Rural households' social reproduction in China's agrarian transition: Wage employment and family farming

• Main Author: ZHANG, Qian Forrest
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2015
• Subjects: Asian Studies; Rural Sociology; Sociology
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/2143; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/3400/viewcontent/Rural_households_social_reproduction_in_Chinas_agrarian_transit.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Wage employment has penetrated deeply into rural households’ livelihoods and has become acentral pillar in China’s rural economy. In the past three decades, three developmentspropelled the growth of wage employment: rural industrialization, rural-to-urban migration,and rise of capitalist agriculture. These developments brought in a decisive break to thetrajectory of China’s agrarian transition: the traditional model of household reproductionbased on family farming and handicraft production has now been replaced by a new one inwhich wage employment and family farming are closely bonded in a myriad of ways –through both the household-level division of labour and individual-level circulation of labourbetween the two.