coastal cities,
that employ low-cost migrant labor in the countryside.
This labor is allowed to work in cities but not allowed to settle.
And this is what makes it low-cost because enterprises don't have to pay wages
calibrated for entire families.
They just pay a single worker's wage while the families remain back
in the countryside, and they also don't have to supply public goods for
these families as well.
We all know this.
The Chinese scholars in the room all know this fairly well.
This migrant merry-go however has fueled export production for 2 decades but
in doing so, and this is something that I'm arguing today,
it's also impoverished the countryside.
It's created these widespread rural government deficits for
reasons that I'll explain later.
And, this is actually the new part of the story,
these deficits then have led China into a new mode of development.
Today rural governments bankrupted from decades of labor migration have been
recovering from deficits through land sales.
They expropriate rural land then they auction off rights to this land to private
developers who are then willing to pay exorbitant land transfer
fees in anticipation of rising property values with urbanization.
So there is a contradiction between these two models of development.
One is that Chinese urbanization does not rely on land alone.
It still requires migrant labor.
After all somebody has to be building these enormous cities.
And two is the migrant merry-go works because village land has long
provided a farm subsidy for low wages.
However land sales are now destroying this farming subsidy.
And to give you an idea of the source of this if not the scope of this phenomenon,
China has more or less 400 million migrant workers.
One in five have lost access to rural land.
So what are the causes of this shift toward land modification?
The central thesis of my book is that the way that labor markets have formed in
China has created a fiscal deficit crisis that the state must then resolve through
a shift toward land redevelopment and rural monetization.
And I'm gonna draw on and weave together three different literatures in order
to make sense of this transformation.
Each literature sort of sheds partial light on the transformation but
none of them are sort of sufficient alone in explaining it.
So the first explanation for this shift is that,
as many scholars have noted, various twists and turns in Chinese reform have
been explained through runaway local government experimentation.
As we all know the central state has presented a lot of policies as campaigns
and then dictated the large broad brushstrokes of these campaigns but
then left these local level details to local implementation.
And because these campaigns are initiated without appropriate regulation,
you get these bubbles like, for example, the runaway growth of the 1980s,
the town and village enterprises that occur through development.
So the question is was this labor intensive development of the 1990s that we
saw actually a case of runaway experimentation.
And then perhaps the land to the commodification is turned toward land
development that came later maybe was a way for
the central state to then tamp down this runaway experimentation.
This argument doesn't quite work.
It works a little better the other way around.
Most scholars actually argue that land modification is the runaway
experimentation, that local governments are overzealously expropriating land
beyond central state control.
And so the question still remains why certain localities have developed these
physical deficits in the first place.
So this runaway experimentation explanation doesn't quite address
the question of why we have this physical deficit.
So the second literature we can look at is the Marxist geography.
David Harvey, others have argued that rates of profitability eventually decline
under a capitalist development and then the state has to intervene by privatizing
sectors or by opening new credit markets, for example, or by expropriating land.
But what all these things have common is that they stimulate development by
injecting cheaper assets into the market.
So the strength of this perspective is its spatial aspect.
It explains why land expropriation rates might be higher in one place than another,
and this is because rising production costs in one location might push investors
to then move and as they move they expand causing infrastructure,
though which was originally built to lower transaction costs.
Then what this capital leaves of course labor tends to over-accumulate meaning
that unemployment rises, consumption falls.
And then the state has to step in to restimulate development through
urbanization.
So this is a good explanation, I think,
of why urbanization again happened in the first place.
It's a form of restimulation, of growth that's been flagging.
But it still doesn't help us understand why this fiscal crisis deepened in
the first place.
Capital flight in China moreover did not perceive the fiscal crisis before and
even during the land-centered development boom of the 2000s.
Export oriented manufacturing was still growing.
So in order to understand the fiscal crisis I think we have to turn to a third
literature which I would call a more celebratory literature that has
proclaimed China's benign capitalist rise.
This is the literature on Chinese development without dispossession.
Giovanni Arrighi has alleged that China has bypassed the labor capital
confrontation that's been so central to western development.
And it's done so by preserving universal land use rights of land in
the rural countryside and creating there for this partially wage dependent
labor force that can withstand wages that are set even below the subsistence level.
Again because families are subsidizing the wage through farming.
So of course all three of these explanations I think are necessary for
understanding this.
The last explanation I think gets a little closer as to why this fiscal crisis
happened in the first place.
