1 00:00:00,040 --> 00:00:03,831 The following is part of Cornell Contemporary China Initiative Lecture 2 00:00:03,831 --> 00:00:06,200 Series under the Cornell East Asia Program. 3 00:00:06,200 --> 00:00:09,800 The arguments and viewpoints of this talk belong solely to the speaker. 4 00:00:09,800 --> 00:00:11,218 We hope you enjoy. 5 00:00:11,218 --> 00:00:14,210 We're very happy to have our visitor today. 6 00:00:15,590 --> 00:00:19,500 Professor Julia Chuang who comes to us from Boston College. 7 00:00:19,500 --> 00:00:24,813 She graduated from University of California Berkeley 8 00:00:24,813 --> 00:00:28,400 with a PhD in sociology in 2014. 9 00:00:28,400 --> 00:00:32,322 She then took a couple of years of a postdoctoral fellowship and was able to 10 00:00:32,322 --> 00:00:36,369 do- was that the moment you were doing most of that intensive field work, or 11 00:00:36,369 --> 00:00:37,900 no it was earlier than that. 12 00:00:37,900 --> 00:00:39,300 >> No that was during grad school, yeah. 13 00:00:39,300 --> 00:00:44,181 >> But was able to do additional research, has spent something like 10 years 14 00:00:44,181 --> 00:00:48,160 doing research on the topic we're going to hear about today. 15 00:00:49,420 --> 00:00:54,258 And the topic that is also the subject of her new book which will be 16 00:00:54,258 --> 00:00:55,700 out in the spring. 17 00:00:55,700 --> 00:01:01,114 The book titled as the talk is "Beneath the China Boom: Labor, Citizenship, 18 00:01:01,114 --> 00:01:06,883 and the Making of a Rural Land Market" and really quite a crucial question and 19 00:01:06,883 --> 00:01:12,652 a crucial way way of looking at some of the economic and social changes going on 20 00:01:12,652 --> 00:01:18,100 in China over the last 2, at least or a little bit more maybe, decades. 21 00:01:18,100 --> 00:01:20,500 So we're very happy to have her here. 22 00:01:20,500 --> 00:01:24,143 Just keep in mind there will be one more talk in November in the series. 23 00:01:24,143 --> 00:01:26,211 We hope to see you back then as well. 24 00:01:26,211 --> 00:01:30,100 But for tonight please join me in welcoming Julia Chuang. 25 00:01:32,300 --> 00:01:33,400 >> Thank you. 26 00:01:33,400 --> 00:01:38,100 Well first thank you to Professor McNeal for inviting me here today. 27 00:01:38,100 --> 00:01:39,300 I'm very happy to be here. 28 00:01:39,300 --> 00:01:43,500 My talk is gonna be based on my book which is forthcoming on UC Press. 29 00:01:43,500 --> 00:01:48,001 And this is the cover, "Beneath the China Boom: Labor, Citizenship, 30 00:01:48,001 --> 00:01:52,283 and the Making of a Rural Land Market." So today I'm gonna talk about 31 00:01:52,283 --> 00:01:56,000 a recent transformation in the Chinese political economy. 32 00:01:56,000 --> 00:02:00,554 As we all know since the early 1990s manufacturing, particularly for 33 00:02:00,554 --> 00:02:04,325 export manufacturing, has generated much of China's GDP. 34 00:02:05,700 --> 00:02:08,950 In 2005 35% of the GDP came from the export sector and 35 00:02:08,950 --> 00:02:11,810 we all kind of know about this kind of labor intensive 36 00:02:11,810 --> 00:02:14,670 production model that's been behind this growth. 37 00:02:16,322 --> 00:02:19,936 In the early 2000s however, sorry more like the late 2000s, 38 00:02:19,936 --> 00:02:21,600 much of this started to change. 39 00:02:21,600 --> 00:02:26,124 So real estate, construction, they became new growth areas. 40 00:02:26,124 --> 00:02:27,700 Exports have since been declining. 41 00:02:27,700 --> 00:02:32,751 During that decade the constructive area of Chinese cities has 42 00:02:32,751 --> 00:02:40,002 grown by over 50% and by 2010 77% of local government revenues came from taxes. 43 00:02:41,102 --> 00:02:43,902 I'm sorry, not from taxes on enterprise production but 44 00:02:43,902 --> 00:02:46,300 rather from the financing of land development. 45 00:02:46,300 --> 00:02:50,700 So my talk today is very simply put on this very transition. 46 00:02:50,700 --> 00:02:52,884 And it asks what are the causes and 47 00:02:52,884 --> 00:02:56,324 what are the consequences of this transformation. 48 00:02:56,324 --> 00:02:59,557 So I'm gonna argue that this transformation was actually caused 49 00:02:59,557 --> 00:03:03,800 by interactions and contradictions between two underlying models of development. 50 00:03:03,800 --> 00:03:08,920 The first of this is this labor intensive development and it's enabled as we 51 00:03:08,920 --> 00:03:14,040 all know by rural regions supplying low cost labor for urban development and 52 00:03:14,040 --> 00:03:18,928 also then subsidizing the labor costs that was born by urban economies. 53 00:03:18,928 --> 00:03:22,100 The second is this new form of land-centered development. 54 00:03:22,100 --> 00:03:26,100 It's based on the process of urbanizing formerly rural regions. 55 00:03:26,100 --> 00:03:30,200 And I argue today that the first model has actually led to the second model. 56 00:03:30,200 --> 00:03:31,900 And here's how. 57 00:03:31,900 --> 00:03:37,400 In the 1990s China had a development model which I call kind of the migrant merry-go. 58 00:03:37,400 --> 00:03:40,595 It's relying on enterprises in cities, mainly coastal cities, 59 00:03:40,595 --> 00:03:43,400 that employ low-cost migrant labor in the countryside. 60 00:03:43,400 --> 00:03:46,000 This labor is allowed to work in cities but not allowed to settle. 61 00:03:46,000 --> 00:03:49,553 And this is what makes it low-cost because enterprises don't have to pay wages 62 00:03:49,553 --> 00:03:51,100 calibrated for entire families. 63 00:03:51,100 --> 00:03:54,579 They just pay a single worker's wage while the families remain back 64 00:03:54,579 --> 00:03:58,301 in the countryside, and they also don't have to supply public goods for 65 00:03:58,301 --> 00:03:59,600 these families as well. 66 00:03:59,600 --> 00:04:00,700 We all know this. 67 00:04:00,700 --> 00:04:04,310 The Chinese scholars in the room all know this fairly well. 68 00:04:05,380 --> 00:04:09,142 This migrant merry-go however has fueled export production for 2 decades but 69 00:04:09,142 --> 00:04:12,006 in doing so, and this is something that I'm arguing today, 70 00:04:12,006 --> 00:04:14,100 it's also impoverished the countryside. 71 00:04:14,100 --> 00:04:17,354 It's created these widespread rural government deficits for 72 00:04:17,354 --> 00:04:19,200 reasons that I'll explain later. 73 00:04:19,200 --> 00:04:22,194 And, this is actually the new part of the story, 74 00:04:22,194 --> 00:04:26,300 these deficits then have led China into a new mode of development. 75 00:04:26,300 --> 00:04:30,904 Today rural governments bankrupted from decades of labor migration have been 76 00:04:30,904 --> 00:04:33,700 recovering from deficits through land sales. 77 00:04:33,700 --> 00:04:37,959 They expropriate rural land then they auction off rights to this land to private 78 00:04:37,959 --> 00:04:41,393 developers who are then willing to pay exorbitant land transfer 79 00:04:41,393 --> 00:04:45,100 fees in anticipation of rising property values with urbanization. 80 00:04:46,100 --> 00:04:51,400 So there is a contradiction between these two models of development. 81 00:04:51,400 --> 00:04:56,300 One is that Chinese urbanization does not rely on land alone. 82 00:04:56,300 --> 00:04:58,500 It still requires migrant labor. 