China’s agrarian transition: Peasants, property, and politics, by René Trappel

• Main Author: ZHANG, Qian Forrest
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2017
• Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics; Asian Studies
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3203; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/4460/viewcontent/2017_CJ_book_review_pre_pub_version.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Rene Trappel’s book is an ambitious attempt to address some of the key issues in thecomplex process of agrarian transition unfolding in China today. Trappel favors the“commodification of farmland” – the transfer of the land rights of small-scale farmers,especially to large-scale agribusiness producers – as a necessary condition for agrariantransition. He selects this as the dependent variable for his investigation and equates thiswith ‘agrarian transition’. He collected information from four counties (one each in Sichuanand Shandong and two in Guizhou) through three field trips between 2008 and 2010.