You had this highly successful model of development without dispossessing
the peasantry but what Arrighi and others didn't actually forsee is that
this development without dispossession would then lead to large physical deficits
because rural governments are now subsidizing the workforce, or paying for
a workforce, that's employed elsewhere and not seeing any kind of fiscal transfers or
returns back from these.
So let me go into this last model that I want to expand on.
This model for why China's labor is low cost and
why its low cost labor model has then led to fiscal crisis.
Before I go further this is a timescale for what I'm talking about.
I'm not exactly arguing that labor migration proceeds and
then leads to land dispossession.
I'm arguing that, well I am arguing that, but I'm also arguing that labor migration
continues during a period like land dispossession.
And you can see these pivotal moments that have preceded each one.
So 1994 is TVE privatization,
2006 the "Building a New Socialist Countryside" campaign begins and that's
when you really see the legitimation of land expropriation at the central level.
And I'll come back to this slide I think in a little bit.
So first I wanna explain China's low-cost labor model.
One reason why low cost labor is prevalent in China is
that the welfare state is localized.
So people can only access healthcare, schools, insurance pensions, and
welfare in their cities of origin- in their villages of origin sorry.
They also receive use rights to small plots of village land which they farm.
In the meantime it all this is enforced through this well known nationwide
registrar the hukou system.
So this is what these labor circulation- laborers in cities maintain households in
villages where their children can access public goods.
A second institution however disrupts all of this.
The fact that welfare is not just administered locally, it's also funded
locally ever since a series of fiscal decentralization reforms in the 1990s.
So in China there are very few fiscal transfers from rich to poor provinces and
even fewer from central to local.
When laborers are working in one place but
then utilizing public goods in another place this kind of system creates burdens.
So you can see here the results of this arrangement.
This is the breakdown of expenditures.
Rural governments are funding the bulk of education, health, and social security.
Sorry here you can actually see the public expenditure burdens by local government.
It's been actually growing hugely since 1994.
This is due to reforms, fiscal decentralization reforms,
which have devolved paying for schools and hospitals down to the county level.
And here you can see the result of that.
And you can see education, health, and
social security are mainly paid for by the counties.
Education is an exception actually.
I think education right now is actually being,
since 2014 I think has been pulled back to the central state levels and
now the central state is still funding it- or actually at least the provinces are.
But nevertheless health, social security, and
unemployment are all funded by counties and townships.
So as a result of this you can kind of see what these budgets look like at the local
government levels.
So we see costs represented by this dotted line they're rising with decentralization.
At the same time that cost are arising revenues, the solid line, are dropping.
So in 1994, a huge drop in local government revenues.
The state basically has pulled revenue collection away from localities and
toward the center.
It's a result many things.
One is the rural tax base being wiped out by deepening privatization of TVEs.
It's also due to banking reforms that choked off credit to rural businesses.
This is what begins the accumulation of local government debts.
And then also in 2003 or so the state abolishes all rural household and
agricultural taxes in response to rural tax revolt.
So by the 2000s, mid-2000s many rural governments have fiscal deficits totaling
3 times their revenues and this is what is driving the shift from labor intensive
to land centered development.
Of course these deficits are now then resolved through urban expansion.
So since 2006 state law has actually updated its hukou policy in order to allow
rural governments to legally expropriate village land for urban expansion and
in places where this land transfer is happening rural people can
then transfer from rural to urban citizenship.
They engage in kind of a land for welfare trade off.
They give up their birthright to village land and
in exchange they get access to urban public goods.
Now all his sounds fairly common sense in theory but
in practice this so-called land for
welfare trade is not really an upgrade for two reasons.
One, this reform doesn't actually allow rural people to move to cities.
It instead requires them to stay in designated townships which are built to
house them and then land around them is being urbanized.
And two, these designated townships, they don't actually provide full social welfare
because these local governments that are running them as you remember are more
concerned with using funds from land revenues to pay off fiscal deficits,
not for expanding social programs.
So this is the backdrop for the field work that I did and
I wanna take you into the field with me now and
tell you a little bit about the research that I did on this question.
I ended up doing 31 months of multi-sited ethnography for around 2007 to 2012,
and this study started as ethnography of construction workers actually in Beijing.
So I followed these construction workers in Beijing to two villages in Sichuan
province.
And I lived in Sichuan province with these villagers for 2 consecutive years.
