STATE-LED RURALIZATION AND ITS URBAN ENTANGLEMENTS: Agribusiness Land Transfers in Rural China
This article was made possible by support from the Social Science Research Council's International Dissertation Research Fellowship, with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the American Council of Learned Societies’ (ACLS) Predissertation Grant in China Studies; the Luce Foundation; the ACLS's Dissertation Completion Fellowship; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Carter Manny Research Citation, and the Graham Foundation. At the University of California, Berkeley, the Center for Chinese Studies’ Pamela and Kenneth Fong Fellowship, the Institute of International Studies’ John L. Simpson Memorial Fellowship and the Global Metropolitan Studies’ Research Fellowship generously supported this research. I presented an earlier version of this article at the Urban Affairs Association Conference, and received comments on these findings from Margaret Crawford, You-tien Hsing, Greig Crysler and Winnie Wong. Finally, I thank the IJURR's editor, Liza Weinstein, and the reviewers for their many insightful comments.
Abstract
As urbanization takes on forms and spaces beyond the typical city, urban theorists have questioned how the field can comprehend the rural. Drawing on recent theories in rural geography, I propose the concept of ‘state-led ruralization’, which I define as state agencies’ deliberate effort to reshape rural social space by regulating the relations between rural people and their land, the physical forms of the rural environment and the subjectivity of rural dwellers. I argue that state-led ruralization and extended urbanization, although deeply entangled, are two distinct categories of planetary capitalism. I examine their entanglement through an ethnographic analysis of a case of state-led ruralization: agrarian corporatization in Sangshan, a village in rural Hunan province, China. Following national efforts to maximize food yields to feed urban populations—a mode of land governance that I call the ‘food security regime’—Sangshan village government sought to persuade farmers to sign a deal to transfer their land to an agribusiness corporation. My findings reveal that farmers’ ability to opt out of these deals and retain their farmlands largely depended on the economic power they had previously accumulated in cities through urbanization. These relations between urbanization and ruralization may offer alternative pathways for urban theorization.
Worldmaking beyond urbanization
Recent debates in urban studies have highlighted that city growth is not self-sustained: it feeds on resource and capital extraction from hinterland regions that we have traditionally considered non-urban (Brenner, 2016). This awareness has raised an important question: how can urban studies comprehend and examine rural space? Debates on extended urbanization have provided a powerful critique of urban ideology, revealing how the celebration of urbanity since the nineteenth century has displaced ways of living and making worlds that exist outside of cities (Brenner and Schmid, 2014; 2015). Yet, this framework has faced criticism for producing an overly comprehensive theory that fails to capture locality and the heterogeneity of planetary spatial transformations (Khatam and Haas, 2018). In response, Neil Brenner (2018) has called for a more constructive critical work of ‘engaged pluralism’ that complicates extended urbanization through diverse positionalities and worldviews.
In this spirit of constructive engagement and pluralization, I seek to bring concepts from critical rural studies into closer conversation with urban studies. I draw on recent efforts to theorize ‘geographies of ruralization’ (Gillen et al., 2022b), a framework that emerged as an explicit response to extended urbanization. The authors define it as ‘those elements of the rural that are persistent, resonant, and pervasive even in an urbanizing world’ (ibid.: 187). They refer to dynamics such as the resistance of smallholding agriculture, the reproduction of rural livelihoods amidst urban migrations, or the return to rural life after a period away. I find this concept especially relevant because it legitimizes sociospatial transformations and associated theories that exist outside of urbanization. However, as many authors have already pointed out (Chen and Kong, 2022; Ghosh, 2022; Ortega, 2022; Williams, 2023), this theorization mostly describes bottom-up processes. In this article, I propose the concept of ‘state-led ruralization’, which I characterize as state agencies’ deliberate striving to shape ways of being rural. They do so by regulating the administrative and material relations between people and rural land, the physical forms of the rural environment and the subjectivity of rural dwellers. These governmental projects are not fully independent of urbanization. In fact, they often emerge in response to the changes caused by urban expansion. Yet their logics, bureaucratic processes, social and environmental outcomes are not completely explained within the theoretical umbrella of urbanization. Once it lands in rural places, state-led ruralization materializes in multiple state–society relations that recast rural populations into differentiated social strata. My findings show that this differentiation builds on the changes brought by previous waves of urbanization, thus revealing some of the modalities in which urbanization and ruralization are coproduced. I argue that state-led ruralization is distinct from, yet entangled with, urbanization.
I propose this concept through an ethnographic analysis of ongoing rural development in China, although I maintain the possibility that this framework could be redeployed elsewhere.1 Since the 2010s, as a response to the loss of agricultural land caused by massive urban expansion, China's central government formally enabled the substitution of family farming with corporate agribusiness models. The Ministry of Agriculture achieved this by creating ‘land management rights’, a legal tool that allows private agricultural companies to acquire the land of entire villages (Wang and Zhang, 2017). This mode of governance, which I call the ‘food security regime’, is a prominent logic underpinning China's state-led ruralization. Official statistics show that around 30% of total arable farmlands was being operated by large-scale companies in 2019 (Rogers et al., 2021). I specifically examine the negotiations around agribusiness land transfers in Sangshan village, where, between 2015 and 2018, the local government brokered the acquisition of village farmlands for a private agricultural firm. My findings reveal three outcomes of this state project that affected peasant life in distinct ways: depeasantization, resistance and, most commonly, compromise. Crucially, these outcomes largely depended on farmers’ economic power accumulated previously in cities via manufacturing work and engagement with other urban industries.