83 00:04:58,500 --> 00:05:01,700 After all somebody has to be building these enormous cities. 84 00:05:01,700 --> 00:05:06,509 And two is the migrant merry-go works because village land has long 85 00:05:06,509 --> 00:05:09,300 provided a farm subsidy for low wages. 86 00:05:09,300 --> 00:05:15,200 However land sales are now destroying this farming subsidy. 87 00:05:15,200 --> 00:05:19,102 And to give you an idea of the source of this if not the scope of this phenomenon, 88 00:05:19,102 --> 00:05:21,900 China has more or less 400 million migrant workers. 89 00:05:21,900 --> 00:05:26,100 One in five have lost access to rural land. 90 00:05:26,100 --> 00:05:30,100 So what are the causes of this shift toward land modification? 91 00:05:30,100 --> 00:05:34,648 The central thesis of my book is that the way that labor markets have formed in 92 00:05:34,648 --> 00:05:39,553 China has created a fiscal deficit crisis that the state must then resolve through 93 00:05:39,553 --> 00:05:43,200 a shift toward land redevelopment and rural monetization. 94 00:05:43,200 --> 00:05:48,125 And I'm gonna draw on and weave together three different literatures in order 95 00:05:48,125 --> 00:05:50,600 to make sense of this transformation. 96 00:05:50,600 --> 00:05:54,542 Each literature sort of sheds partial light on the transformation but 97 00:05:54,542 --> 00:05:57,900 none of them are sort of sufficient alone in explaining it. 98 00:05:57,900 --> 00:06:01,047 So the first explanation for this shift is that, 99 00:06:01,047 --> 00:06:06,038 as many scholars have noted, various twists and turns in Chinese reform have 100 00:06:06,038 --> 00:06:10,600 been explained through runaway local government experimentation. 101 00:06:10,600 --> 00:06:15,524 As we all know the central state has presented a lot of policies as campaigns 102 00:06:15,524 --> 00:06:20,137 and then dictated the large broad brushstrokes of these campaigns but 103 00:06:20,137 --> 00:06:24,300 then left these local level details to local implementation. 104 00:06:24,300 --> 00:06:28,544 And because these campaigns are initiated without appropriate regulation, 105 00:06:28,544 --> 00:06:32,914 you get these bubbles like, for example, the runaway growth of the 1980s, 106 00:06:32,914 --> 00:06:36,600 the town and village enterprises that occur through development. 107 00:06:36,600 --> 00:06:41,326 So the question is was this labor intensive development of the 1990s that we 108 00:06:41,326 --> 00:06:44,300 saw actually a case of runaway experimentation. 109 00:06:44,300 --> 00:06:48,477 And then perhaps the land to the commodification is turned toward land 110 00:06:48,477 --> 00:06:51,237 development that came later maybe was a way for 111 00:06:51,237 --> 00:06:55,300 the central state to then tamp down this runaway experimentation. 112 00:06:55,300 --> 00:06:57,400 This argument doesn't quite work. 113 00:06:57,400 --> 00:06:59,000 It works a little better the other way around. 114 00:06:59,000 --> 00:07:02,182 Most scholars actually argue that land modification is the runaway 115 00:07:02,182 --> 00:07:06,090 experimentation, that local governments are overzealously expropriating land 116 00:07:06,090 --> 00:07:07,612 beyond central state control. 117 00:07:09,252 --> 00:07:12,342 And so the question still remains why certain localities have developed these 118 00:07:12,342 --> 00:07:13,900 physical deficits in the first place. 119 00:07:13,900 --> 00:07:17,482 So this runaway experimentation explanation doesn't quite address 120 00:07:17,482 --> 00:07:20,737 the question of why we have this physical deficit. 121 00:07:20,737 --> 00:07:26,500 So the second literature we can look at is the Marxist geography. 122 00:07:26,500 --> 00:07:31,127 David Harvey, others have argued that rates of profitability eventually decline 123 00:07:31,127 --> 00:07:35,687 under a capitalist development and then the state has to intervene by privatizing 124 00:07:35,687 --> 00:07:40,400 sectors or by opening new credit markets, for example, or by expropriating land. 125 00:07:40,400 --> 00:07:44,180 But what all these things have common is that they stimulate development by 126 00:07:44,180 --> 00:07:46,400 injecting cheaper assets into the market. 127 00:07:46,400 --> 00:07:49,835 So the strength of this perspective is its spatial aspect. 128 00:07:49,835 --> 00:07:54,577 It explains why land expropriation rates might be higher in one place than another, 129 00:07:54,577 --> 00:07:59,120 and this is because rising production costs in one location might push investors 130 00:07:59,120 --> 00:08:02,859 to then move and as they move they expand causing infrastructure, 131 00:08:02,859 --> 00:08:06,500 though which was originally built to lower transaction costs. 132 00:08:06,500 --> 00:08:10,870 Then what this capital leaves of course labor tends to over-accumulate meaning 133 00:08:10,870 --> 00:08:13,514 that unemployment rises, consumption falls. 134 00:08:13,514 --> 00:08:17,187 And then the state has to step in to restimulate development through 135 00:08:17,187 --> 00:08:18,094 urbanization. 136 00:08:18,094 --> 00:08:19,897 So this is a good explanation, I think, 137 00:08:19,897 --> 00:08:22,400 of why urbanization again happened in the first place. 138 00:08:22,400 --> 00:08:25,992 It's a form of restimulation, of growth that's been flagging. 139 00:08:25,992 --> 00:08:29,550 But it still doesn't help us understand why this fiscal crisis deepened in 140 00:08:29,550 --> 00:08:30,400 the first place. 141 00:08:30,400 --> 00:08:34,758 Capital flight in China moreover did not perceive the fiscal crisis before and 142 00:08:34,758 --> 00:08:38,600 even during the land-centered development boom of the 2000s. 143 00:08:38,600 --> 00:08:43,851 Export oriented manufacturing was still growing. 144 00:08:43,851 --> 00:08:48,439 So in order to understand the fiscal crisis I think we have to turn to a third 145 00:08:48,439 --> 00:08:52,731 literature which I would call a more celebratory literature that has 146 00:08:52,731 --> 00:08:55,700 proclaimed China's benign capitalist rise. 147 00:08:55,700 --> 00:08:59,021 This is the literature on Chinese development without dispossession. 148 00:09:00,111 --> 00:09:03,909 Giovanni Arrighi has alleged that China has bypassed the labor capital 149 00:09:03,909 --> 00:09:07,400 confrontation that's been so central to western development. 150 00:09:07,400 --> 00:09:11,027 And it's done so by preserving universal land use rights of land in 151 00:09:11,027 --> 00:09:15,176 the rural countryside and creating there for this partially wage dependent 152 00:09:15,176 --> 00:09:19,800 labor force that can withstand wages that are set even below the subsistence level. 153 00:09:19,800 --> 00:09:22,900 Again because families are subsidizing the wage through farming. 154 00:09:22,900 --> 00:09:28,469 So of course all three of these explanations I think are necessary for 155 00:09:28,469 --> 00:09:30,300 understanding this. 156 00:09:30,300 --> 00:09:33,820 The last explanation I think gets a little closer as to why this fiscal crisis 157 00:09:33,820 --> 00:09:35,200 happened in the first place. 