So in each village I rented a bedroom in a migrant household.
I observed how laborers recruited.
Each village basically has a broker, an entrepreneurial village man who delivers
laborers for recruitment for subcontractors in cities to employ.
And I studied this process of labor recruitment.
I studied it because at a process it's the mechanism that links rural and
urban economies.
I basically sampled villages where
construction is the main source of employment.
And I did this because most studies of China until I started studying my
[intelligible], most of the studies when I started doing this research were actually
on manufacturing.
But actually I'm going to argue today that it's construction that's a more
key industry in China.
And this is because construction lies in the nexus of both land and labor markets.
So I'll start with the connection between construction and land.
In construction, unlike manufacturing,
land is the primary source of surplus value or profitability.
It's also the primary variable cost.
So properties are built on land and
then this land dictates the price at which properties are built.
And also construction then also utilizes labor in a much more
exploitative way than manufacturing ever did.
And this is because Chinese law allows enterprises to delay paying their wage
only until the end of the year.
In manufacturing you also get wage arrears you also have delayed wage payment but
most of the delays are only 3 months you get paid at the end of each 3 month
period or so.
In construction it's a full year.
And this is because enterprises, construction enterprise in China
are actually barred from getting funding from state-backed banks,
and this is so that the state can regulate and
make sure that you don't get an overheating housing market.
And to get around this lack of credit financing construction companies
have just started off-loading the cost onto labor by delaying payment.
So this delayed wage payment system, it works actually and works because of
the laborers that construction employs are all obviously all rural.
90% of labor and construction is rural.
And this labor is also embedded in the rural subsistence economy.
It means back in the countryside families are farming to subsist until wages
come through.
So this is a diagram of what construction subcontracting looks like.
At the end of the year money trickles down from the top.
And meanwhile workers rely on village based informal lending schemes or
on their families to farm so
that they can withstand this delayed wage payment until the end of the year.
So let me take you with me to the first village that I studied.
In Beijing I met a worker named Little Dong who invited me to live with him in
his home in a village which I then called Faming Village.
So this is a scene from Faming.
There's a couple things to note here.
First there's primarily women in this village year-round.
These women farm the land while their husbands work in construction.
And the second thing to note here is that managed remittances are being used to
build two story tiled houses like the one seen in the background.
To do this women are running a low interest informal money lending scheme.
This scene is actually the aftermath of a banquet.
The Wu house belongs to the woman in the middle.
She held the banquet in order to thank the other women who lent their husbands
remittances to help her build the house.
So while women are farming and lending money in Faming Village
their husbands are actually being recruited into labor teams.
So this is a group of men discussing next year's migration.
The man on the far right holding the bucket is a man named Boss Gao.
Boss Gao is the unofficial labor broker of Faming Village.
He has a difficult job.
Throughout the year has to give each worker around $50 US a month all out of
pocket.
However at the end of many years sometimes subcontractors abscond
without paying him or his workers.
So he's taking on a lot of risk to recruit this labor.
The only way to prevent this is for
Boss Gao to become a long term monopolistic labor supplier.
So in other words subcontractors will pay him guaranteed if they know that next
year's labor delivery is also coming on from him and
also depends on their paying him for that current year.
So Boss Gao has to keep his labor supply coming.
It means he has to retain workers, he has to discipline them,
even while suppressing their wages to make sure he can pay his own rent.
And he does this by enlisting other villagers, his wife,
his family members, to put pressure on young possibly wayward members and
to pressure them not to work for outside brokers.
So again this is how labor is sort of embedded in villages.
Not only is it interdependent with farming but also labor institute is being
recruited and then also consistently disciplined through village relations.
So let me give you an idea of what this disciplining looks like.
In 2010 Boss Gao had problems with a 24-year-old worker named Little Fatty.
Little Fatty is a married man but he still has somewhat of a wayward tendency.
This is Little Fatty here.
Sometimes he would abscond from the construction site to meet up with his
middle school classmates and they would spend a week smoking and
playing video games in internet cafes.
So when this happens Boss Gao leveraged actually his wife's relationships to
discipline Little Fatty.
This is how he did it.
He would ask his own wife Madame Gao to befriend Little Fatty's wife
back in Faming.
So this is Little Fatty's wife.
She's a young woman named Sister He.
When the trouble started Madame Gao bought Sister He a cell phone so
she could better keep track of her husband.
