Julia Chuang: Beneath the China Boom: Labor, Citizenship, and the Making of a Rural Land MarketIsabel Heger-Laube

ASIEN – Nr. 156/157 (2020) pp. 219–21

Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. 231 pp., Paperback 23.08 EUR

In this multisited ethnography, based on fieldwork conducted in various stages between 2007 and 2011, Julia Chuang follows the fate of China’s rural population as the country is shifting from economic growth through cheap migrant labor to growth through rural urbanization.

To explain this turn to urbanization as well as its implications for China’s rural workforce, Chuang argues for a “Polanyian view of China’s development”: According to Karl Polanyi (1944), both labor and land are fictitious commodities — sources of human subsistence that can be commoditized for sale on a market. In China, the commodification of rural labor — as well as the exploitation of the rural workforce for low-cost export production — has been ongoing since the beginning of postsocialist reforms. Many rural migrants have been able to withstand their precarious employment conditions in the cities without social welfare only because of their collective land-use rights, with families strategically dividing their labor force between subsistence farming and migration so that migrants can retreat to their home villages in times of need. Over time, this model of development has caused a fiscal crisis in rural areas which, while hollowed out economically, had to support the renewal of a labor force employed elsewhere. To resolve this fiscal crisis, local governments have, since the early 2000s, turned towards “accumulation through dispossession” — the expropriation and commodification of rural land, leading to an uncoordinated urbanization boom. This development, however, undermines the conditions which have so far protected China’s rural workers from the risks associated with migrant work…