158 00:09:35,200 --> 00:09:39,449 You had this highly successful model of development without dispossessing 159 00:09:39,449 --> 00:09:43,563 the peasantry but what Arrighi and others didn't actually forsee is that 160 00:09:43,563 --> 00:09:48,276 this development without dispossession would then lead to large physical deficits 161 00:09:48,276 --> 00:09:52,591 because rural governments are now subsidizing the workforce, or paying for 162 00:09:52,591 --> 00:09:57,501 a workforce, that's employed elsewhere and not seeing any kind of fiscal transfers or 163 00:09:57,501 --> 00:09:59,000 returns back from these. 164 00:09:59,000 --> 00:10:07,396 So let me go into this last model that I want to expand on. 165 00:10:07,396 --> 00:10:10,046 This model for why China's labor is low cost and 166 00:10:10,046 --> 00:10:13,300 why its low cost labor model has then led to fiscal crisis. 167 00:10:15,825 --> 00:10:22,300 Before I go further this is a timescale for what I'm talking about. 168 00:10:22,300 --> 00:10:26,550 I'm not exactly arguing that labor migration proceeds and 169 00:10:26,550 --> 00:10:29,100 then leads to land dispossession. 170 00:10:29,100 --> 00:10:33,733 I'm arguing that, well I am arguing that, but I'm also arguing that labor migration 171 00:10:33,733 --> 00:10:36,600 continues during a period like land dispossession. 172 00:10:36,600 --> 00:10:44,800 And you can see these pivotal moments that have preceded each one. 173 00:10:44,800 --> 00:10:46,600 So 1994 is TVE privatization, 174 00:10:46,600 --> 00:10:51,007 2006 the "Building a New Socialist Countryside" campaign begins and that's 175 00:10:51,007 --> 00:10:55,300 when you really see the legitimation of land expropriation at the central level. 176 00:10:55,300 --> 00:10:58,000 And I'll come back to this slide I think in a little bit. 177 00:10:59,102 --> 00:11:02,200 So first I wanna explain China's low-cost labor model. 178 00:11:02,200 --> 00:11:06,130 One reason why low cost labor is prevalent in China is 179 00:11:06,130 --> 00:11:09,412 that the welfare state is localized. 180 00:11:09,412 --> 00:11:13,838 So people can only access healthcare, schools, insurance pensions, and 181 00:11:13,838 --> 00:11:18,000 welfare in their cities of origin- in their villages of origin sorry. 182 00:11:18,000 --> 00:11:21,200 They also receive use rights to small plots of village land which they farm. 183 00:11:21,200 --> 00:11:25,328 In the meantime it all this is enforced through this well known nationwide 184 00:11:25,328 --> 00:11:27,000 registrar the hukou system. 185 00:11:27,000 --> 00:11:31,526 So this is what these labor circulation- laborers in cities maintain households in 186 00:11:31,526 --> 00:11:34,600 villages where their children can access public goods. 187 00:11:34,600 --> 00:11:37,300 A second institution however disrupts all of this. 188 00:11:37,300 --> 00:11:42,075 The fact that welfare is not just administered locally, it's also funded 189 00:11:42,075 --> 00:11:47,400 locally ever since a series of fiscal decentralization reforms in the 1990s. 190 00:11:47,400 --> 00:11:52,304 So in China there are very few fiscal transfers from rich to poor provinces and 191 00:11:52,304 --> 00:11:54,500 even fewer from central to local. 192 00:11:54,500 --> 00:11:57,396 When laborers are working in one place but 193 00:11:57,396 --> 00:12:03,200 then utilizing public goods in another place this kind of system creates burdens. 194 00:12:03,200 --> 00:12:05,900 So you can see here the results of this arrangement. 195 00:12:05,900 --> 00:12:07,700 This is the breakdown of expenditures. 196 00:12:07,700 --> 00:12:13,100 Rural governments are funding the bulk of education, health, and social security. 197 00:12:13,100 --> 00:12:18,700 Sorry here you can actually see the public expenditure burdens by local government. 198 00:12:18,700 --> 00:12:23,241 It's been actually growing hugely since 1994. 199 00:12:24,391 --> 00:12:28,280 This is due to reforms, fiscal decentralization reforms, 200 00:12:28,280 --> 00:12:33,568 which have devolved paying for schools and hospitals down to the county level. 201 00:12:33,568 --> 00:12:36,400 And here you can see the result of that. 202 00:12:36,400 --> 00:12:40,483 And you can see education, health, and 203 00:12:40,483 --> 00:12:45,900 social security are mainly paid for by the counties. 204 00:12:45,900 --> 00:12:48,000 Education is an exception actually. 205 00:12:48,000 --> 00:12:50,551 I think education right now is actually being, 206 00:12:50,551 --> 00:12:54,505 since 2014 I think has been pulled back to the central state levels and 207 00:12:54,505 --> 00:12:59,000 now the central state is still funding it- or actually at least the provinces are. 208 00:12:59,000 --> 00:13:02,263 But nevertheless health, social security, and 209 00:13:02,263 --> 00:13:06,000 unemployment are all funded by counties and townships. 210 00:13:06,000 --> 00:13:10,863 So as a result of this you can kind of see what these budgets look like at the local 211 00:13:10,863 --> 00:13:12,200 government levels. 212 00:13:12,200 --> 00:13:18,300 So we see costs represented by this dotted line they're rising with decentralization. 213 00:13:18,300 --> 00:13:23,800 At the same time that cost are arising revenues, the solid line, are dropping. 214 00:13:23,800 --> 00:13:28,472 So in 1994, a huge drop in local government revenues. 215 00:13:30,032 --> 00:13:33,794 The state basically has pulled revenue collection away from localities and 216 00:13:33,794 --> 00:13:34,800 toward the center. 217 00:13:34,800 --> 00:13:37,000 It's a result many things. 218 00:13:37,000 --> 00:13:42,000 One is the rural tax base being wiped out by deepening privatization of TVEs. 219 00:13:42,000 --> 00:13:47,038 It's also due to banking reforms that choked off credit to rural businesses. 220 00:13:47,038 --> 00:13:50,000 This is what begins the accumulation of local government debts. 221 00:13:50,000 --> 00:13:55,499 And then also in 2003 or so the state abolishes all rural household and 222 00:13:55,499 --> 00:13:59,500 agricultural taxes in response to rural tax revolt. 223 00:13:59,500 --> 00:14:04,454 So by the 2000s, mid-2000s many rural governments have fiscal deficits totaling 224 00:14:04,454 --> 00:14:08,770 3 times their revenues and this is what is driving the shift from labor intensive 225 00:14:08,770 --> 00:14:10,500 to land centered development. 226 00:14:11,591 --> 00:14:15,700 Of course these deficits are now then resolved through urban expansion. 227 00:14:15,700 --> 00:14:20,503 So since 2006 state law has actually updated its hukou policy in order to allow 228 00:14:20,503 --> 00:14:25,167 rural governments to legally expropriate village land for urban expansion and 229 00:14:25,167 --> 00:14:28,926 in places where this land transfer is happening rural people can 230 00:14:28,926 --> 00:14:31,800 then transfer from rural to urban citizenship. 231 00:14:31,800 --> 00:14:35,200 They engage in kind of a land for welfare trade off. 232 00:14:35,200 --> 00:14:37,638 They give up their birthright to village land and 233 00:14:37,638 --> 00:14:40,200 in exchange they get access to urban public goods. 234 00:14:40,200 --> 00:14:44,500 Now all his sounds fairly common sense in theory but 235 00:14:44,500 --> 00:14:47,600 in practice this so-called land for 236 00:14:47,600 --> 00:14:52,300 welfare trade is not really an upgrade for two reasons. 237 00:14:52,300 --> 00:14:56,200 One, this reform doesn't actually allow rural people to move to cities. 