Then Madame Gao insinuated herself more into Sister He's trust.
She taught Sister He how to buy pigs at the market, how to chop and
cook down yam leaves as pig feed, how to sell them for a income.
Once in a while Madame Gao would make an idle remark about Little Fatty.
About how he didn't seem to be sending any money home lately.
Madame Gao pointed out that Sister He's house was falling apart,
you can see her house in the background,
while other migrants were building new houses for their wives.
She gave Sister He money for some household repairs and
eventually she advised Sister He not to be satisfied with an oaf of a husband.
She told her women can make men demands today.
She said you may not know this but in this village a man can build a one
story house with about 40,000 RMB maybe even 20,000 RMB.
That's just 3 years of saved wages.
A woman can tell her husband you must build me a house.
She might save you build a house or I go back to my natal home.
All of this I think was part of Madame Gao's overall strategy.
She was hoping that Sister He would eventually domesticate
her wayward husband Little Fatty.
So let me summarize before I move on.
This is how the labor market in cities remains embedded in a land based rural
economy.
First women farm.
This protects their husbands from risks of wage arrears.
And second Boss Gao is leveraging trust among village women in order
to discipline minors in cities.
During the year that I lived in Faming I heard
rumors consistently about abandoning to Boss Bo.
I'll show you a picture of him here.
I heard that Boss Bo is the unofficial labor broker of Landing Village.
I heard that in the past he often visited Faming.
And also I heard that he now regularly hired Faming villagers as well.
So in 2011 and went to Landing Village and I met Mr.
Boss Bo who agreed to rent me a room in his house for a year as well.
So the first year I lived with one migrant,
second year married with a migrant broker.
Boss Bo was a busy man I would learn.
He was very different from Boss Gao the Faming Village broker.
Boss Gao had only recruited Faming labor very locally but
Boss Bo instead had expanded his business to several villages.
Here you can see the multiple villages.
These are approximately located.
5 villages nearby where Boss Bo had extensive relationships and
where he consistently recruited labor.
He did this by forging relationships with laborers from other villages.
He would meet them on trains or at construction sites very informally and
then after cultivating their loyalty he would then ask them to serve as middlemen.
These middlemen would then recruit labor for
him from their home villages on his behalf to work for his subcontractors in cities.
And in each village Boss Bo had a very specific reason for entering.
He selected Faming for example for one reason.
His brother in law lived there, he had married a local woman there,
and because of this kinship tie with the local woman there he had
trustworthy relationships and he served as a good middleman there.
And during my time living in Landing Village I continually wondered why Boss Bo
is expanding.
Why he was brokering labor in so many places.
He was expanding his business actively and
yet his profits weren't actually increasing or so he told me.
Expansion was difficult.
He was lending thousands of dollars to workers across villages and
sometimes his middlemen could not keep workers under control.
He also now had to maintain good relations with many many more subcontractors in many
more cities.
These are the cities where he was actively delivering labor to.
Later though I discovered the reason for Boss Bo's business strategy.
He was expanding his brokerage not for profits but instead because in
Landing Village his labor source was becoming slowly untenable.
This is because all village land is being expropriated by the government.
So you can see here Landing Village is actually located on the periphery of
Chongqing City.
The whole formally rural periphery of Chongqing City had now
become urban districts, in the 3 years between 2011 and
2014 all of this became urban and that's around 3 million or
so rural people who were then urbanized.
So where does this put Landing in this picture of Chinese development?
Landing has started off like Faming Village.
They were both labor sending sites and
they were both primarily sending labor into the construction industry.
But Landing for various reasons,
migration began in Landing Village much earlier than it did in Faming Village so
brokers had a lot more time to build up their social networks.
And in the meantime this neighboring city has started to eat up its village land.
And this I think is, Chongqing City began expanding for various reasons.
One of the many reasons I think is because longtime labor migration has
bankrupted the economy and this has lead to land redevelopment.
I should add that I did my research at the time
of Bo Xilai, at the end of Bo Xilai's regime.
And so he was also sort of aggressively pursuing this urban redistricting as well.
So now you'll see the last part of my argument by digging deeper into
Landing Village.
We'll see the contradiction between land redevelopment and labor migrating as well.
Let me show you what Landing looked like before redevelopment.
In the eyes of the state this is empty land.
This is a plot of land that was left under-cultivated by
migrant workers who had left for the city.