238 00:14:56,200 --> 00:15:00,562 It instead requires them to stay in designated townships which are built to 239 00:15:00,562 --> 00:15:03,900 house them and then land around them is being urbanized. 240 00:15:03,900 --> 00:15:08,433 And two, these designated townships, they don't actually provide full social welfare 241 00:15:08,433 --> 00:15:12,369 because these local governments that are running them as you remember are more 242 00:15:12,369 --> 00:15:16,124 concerned with using funds from land revenues to pay off fiscal deficits, 243 00:15:16,124 --> 00:15:18,000 not for expanding social programs. 244 00:15:18,000 --> 00:15:21,831 So this is the backdrop for the field work that I did and 245 00:15:21,831 --> 00:15:24,981 I wanna take you into the field with me now and 246 00:15:24,981 --> 00:15:29,858 tell you a little bit about the research that I did on this question. 247 00:15:29,858 --> 00:15:35,658 I ended up doing 31 months of multi-sited ethnography for around 2007 to 2012, 248 00:15:35,658 --> 00:15:41,100 and this study started as ethnography of construction workers actually in Beijing. 249 00:15:41,100 --> 00:15:46,050 So I followed these construction workers in Beijing to two villages in Sichuan 250 00:15:46,050 --> 00:15:46,800 province. 251 00:15:46,800 --> 00:15:50,700 And I lived in Sichuan province with these villagers for 2 consecutive years. 252 00:15:50,700 --> 00:15:54,849 So in each village I rented a bedroom in a migrant household. 253 00:15:54,849 --> 00:15:57,600 I observed how laborers recruited. 254 00:15:57,600 --> 00:16:02,059 Each village basically has a broker, an entrepreneurial village man who delivers 255 00:16:02,059 --> 00:16:05,700 laborers for recruitment for subcontractors in cities to employ. 256 00:16:05,700 --> 00:16:07,700 And I studied this process of labor recruitment. 257 00:16:07,700 --> 00:16:12,526 I studied it because at a process it's the mechanism that links rural and 258 00:16:12,526 --> 00:16:13,800 urban economies. 259 00:16:13,800 --> 00:16:17,766 I basically sampled villages where 260 00:16:17,766 --> 00:16:23,192 construction is the main source of employment. 261 00:16:25,272 --> 00:16:28,322 And I did this because most studies of China until I started studying my 262 00:16:28,322 --> 00:16:32,202 [intelligible], most of the studies when I started doing this research were actually 263 00:16:32,202 --> 00:16:33,100 on manufacturing. 264 00:16:33,100 --> 00:16:37,606 But actually I'm going to argue today that it's construction that's a more 265 00:16:37,606 --> 00:16:39,000 key industry in China. 266 00:16:39,000 --> 00:16:43,400 And this is because construction lies in the nexus of both land and labor markets. 267 00:16:43,400 --> 00:16:48,300 So I'll start with the connection between construction and land. 268 00:16:48,300 --> 00:16:50,310 In construction, unlike manufacturing, 269 00:16:50,310 --> 00:16:53,200 land is the primary source of surplus value or profitability. 270 00:16:53,200 --> 00:16:55,100 It's also the primary variable cost. 271 00:16:55,100 --> 00:16:56,685 So properties are built on land and 272 00:16:56,685 --> 00:16:59,700 then this land dictates the price at which properties are built. 273 00:16:59,700 --> 00:17:04,352 And also construction then also utilizes labor in a much more 274 00:17:04,352 --> 00:17:08,099 exploitative way than manufacturing ever did. 275 00:17:08,099 --> 00:17:12,736 And this is because Chinese law allows enterprises to delay paying their wage 276 00:17:12,736 --> 00:17:14,599 only until the end of the year. 277 00:17:14,599 --> 00:17:18,256 In manufacturing you also get wage arrears you also have delayed wage payment but 278 00:17:18,256 --> 00:17:21,532 most of the delays are only 3 months you get paid at the end of each 3 month 279 00:17:21,532 --> 00:17:22,200 period or so. 280 00:17:22,200 --> 00:17:24,200 In construction it's a full year. 281 00:17:24,200 --> 00:17:28,028 And this is because enterprises, construction enterprise in China 282 00:17:28,028 --> 00:17:31,922 are actually barred from getting funding from state-backed banks, 283 00:17:31,922 --> 00:17:34,364 and this is so that the state can regulate and 284 00:17:34,364 --> 00:17:37,800 make sure that you don't get an overheating housing market. 285 00:17:37,800 --> 00:17:42,720 And to get around this lack of credit financing construction companies 286 00:17:42,720 --> 00:17:48,731 have just started off-loading the cost onto labor by delaying payment. 287 00:17:48,731 --> 00:17:52,767 So this delayed wage payment system, it works actually and works because of 288 00:17:52,767 --> 00:17:56,500 the laborers that construction employs are all obviously all rural. 289 00:17:56,500 --> 00:18:01,131 90% of labor and construction is rural. 290 00:18:02,251 --> 00:18:05,400 And this labor is also embedded in the rural subsistence economy. 291 00:18:05,400 --> 00:18:08,885 It means back in the countryside families are farming to subsist until wages 292 00:18:08,885 --> 00:18:09,600 come through. 293 00:18:09,600 --> 00:18:13,700 So this is a diagram of what construction subcontracting looks like. 294 00:18:13,700 --> 00:18:16,400 At the end of the year money trickles down from the top. 295 00:18:16,400 --> 00:18:21,751 And meanwhile workers rely on village based informal lending schemes or 296 00:18:21,751 --> 00:18:23,768 on their families to farm so 297 00:18:23,768 --> 00:18:29,400 that they can withstand this delayed wage payment until the end of the year. 298 00:18:31,300 --> 00:18:34,700 So let me take you with me to the first village that I studied. 299 00:18:34,700 --> 00:18:38,734 In Beijing I met a worker named Little Dong who invited me to live with him in 300 00:18:38,734 --> 00:18:42,000 his home in a village which I then called Faming Village. 301 00:18:42,000 --> 00:18:45,400 So this is a scene from Faming. 302 00:18:45,400 --> 00:18:47,300 There's a couple things to note here. 303 00:18:47,300 --> 00:18:51,000 First there's primarily women in this village year-round. 304 00:18:51,000 --> 00:18:54,400 These women farm the land while their husbands work in construction. 305 00:18:54,400 --> 00:18:58,459 And the second thing to note here is that managed remittances are being used to 306 00:18:58,459 --> 00:19:01,900 build two story tiled houses like the one seen in the background. 307 00:19:01,900 --> 00:19:06,500 To do this women are running a low interest informal money lending scheme. 308 00:19:06,500 --> 00:19:09,200 This scene is actually the aftermath of a banquet. 309 00:19:09,200 --> 00:19:12,500 The Wu house belongs to the woman in the middle. 310 00:19:12,500 --> 00:19:15,791 She held the banquet in order to thank the other women who lent their husbands 311 00:19:15,791 --> 00:19:17,600 remittances to help her build the house. 312 00:19:17,600 --> 00:19:22,210 So while women are farming and lending money in Faming Village 313 00:19:22,210 --> 00:19:27,000 their husbands are actually being recruited into labor teams. 314 00:19:27,000 --> 00:19:30,800 So this is a group of men discussing next year's migration. 315 00:19:30,800 --> 00:19:35,500 The man on the far right holding the bucket is a man named Boss Gao. 316 00:19:35,500 --> 00:19:39,628 Boss Gao is the unofficial labor broker of Faming Village. 