In the eyes of the state this kind of fallow land is an undercapitalized asset.
Yet in the eyes of its former inhabitants it's a source of retirement.
It's a source of security.
When urbanization came villagers quickly understood that
the most important thing was to sever their reliance on this land.
So far example Boss Bo.
This is his wife pictured here.
He purchased an apartment in the county seat and this is that apartment.
Around 550 thousand RMB.
He was also then preparing paperwork to upgrade his family
from rural hukou to urban hukou registration.
They would become urban citizens and register toward that county township.
Now just as Boss Bo was preparing for this transition so
too were his workers getting ready.
A many mealtime conversations like the one pictured here centered around
the issue of welfare.
And you can notice here this is still Boss Bo's wife.
This is just them in their old country house rather than that
well-furnished well-appointed county apartment.
Most villages relinquished their land and they converted their rural hukou to urban
citizenship hoping to qualify for welfare support during this whole transition.
This would help them cover expenses while they were waiting for year end wages.
And usually the welfare program in their village would admit beneficiaries below
a certain income level.
This is the dibao program, the low income welfare program.
Suddenly in 2011 however this program was rolled back and
villagers were urged to rely on family support instead.
At a town meeting for example a welfare official announced we advise for
each household that migrant children remit 20% of their income to elderly parents.
If your children do not remit this amount then you must tell them it is
a state-mandated responsibility to care for your parents.
Keep this in mind when you talk to them next.
Tell them they must remit 20% of their income home to you.
So to recap all of Landing's population has been reregistered as urban citizens
but they're being stripped of their welfare benefits which had been minimized
in order to cut costs at the local government level.
And again this tightening of the belt, this cutting down of welfare,
is a result of fiscal decentralization.
so how does well or it actually affect villagers?
Villagers have to continue working under the same conditions of delayed wage
payment as yet before but they have no land and
also no welfare to support them while they await wages.
Boss Bo is preparing for himself for all of this.
He had purchased this apartment.
And I was with Boss Bo for
example when he started feeling the changes that were percolating from below.
Boss Bo hearing a lot of complaints from many of the workers that he recruited from
Landing Village.
One day he received a phone call from one of two workers,
from two workers which is one of the two workers.
And the worker that had called him,
he asked him if he could come home from the construction site because he
had heard rumors that some village houses were being demolished.
Boss Bo gave him time off.
Another month later another worker called him to ask if he could get his wages for
the year in advance.
He needed the money now for a down payment on a township apartment.
When Boss Bo heard this he was incensed.
After he got off the phone he told me that's it I'm through with the Landing
workers, they were too expensive in the first place and
now they want personal loans on top of everything.
If I'm short 15 men it's very easy.
I'll just call a couple guys back and find delusional tell them to get on a bus.
Right away they know where I am.
So if we step back we can see that this situation is indeed counterintuitive.
Conventionally it means that loss of land would make labor fully proletarianized,
willing to work for any wage.
They should be an ideal form of labor, these landless workers.
But Boss Bo as we know prefers to avoid these laborers.
They have greater grievances,
their families are unable to sustain themselves until wages come through, and
now to him Faming looks like a much more attractive site of recruitment.
At least there workers are still willing to be paid at the end of the year.
So let's zoom out even further.
What does it tell about the interaction between labor and land commodification?
Well it tell us that land exploration disrupts labor recruitment.
Once land is enclosed for redevelopment the labor that sits on top of it
can no longer be profitably employed.
So then the next question is what happens to this labor if Boss Bo does
not want to hire them.
So most workers attempted to pivot out of wage labor.
They upgrade to entrepreneurial activity for example.
Some relocate to other villages where they have kin members or children or
spouses who still have their hukou registered there.
For wage laborers however dispossession or
this full proletarianization was disastrous.
So this one worker.
This is Farmer Yuan, a farmer age 65.
He and his brothers were bachelors.
Usually one of them did migrant labor in the city while the other farmed
the land at home.
They lost their land in September and
then Farmer Yuan heard about a job in Inner Mongolia from a younger villager
whose middle school classmate was a subcontractor.
He thought to himself he would take this job even though he doesn't normally do
migrant labor he was requiring some form of income.
Before he left for
this job in Inner Mongolia another villager gave him a warning.
He said most jobs start in February after Lunar New Year.
This job however starts in September.
It's off the calendar.
What he was implying was that sometimes these late start jobs are scams.