317 00:19:39,628 --> 00:19:41,500 He has a difficult job. 318 00:19:41,500 --> 00:19:46,203 Throughout the year has to give each worker around $50 US a month all out of 319 00:19:46,203 --> 00:19:46,800 pocket. 320 00:19:46,800 --> 00:19:51,418 However at the end of many years sometimes subcontractors abscond 321 00:19:51,418 --> 00:19:53,900 without paying him or his workers. 322 00:19:53,900 --> 00:19:57,800 So he's taking on a lot of risk to recruit this labor. 323 00:19:57,800 --> 00:20:00,099 The only way to prevent this is for 324 00:20:00,099 --> 00:20:04,300 Boss Gao to become a long term monopolistic labor supplier. 325 00:20:04,300 --> 00:20:08,201 So in other words subcontractors will pay him guaranteed if they know that next 326 00:20:08,201 --> 00:20:10,801 year's labor delivery is also coming on from him and 327 00:20:10,801 --> 00:20:13,600 also depends on their paying him for that current year. 328 00:20:13,600 --> 00:20:16,000 So Boss Gao has to keep his labor supply coming. 329 00:20:16,000 --> 00:20:19,432 It means he has to retain workers, he has to discipline them, 330 00:20:19,432 --> 00:20:23,400 even while suppressing their wages to make sure he can pay his own rent. 331 00:20:23,400 --> 00:20:27,371 And he does this by enlisting other villagers, his wife, 332 00:20:27,371 --> 00:20:32,480 his family members, to put pressure on young possibly wayward members and 333 00:20:32,480 --> 00:20:35,900 to pressure them not to work for outside brokers. 334 00:20:35,900 --> 00:20:39,100 So again this is how labor is sort of embedded in villages. 335 00:20:39,100 --> 00:20:43,602 Not only is it interdependent with farming but also labor institute is being 336 00:20:43,602 --> 00:20:48,400 recruited and then also consistently disciplined through village relations. 337 00:20:48,400 --> 00:20:51,300 So let me give you an idea of what this disciplining looks like. 338 00:20:51,300 --> 00:20:57,700 In 2010 Boss Gao had problems with a 24-year-old worker named Little Fatty. 339 00:20:57,700 --> 00:21:02,300 Little Fatty is a married man but he still has somewhat of a wayward tendency. 340 00:21:02,300 --> 00:21:04,000 This is Little Fatty here. 341 00:21:04,000 --> 00:21:07,844 Sometimes he would abscond from the construction site to meet up with his 342 00:21:07,844 --> 00:21:11,246 middle school classmates and they would spend a week smoking and 343 00:21:11,246 --> 00:21:13,400 playing video games in internet cafes. 344 00:21:13,400 --> 00:21:18,139 So when this happens Boss Gao leveraged actually his wife's relationships to 345 00:21:18,139 --> 00:21:19,800 discipline Little Fatty. 346 00:21:19,800 --> 00:21:21,700 This is how he did it. 347 00:21:21,700 --> 00:21:26,532 He would ask his own wife Madame Gao to befriend Little Fatty's wife 348 00:21:26,532 --> 00:21:28,430 back in Faming. 349 00:21:28,430 --> 00:21:29,800 So this is Little Fatty's wife. 350 00:21:29,800 --> 00:21:33,130 She's a young woman named Sister He. 351 00:21:33,130 --> 00:21:36,602 When the trouble started Madame Gao bought Sister He a cell phone so 352 00:21:36,602 --> 00:21:38,900 she could better keep track of her husband. 353 00:21:38,900 --> 00:21:43,300 Then Madame Gao insinuated herself more into Sister He's trust. 354 00:21:43,300 --> 00:21:47,634 She taught Sister He how to buy pigs at the market, how to chop and 355 00:21:47,634 --> 00:21:51,900 cook down yam leaves as pig feed, how to sell them for a income. 356 00:21:51,900 --> 00:21:56,612 Once in a while Madame Gao would make an idle remark about Little Fatty. 357 00:21:56,612 --> 00:22:00,800 About how he didn't seem to be sending any money home lately. 358 00:22:00,800 --> 00:22:04,372 Madame Gao pointed out that Sister He's house was falling apart, 359 00:22:04,372 --> 00:22:06,538 you can see her house in the background, 360 00:22:06,538 --> 00:22:10,000 while other migrants were building new houses for their wives. 361 00:22:10,000 --> 00:22:13,103 She gave Sister He money for some household repairs and 362 00:22:13,103 --> 00:22:17,500 eventually she advised Sister He not to be satisfied with an oaf of a husband. 363 00:22:17,500 --> 00:22:20,700 She told her women can make men demands today. 364 00:22:20,700 --> 00:22:26,052 She said you may not know this but in this village a man can build a one 365 00:22:26,052 --> 00:22:31,800 story house with about 40,000 RMB maybe even 20,000 RMB. 366 00:22:31,800 --> 00:22:34,300 That's just 3 years of saved wages. 367 00:22:34,300 --> 00:22:37,900 A woman can tell her husband you must build me a house. 368 00:22:37,900 --> 00:22:41,100 She might save you build a house or I go back to my natal home. 369 00:22:41,100 --> 00:22:45,300 All of this I think was part of Madame Gao's overall strategy. 370 00:22:45,300 --> 00:22:49,108 She was hoping that Sister He would eventually domesticate 371 00:22:49,108 --> 00:22:51,400 her wayward husband Little Fatty. 372 00:22:51,400 --> 00:22:54,600 So let me summarize before I move on. 373 00:22:54,600 --> 00:22:58,884 This is how the labor market in cities remains embedded in a land based rural 374 00:22:58,884 --> 00:22:59,500 economy. 375 00:22:59,500 --> 00:23:00,900 First women farm. 376 00:23:00,900 --> 00:23:04,100 This protects their husbands from risks of wage arrears. 377 00:23:04,100 --> 00:23:09,059 And second Boss Gao is leveraging trust among village women in order 378 00:23:09,059 --> 00:23:11,500 to discipline minors in cities. 379 00:23:11,500 --> 00:23:14,964 During the year that I lived in Faming I heard 380 00:23:14,964 --> 00:23:19,000 rumors consistently about abandoning to Boss Bo. 381 00:23:19,000 --> 00:23:21,271 I'll show you a picture of him here. 382 00:23:21,271 --> 00:23:25,200 I heard that Boss Bo is the unofficial labor broker of Landing Village. 383 00:23:25,200 --> 00:23:28,100 I heard that in the past he often visited Faming. 384 00:23:28,100 --> 00:23:32,300 And also I heard that he now regularly hired Faming villagers as well. 385 00:23:32,300 --> 00:23:36,440 So in 2011 and went to Landing Village and I met Mr. 386 00:23:36,440 --> 00:23:41,300 Boss Bo who agreed to rent me a room in his house for a year as well. 387 00:23:41,300 --> 00:23:43,663 So the first year I lived with one migrant, 388 00:23:43,663 --> 00:23:46,100 second year married with a migrant broker. 389 00:23:46,100 --> 00:23:49,200 Boss Bo was a busy man I would learn. 390 00:23:49,200 --> 00:23:52,600 He was very different from Boss Gao the Faming Village broker. 391 00:23:52,600 --> 00:23:55,797 Boss Gao had only recruited Faming labor very locally but 392 00:23:55,797 --> 00:23:59,400 Boss Bo instead had expanded his business to several villages. 393 00:23:59,400 --> 00:24:02,400 Here you can see the multiple villages. 394 00:24:02,400 --> 00:24:05,500 These are approximately located. 395 00:24:05,500 --> 00:24:09,834 5 villages nearby where Boss Bo had extensive relationships and 396 00:24:09,834 --> 00:24:12,600 where he consistently recruited labor. 397 00:24:12,600 --> 00:24:17,000 He did this by forging relationships with laborers from other villages. 398 00:24:17,000 --> 00:24:20,392 He would meet them on trains or at construction sites very informally and 399 00:24:20,392 --> 00:24:24,300 then after cultivating their loyalty he would then ask them to serve as middlemen. 400 00:24:24,300 --> 00:24:26,737 These middlemen would then recruit labor for 401 00:24:26,737 --> 00:24:31,300 him from their home villages on his behalf to work for his subcontractors in cities. 402 00:24:31,300 --> 00:24:35,300 And in each village Boss Bo had a very specific reason for entering. 403 00:24:35,300 --> 00:24:38,000 He selected Faming for example for one reason. 404 00:24:38,000 --> 00:24:42,275 His brother in law lived there, he had married a local woman there, 405 00:24:42,275 --> 00:24:46,250 and because of this kinship tie with the local woman there he had 406 00:24:46,250 --> 00:24:50,600 trustworthy relationships and he served as a good middleman there. 407 00:24:50,600 --> 00:24:55,271 And during my time living in Landing Village I continually wondered why Boss Bo 408 00:24:55,271 --> 00:24:56,200 is expanding. 409 00:24:56,200 --> 00:24:59,400 Why he was brokering labor in so many places. 410 00:24:59,400 --> 00:25:01,661 He was expanding his business actively and 411 00:25:01,661 --> 00:25:05,000 yet his profits weren't actually increasing or so he told me. 412 00:25:05,000 --> 00:25:06,600 Expansion was difficult. 413 00:25:06,600 --> 00:25:09,904 He was lending thousands of dollars to workers across villages and 414 00:25:09,904 --> 00:25:13,100 sometimes his middlemen could not keep workers under control. 415 00:25:14,500 --> 00:25:19,453 He also now had to maintain good relations with many many more subcontractors in many 416 00:25:19,453 --> 00:25:20,300 more cities. 417 00:25:20,300 --> 00:25:25,000 These are the cities where he was actively delivering labor to. 418 00:25:25,000 --> 00:25:30,300 Later though I discovered the reason for Boss Bo's business strategy. 419 00:25:30,300 --> 00:25:34,210 He was expanding his brokerage not for profits but instead because in 420 00:25:34,210 --> 00:25:38,000 Landing Village his labor source was becoming slowly untenable. 421 00:25:38,000 --> 00:25:41,400 This is because all village land is being expropriated by the government. 422 00:25:41,400 --> 00:25:46,303 So you can see here Landing Village is actually located on the periphery of 423 00:25:46,303 --> 00:25:47,500 Chongqing City. 424 00:25:47,500 --> 00:25:52,437 The whole formally rural periphery of Chongqing City had now 425 00:25:52,437 --> 00:25:57,470 become urban districts, in the 3 years between 2011 and 426 00:25:57,470 --> 00:26:02,793 2014 all of this became urban and that's around 3 million or 427 00:26:02,793 --> 00:26:06,200 so rural people who were then urbanized. 428 00:26:07,800 --> 00:26:14,900 So where does this put Landing in this picture of Chinese development? 429 00:26:14,900 --> 00:26:17,800 Landing has started off like Faming Village. 430 00:26:17,800 --> 00:26:20,064 They were both labor sending sites and 431 00:26:20,064 --> 00:26:24,457 they were both primarily sending labor into the construction industry. 432 00:26:24,457 --> 00:26:26,788 But Landing for various reasons, 433 00:26:26,788 --> 00:26:32,171 migration began in Landing Village much earlier than it did in Faming Village so 434 00:26:32,171 --> 00:26:36,365 brokers had a lot more time to build up their social networks. 435 00:26:37,395 --> 00:26:43,500 And in the meantime this neighboring city has started to eat up its village land. 436 00:26:43,500 --> 00:26:49,100 And this I think is, Chongqing City began expanding for various reasons. 437 00:26:49,100 --> 00:26:53,442 One of the many reasons I think is because longtime labor migration has 438 00:26:53,442 --> 00:26:57,500 bankrupted the economy and this has lead to land redevelopment. 439 00:26:57,500 --> 00:27:02,557 I should add that I did my research at the time 440 00:27:02,557 --> 00:27:07,900 of Bo Xilai, at the end of Bo Xilai's regime. 441 00:27:07,900 --> 00:27:14,000 And so he was also sort of aggressively pursuing this urban redistricting as well. 442 00:27:14,000 --> 00:27:18,446 So now you'll see the last part of my argument by digging deeper into 443 00:27:18,446 --> 00:27:19,700 Landing Village. 444 00:27:19,700 --> 00:27:24,000 We'll see the contradiction between land redevelopment and labor migrating as well. 445 00:27:24,000 --> 00:27:30,400 Let me show you what Landing looked like before redevelopment. 446 00:27:30,400 --> 00:27:33,000 In the eyes of the state this is empty land. 447 00:27:33,000 --> 00:27:36,959 This is a plot of land that was left under-cultivated by 448 00:27:36,959 --> 00:27:40,000 migrant workers who had left for the city. 449 00:27:40,000 --> 00:27:43,900 In the eyes of the state this kind of fallow land is an undercapitalized asset. 450 00:27:43,900 --> 00:27:47,300 Yet in the eyes of its former inhabitants it's a source of retirement. 451 00:27:47,300 --> 00:27:48,800 It's a source of security. 452 00:27:48,800 --> 00:27:52,143 When urbanization came villagers quickly understood that 453 00:27:52,143 --> 00:27:55,900 the most important thing was to sever their reliance on this land. 454 00:27:55,900 --> 00:27:58,300 So far example Boss Bo. 455 00:27:58,300 --> 00:28:00,700 This is his wife pictured here. 456 00:28:00,700 --> 00:28:04,300 He purchased an apartment in the county seat and this is that apartment. 457 00:28:07,894 --> 00:28:10,800 Around 550 thousand RMB. 458 00:28:10,800 --> 00:28:15,145 He was also then preparing paperwork to upgrade his family 459 00:28:15,145 --> 00:28:18,700 from rural hukou to urban hukou registration. 460 00:28:18,700 --> 00:28:23,600 They would become urban citizens and register toward that county township. 461 00:28:23,600 --> 00:28:26,521 Now just as Boss Bo was preparing for this transition so 462 00:28:26,521 --> 00:28:28,500 too were his workers getting ready. 463 00:28:28,500 --> 00:28:33,398 A many mealtime conversations like the one pictured here centered around 464 00:28:33,398 --> 00:28:34,900 the issue of welfare. 465 00:28:34,900 --> 00:28:37,000 And you can notice here this is still Boss Bo's wife. 466 00:28:37,000 --> 00:28:40,912 This is just them in their old country house rather than that 467 00:28:40,912 --> 00:28:44,600 well-furnished well-appointed county apartment. 468 00:28:44,600 --> 00:28:49,376 Most villages relinquished their land and they converted their rural hukou to urban 469 00:28:49,376 --> 00:28:54,100 citizenship hoping to qualify for welfare support during this whole transition. 470 00:28:54,100 --> 00:28:57,600 This would help them cover expenses while they were waiting for year end wages. 471 00:28:57,600 --> 00:29:02,115 And usually the welfare program in their village would admit beneficiaries below 472 00:29:02,115 --> 00:29:03,500 a certain income level. 473 00:29:03,500 --> 00:29:07,500 This is the dibao program, the low income welfare program. 474 00:29:07,500 --> 00:29:11,140 Suddenly in 2011 however this program was rolled back and 475 00:29:11,140 --> 00:29:14,500 villagers were urged to rely on family support instead. 476 00:29:14,500 --> 00:29:20,140 At a town meeting for example a welfare official announced we advise for 477 00:29:20,140 --> 00:29:27,100 each household that migrant children remit 20% of their income to elderly parents. 478 00:29:27,100 --> 00:29:30,751 If your children do not remit this amount then you must tell them it is 479 00:29:30,751 --> 00:29:34,100 a state-mandated responsibility to care for your parents. 