They are subcontractors who had production slowdowns so
they let their own workers go but then production speeds up and now they
have to bring in new men who they're using to fill in an unexpected production gap.
Oftentimes they'll employ these workers very harshly,
work them very hard to the bone, and then let them go without paying them
because they don't need to cultivate their loyalty.
They're just sort of scabs or people who stepped in.
The brothers, Farmer Yuan and his brother who was also accompanying him, heard this
warning and they took it very seriously but they also had no other job offers.
They had asked Boss Bo for jobs.
Boss Bo had then already moved recruitment to Faming Village.
So Farmer Yuan and his brother went to Inner Mongolia.
He got a monthly wage of 460 US dollars paid at the end of the year, a monthly
living allowance of 60 US dollars would be later deducted from the wage.
5 months later he returned, his clothes tattered, considerably aged.
The rumors had been true.
The subcontractor had absconded with his wages.
So Farmer Yuan came home and at the end of the year, despite the promised 460 dollars
of monthly wage, he only brought home $130 US for the entire 5 months of work.
Then they had other problems.
Their house has been demolished so they moved in with a cousin who had a township
apartment but their problems didn't end there.
They also no longer had land so now food is a cash expense and
that $130 went very fast.
After 2 months the money was spent.
So let me summarize the situation in Landing Village now.
Landless workers have nothing but their labor power to sell,
in Marxist parlance, but men like Boss Bo don't wanna buy it.
If we're using the language of Karl Polanyi we can call this
disembedded labor.
It's labor that's no longer linked to the land and subsistence economy.
It's no longer able to even partially reproduce itself as a labor force and
as a result it's become redundant no longer valued as a commodity.
So I just wanna end by saying for
the rural people that I studied land expropriation exacted a high human cost.
During the period of my research there were 3 suicides in Landing Village.
All of them were landless workers.
One of them was directly land related.
A farmer hung himself from a rafter of his house on the eve of its demolition.
Another was labor related.
It was Farmer Yuan actually who moved out of his cousin's apartment which was
being crowded more and more by the month with more and
more relatives who were also landless and homeless.
In the winter he returned alone to an abandoned house on the edge of a deep
ravine, still standing, though had been long marked for demolition.
And by then the village had been cleared of nearly all inhabitants.
So perhaps it was social isolation,
the villagers surmised perhaps it was economic distribution, one night
shortly after the Lunar New Year Farmer Yuan walked off the edge of a ravine.
So let me now conclude.
I have 3 points to make.
One is a point on my macro-argument on Chinese development.
Another is a point about my kind of micro-level ethnographic account.
And then third a methodological point about linking the two.
So the first part of my talk today traced China's transition from a development
model based on migrant labor to one based on land expropriation.
I argued that the cost of maintaining cheap labor in cities was being
externalized to the countryside and it was being borne by local governments and
over time these costs proved unbearable.
And so these local governments have turned toward a new mode of seeking revenues
through land expropriation.
The second part of my talk focused on the micro-foundations on this
macro-transformation.
So I went to Faming to see how this kind of system of migrant labor is reproduced.
And we also then went to Landing to see how the system is being destroyed by
land expropriation, which forces labor brokers like Boss Bo to go further and
further afield to recruit labor for construction projects.
We can see how land expropriation still requires migrant labor but it undermines
its foundations and the result is this complete proletarianization.
Another result of this is also this boom and bust dynamic that's produced by
all of this, an extreme growth that's self cannibalizing.
First, exuberant period of labor intensive growth and then a collapse and
then now an overexuberant period of urbanization.
And this overexuberance is kind of at the root of China's current debt and
fiscal crisis.
So local governments have become financing vehicles.
They take on debt for urbanization and they're stuck in this ongoing cycle of
debt because governments develop land beyond demand and they use this land for
high margin luxury housing to make up their past debts and when properties don't
sell you can kind of see the harbinger of the bust that's to follow this boom,
these ghost towns devoid of inhabitants.
So the third point I want to make is that there is
a methodological lesson to draw I think from my study.
What I've described is a view of China that links both rural and
urban economies together through I think graphic following of this labor migrant,
labor recruitment process.
It examines relationships between villages and cities and
also between villages themselves.
And I think it's this on ground work allows me to see this
antagonistic interdependence between the two models of development,
one based on land and one based on labor.
Is a new sort of internal contradiction of the Chinese economy today.
Thank you.