480 00:29:34,100 --> 00:29:36,000 Keep this in mind when you talk to them next. 481 00:29:36,000 --> 00:29:39,400 Tell them they must remit 20% of their income home to you. 482 00:29:39,400 --> 00:29:44,296 So to recap all of Landing's population has been reregistered as urban citizens 483 00:29:44,296 --> 00:29:49,120 but they're being stripped of their welfare benefits which had been minimized 484 00:29:49,120 --> 00:29:52,300 in order to cut costs at the local government level. 485 00:29:52,300 --> 00:29:56,180 And again this tightening of the belt, this cutting down of welfare, 486 00:29:56,180 --> 00:29:59,054 is a result of fiscal decentralization. 487 00:29:59,054 --> 00:30:02,200 so how does well or it actually affect villagers? 488 00:30:02,200 --> 00:30:06,788 Villagers have to continue working under the same conditions of delayed wage 489 00:30:06,788 --> 00:30:09,470 payment as yet before but they have no land and 490 00:30:09,470 --> 00:30:12,800 also no welfare to support them while they await wages. 491 00:30:12,800 --> 00:30:14,900 Boss Bo is preparing for himself for all of this. 492 00:30:14,900 --> 00:30:16,800 He had purchased this apartment. 493 00:30:16,800 --> 00:30:18,588 And I was with Boss Bo for 494 00:30:18,588 --> 00:30:24,600 example when he started feeling the changes that were percolating from below. 495 00:30:24,600 --> 00:30:28,480 Boss Bo hearing a lot of complaints from many of the workers that he recruited from 496 00:30:28,480 --> 00:30:29,400 Landing Village. 497 00:30:29,400 --> 00:30:33,348 One day he received a phone call from one of two workers, 498 00:30:33,348 --> 00:30:36,800 from two workers which is one of the two workers. 499 00:30:36,800 --> 00:30:38,592 And the worker that had called him, 500 00:30:38,592 --> 00:30:42,117 he asked him if he could come home from the construction site because he 501 00:30:42,117 --> 00:30:45,482 had heard rumors that some village houses were being demolished. 502 00:30:45,482 --> 00:30:47,100 Boss Bo gave him time off. 503 00:30:47,100 --> 00:30:51,120 Another month later another worker called him to ask if he could get his wages for 504 00:30:51,120 --> 00:30:52,200 the year in advance. 505 00:30:52,200 --> 00:30:55,600 He needed the money now for a down payment on a township apartment. 506 00:30:55,600 --> 00:30:57,600 When Boss Bo heard this he was incensed. 507 00:30:57,600 --> 00:31:00,515 After he got off the phone he told me that's it I'm through with the Landing 508 00:31:00,515 --> 00:31:02,691 workers, they were too expensive in the first place and 509 00:31:02,691 --> 00:31:04,700 now they want personal loans on top of everything. 510 00:31:04,700 --> 00:31:06,800 If I'm short 15 men it's very easy. 511 00:31:06,800 --> 00:31:10,500 I'll just call a couple guys back and find delusional tell them to get on a bus. 512 00:31:10,500 --> 00:31:12,500 Right away they know where I am. 513 00:31:12,500 --> 00:31:17,800 So if we step back we can see that this situation is indeed counterintuitive. 514 00:31:17,800 --> 00:31:21,714 Conventionally it means that loss of land would make labor fully proletarianized, 515 00:31:21,714 --> 00:31:23,100 willing to work for any wage. 516 00:31:23,100 --> 00:31:26,350 They should be an ideal form of labor, these landless workers. 517 00:31:26,350 --> 00:31:32,000 But Boss Bo as we know prefers to avoid these laborers. 518 00:31:32,000 --> 00:31:33,392 They have greater grievances, 519 00:31:33,392 --> 00:31:36,845 their families are unable to sustain themselves until wages come through, and 520 00:31:36,845 --> 00:31:40,000 now to him Faming looks like a much more attractive site of recruitment. 521 00:31:40,000 --> 00:31:43,600 At least there workers are still willing to be paid at the end of the year. 522 00:31:43,600 --> 00:31:45,500 So let's zoom out even further. 523 00:31:45,500 --> 00:31:48,900 What does it tell about the interaction between labor and land commodification? 524 00:31:48,900 --> 00:31:53,400 Well it tell us that land exploration disrupts labor recruitment. 525 00:31:53,400 --> 00:31:57,239 Once land is enclosed for redevelopment the labor that sits on top of it 526 00:31:57,239 --> 00:31:59,400 can no longer be profitably employed. 527 00:31:59,400 --> 00:32:03,970 So then the next question is what happens to this labor if Boss Bo does 528 00:32:03,970 --> 00:32:05,500 not want to hire them. 529 00:32:05,500 --> 00:32:09,200 So most workers attempted to pivot out of wage labor. 530 00:32:09,200 --> 00:32:12,600 They upgrade to entrepreneurial activity for example. 531 00:32:12,600 --> 00:32:16,555 Some relocate to other villages where they have kin members or children or 532 00:32:16,555 --> 00:32:19,500 spouses who still have their hukou registered there. 533 00:32:19,500 --> 00:32:22,343 For wage laborers however dispossession or 534 00:32:22,343 --> 00:32:25,500 this full proletarianization was disastrous. 535 00:32:25,500 --> 00:32:28,400 So this one worker. 536 00:32:28,400 --> 00:32:31,500 This is Farmer Yuan, a farmer age 65. 537 00:32:31,500 --> 00:32:33,400 He and his brothers were bachelors. 538 00:32:33,400 --> 00:32:36,350 Usually one of them did migrant labor in the city while the other farmed 539 00:32:36,350 --> 00:32:37,100 the land at home. 540 00:32:37,100 --> 00:32:39,084 They lost their land in September and 541 00:32:39,084 --> 00:32:43,116 then Farmer Yuan heard about a job in Inner Mongolia from a younger villager 542 00:32:43,116 --> 00:32:46,000 whose middle school classmate was a subcontractor. 543 00:32:46,000 --> 00:32:50,493 He thought to himself he would take this job even though he doesn't normally do 544 00:32:50,493 --> 00:32:53,500 migrant labor he was requiring some form of income. 545 00:32:53,500 --> 00:32:54,455 Before he left for 546 00:32:54,455 --> 00:32:57,900 this job in Inner Mongolia another villager gave him a warning. 547 00:32:57,900 --> 00:33:01,700 He said most jobs start in February after Lunar New Year. 548 00:33:01,700 --> 00:33:03,300 This job however starts in September. 549 00:33:03,300 --> 00:33:04,700 It's off the calendar. 550 00:33:04,700 --> 00:33:09,200 What he was implying was that sometimes these late start jobs are scams. 551 00:33:09,200 --> 00:33:12,152 They are subcontractors who had production slowdowns so 552 00:33:12,152 --> 00:33:15,778 they let their own workers go but then production speeds up and now they 553 00:33:15,778 --> 00:33:20,100 have to bring in new men who they're using to fill in an unexpected production gap. 554 00:33:20,100 --> 00:33:22,751 Oftentimes they'll employ these workers very harshly, 555 00:33:22,751 --> 00:33:25,993 work them very hard to the bone, and then let them go without paying them 556 00:33:25,993 --> 00:33:28,500 because they don't need to cultivate their loyalty. 557 00:33:28,500 --> 00:33:32,400 They're just sort of scabs or people who stepped in. 558 00:33:32,400 --> 00:33:37,331 The brothers, Farmer Yuan and his brother who was also accompanying him, heard this 559 00:33:37,331 --> 00:33:41,800 warning and they took it very seriously but they also had no other job offers. 560 00:33:41,800 --> 00:33:43,200 They had asked Boss Bo for jobs. 561 00:33:43,200 --> 00:33:46,200 Boss Bo had then already moved recruitment to Faming Village. 562 00:33:46,200 --> 00:33:49,400 So Farmer Yuan and his brother went to Inner Mongolia. 563 00:33:49,400 --> 00:33:54,214 He got a monthly wage of 460 US dollars paid at the end of the year, a monthly 564 00:33:54,214 --> 00:33:58,900 living allowance of 60 US dollars would be later deducted from the wage. 565 00:33:58,900 --> 00:34:03,500 5 months later he returned, his clothes tattered, considerably aged. 566 00:34:03,500 --> 00:34:05,900 The rumors had been true. 567 00:34:05,900 --> 00:34:08,995 The subcontractor had absconded with his wages. 568 00:34:08,995 --> 00:34:14,649 So Farmer Yuan came home and at the end of the year, despite the promised 460 dollars 569 00:34:14,649 --> 00:34:19,800 of monthly wage, he only brought home $130 US for the entire 5 months of work. 570 00:34:19,800 --> 00:34:22,400 Then they had other problems. 571 00:34:22,400 --> 00:34:26,427 Their house has been demolished so they moved in with a cousin who had a township 572 00:34:26,427 --> 00:34:29,000 apartment but their problems didn't end there. 573 00:34:29,000 --> 00:34:32,457 They also no longer had land so now food is a cash expense and 574 00:34:32,457 --> 00:34:34,300 that $130 went very fast. 575 00:34:34,300 --> 00:34:36,536 After 2 months the money was spent. 576 00:34:36,536 --> 00:34:41,699 So let me summarize the situation in Landing Village now. 577 00:34:41,699 --> 00:34:46,102 Landless workers have nothing but their labor power to sell, 578 00:34:46,102 --> 00:34:50,625 in Marxist parlance, but men like Boss Bo don't wanna buy it. 579 00:34:50,625 --> 00:34:53,910 If we're using the language of Karl Polanyi we can call this 580 00:34:53,910 --> 00:34:55,100 disembedded labor. 581 00:34:55,100 --> 00:34:58,700 It's labor that's no longer linked to the land and subsistence economy. 582 00:34:58,700 --> 00:35:03,051 It's no longer able to even partially reproduce itself as a labor force and 583 00:35:03,051 --> 00:35:07,200 as a result it's become redundant no longer valued as a commodity. 584 00:35:07,200 --> 00:35:09,260 So I just wanna end by saying for 585 00:35:09,260 --> 00:35:14,500 the rural people that I studied land expropriation exacted a high human cost. 586 00:35:14,500 --> 00:35:17,700 During the period of my research there were 3 suicides in Landing Village. 587 00:35:17,700 --> 00:35:19,500 All of them were landless workers. 588 00:35:19,500 --> 00:35:22,400 One of them was directly land related. 589 00:35:22,400 --> 00:35:27,300 A farmer hung himself from a rafter of his house on the eve of its demolition. 590 00:35:27,300 --> 00:35:28,500 Another was labor related. 591 00:35:28,500 --> 00:35:33,212 It was Farmer Yuan actually who moved out of his cousin's apartment which was 592 00:35:33,212 --> 00:35:36,402 being crowded more and more by the month with more and 593 00:35:36,402 --> 00:35:39,681 more relatives who were also landless and homeless. 594 00:35:39,681 --> 00:35:43,598 In the winter he returned alone to an abandoned house on the edge of a deep 595 00:35:43,598 --> 00:35:47,600 ravine, still standing, though had been long marked for demolition. 596 00:35:47,600 --> 00:35:51,000 And by then the village had been cleared of nearly all inhabitants. 597 00:35:51,000 --> 00:35:53,069 So perhaps it was social isolation, 598 00:35:53,069 --> 00:35:57,210 the villagers surmised perhaps it was economic distribution, one night 599 00:35:57,210 --> 00:36:01,500 shortly after the Lunar New Year Farmer Yuan walked off the edge of a ravine. 600 00:36:01,500 --> 00:36:04,900 So let me now conclude. 601 00:36:04,900 --> 00:36:07,000 I have 3 points to make. 602 00:36:07,000 --> 00:36:11,900 One is a point on my macro-argument on Chinese development. 603 00:36:11,900 --> 00:36:16,000 Another is a point about my kind of micro-level ethnographic account. 604 00:36:16,000 --> 00:36:19,000 And then third a methodological point about linking the two. 605 00:36:19,000 --> 00:36:23,387 So the first part of my talk today traced China's transition from a development 606 00:36:23,387 --> 00:36:27,000 model based on migrant labor to one based on land expropriation. 607 00:36:27,000 --> 00:36:30,805 I argued that the cost of maintaining cheap labor in cities was being 608 00:36:30,805 --> 00:36:35,278 externalized to the countryside and it was being borne by local governments and 609 00:36:35,278 --> 00:36:37,700 over time these costs proved unbearable. 610 00:36:37,700 --> 00:36:41,224 And so these local governments have turned toward a new mode of seeking revenues 611 00:36:41,224 --> 00:36:42,600 through land expropriation. 612 00:36:42,600 --> 00:36:46,305 The second part of my talk focused on the micro-foundations on this 613 00:36:46,305 --> 00:36:47,800 macro-transformation. 614 00:36:47,800 --> 00:36:52,743 So I went to Faming to see how this kind of system of migrant labor is reproduced. 615 00:36:52,743 --> 00:36:57,015 And we also then went to Landing to see how the system is being destroyed by 616 00:36:57,015 --> 00:37:01,638 land expropriation, which forces labor brokers like Boss Bo to go further and 617 00:37:01,638 --> 00:37:05,300 further afield to recruit labor for construction projects. 618 00:37:05,300 --> 00:37:09,757 We can see how land expropriation still requires migrant labor but it undermines 619 00:37:09,757 --> 00:37:13,700 its foundations and the result is this complete proletarianization. 620 00:37:13,700 --> 00:37:19,983 Another result of this is also this boom and bust dynamic that's produced by 621 00:37:19,983 --> 00:37:25,100 all of this, an extreme growth that's self cannibalizing. 622 00:37:25,100 --> 00:37:29,921 First, exuberant period of labor intensive growth and then a collapse and 623 00:37:29,921 --> 00:37:33,300 then now an overexuberant period of urbanization. 624 00:37:33,300 --> 00:37:36,474 And this overexuberance is kind of at the root of China's current debt and 625 00:37:36,474 --> 00:37:37,200 fiscal crisis. 626 00:37:37,200 --> 00:37:41,300 So local governments have become financing vehicles. 627 00:37:41,300 --> 00:37:45,606 They take on debt for urbanization and they're stuck in this ongoing cycle of 628 00:37:45,606 --> 00:37:49,981 debt because governments develop land beyond demand and they use this land for 629 00:37:49,981 --> 00:37:54,487 high margin luxury housing to make up their past debts and when properties don't 630 00:37:54,487 --> 00:37:58,794 sell you can kind of see the harbinger of the bust that's to follow this boom, 631 00:37:58,794 --> 00:38:01,200 these ghost towns devoid of inhabitants. 632 00:38:01,200 --> 00:38:05,234 So the third point I want to make is that there is 633 00:38:05,234 --> 00:38:10,000 a methodological lesson to draw I think from my study. 634 00:38:10,000 --> 00:38:13,870 What I've described is a view of China that links both rural and 635 00:38:13,870 --> 00:38:19,059 urban economies together through I think graphic following of this labor migrant, 636 00:38:19,059 --> 00:38:20,900 labor recruitment process. 637 00:38:20,900 --> 00:38:23,736 It examines relationships between villages and cities and 638 00:38:23,736 --> 00:38:25,500 also between villages themselves. 639 00:38:25,500 --> 00:38:28,803 And I think it's this on ground work allows me to see this 640 00:38:28,803 --> 00:38:33,094 antagonistic interdependence between the two models of development, 641 00:38:33,094 --> 00:38:35,500 one based on land and one based on labor. 642 00:38:35,500 --> 00:38:41,500 Is a new sort of internal contradiction of the Chinese economy today. 643 00:38:41,500 --> 00:38:43,000 Thank you.