This analysis begins to theorize the characteristics of ruralization as a state project, and its relations with urbanization in China. Scholars proposing geographies of ruralization have already argued that this process is distinct from urbanization. I complicate this distinction by challenging a binary view of urbanization as a capitalist or state-led process and ruralization as bottom-up resistance. I also elaborate on the entanglement between urbanization and state-led ruralization by framing China's food security regime as an explicit response to urbanization. State entrepreneurialism (Wu et al., 2022), the governance mode that shaped speculative urbanization in Chinese cities after socialism, has expanded its reach and morphed into a ruralization project. The governmental attitude toward development does not exclusively materialize the relentless expansion of urban real estate. It also realigns with strategic political and economic goals of national security, particularly the control of food and environmental resources through rural agricultural restructuring. This effort to reorder rural social space is entangled with the country's recent urbanization. This does not mean that it is urbanization. The ruralization perspective allows these changes to be analyzed through theories and methodologies built on specific rural ecologies and environments, particularly within the rich legacy of rural studies. Rather than conceptualizing planetary capitalist worldmaking exclusively through the framework of urbanization, we can think of a multiplicity of sociospatial processes that are separate yet inextricably linked to one another. I believe that thinking of urbanization and ruralization as ‘distinct yet entangled’ may bring urban scholars closer to the ‘engaged pluralism’ in urban theorization that Brenner advocated.
This article presents only one of the many possible forms of ruralization. Different processes emerge as states and planetary capitalism incorporate varied land-based economies, such as hunting, forestry, fishing or resource extraction. Geological conditions generate multiple ruralities, with sharp differences among mountains, valleys or flatlands. There are, in short, many ruralities and multiple ruralizations, all of which establish varying power relations with urban space. While urbanization tends to be used in the singular, proponents of ‘geographies of ruralization’ maintained a plural form to emphasize this heterogeneity (Gillen et al., 2022b). We can interpret this multitude, and its entanglement with the making of urban spaces, through a range of major and minor theories available ‘outside’ of urban theory.
The outside of urban theory
As urbanization takes on forms and spaces outside of the ‘city’, urban scholars have been questioning appropriate sites of urban research, both geographically and theoretically. Brenner and Schmid proposed the concepts of planetary and extended urbanization to highlight the extractive relations between cities and their ‘constitutive outside’, such as the hinterland, the rural, the wilderness, and even the atmosphere and outer space (Brenner and Schmid, 2014; Brenner, 2016; 2018). They interpreted the urban as a set of processes and ideologies rather than as ontological entities or physical objects bound within the spatial confines of the city. This proposition greatly advanced thinking in urban studies, leading scholars to question long-established geographical categories of ‘city’ and ‘countryside’. By bringing urban scholars to interrogate the extended spatial relationalities and forms of extractivism that make urban space, planetary urbanization advocated for an urban theory ‘without an outside’ (Brenner, 2014).
This contention—that the majority of sociospatial dynamics driven by planetary capitalism can be understood through the theoretical umbrella of urbanization—sparked a variety of criticisms. Richard Walker (2015) argued that this framework reproduced the ‘idealist trap’ of postmodern thinkers by assuming that, because categories are imperfect representations of a given reality, there is no knowable reality. Other scholars emphasized the concept's tendency to universalize urban theory (Jazeel, 2018; Khatam and Haas, 2018), and disregarding difference within urban analysis (Kipfer, 2018; O'Callaghan, 2018). Brenner (2018) responded that the formulation was instead an attempt to displace the ‘city’ as the central analytical object in urban studies, seeking to supersede the inside/outside dualism.
Some scholars accepted the general framework of extended urbanization but sought to specify and expand it through feminist and queer perspectives (Angelo and Goh, 2021), views on world imperialism (Galindez, 2023) and postcolonial theories (Vegliò, 2021). A significant portion of this debate focused on the integration of extended urbanization with the legacy of critical rural studies, particularly in relation to the agrarian question (Gururani, 2019; Ghosh and Meer, 2020; Balakrishnan and Gururani, 2021). I find this work particularly significant because of its validation of perspectives ‘outside’ of urban theory, notably rural studies, as a crucial body of knowledge for understanding twenty-first century urbanization. Ghosh and Meer (2020) identified depeasantization (Araghi, 1995), agribusiness takeovers (Li and Semedi, 2021), and the articulations of ‘operational landscapes’ (Brenner and Katsikis, 2020) as three entry points for a dialogue between the agrarian question and extended urbanization. Gururani (2019) theorized ‘agrarian urbanism’, arguing that, in contexts like present-day India, ‘the urban question is indeed also the agrarian question’ (ibid.: 973).
I position myself in alignment with this thread of scholarship that looks at the knowledge available ‘outside’ of urban studies to understand our urbanizing world (Ghosh, 2017; Jazeel, 2018; Gururani, 2019). My critique of extended urbanization is that it has not fully validated rural space as a relevant field of inquiry in itself, but only inasmuch as it became participant (‘constitutive’) (Brenner, 2016) in city-making. As a result, while aiming to displace the city as the sole analytical object in the field, it inadvertently reproduced the discursive hegemony of citiness. To be sure, much of planetary urbanization scholarship is committed to revealing and critiquing the uneven power relations between the city and the non-city. Yet the problem persists with the use of the urbanization paradigm to describe these relationalities. The urbanization perspective recognizes the heterogeneous, dispersed and networked sociospatial restructuring of twenty-first century capitalism, but it unilaterally ties them to the growth of cities. Instead, using concepts other than ‘urbanization’ highlights logics and political economies theorized outside of urban studies to represent forms of capitalist change unfolding in the non-city. This perspective shift helps avoid an ‘urbanormative’ (Fulkerson and Thomas, 2013; Thomas et al., 2013) worldview that precludes the recognition of planetary changes outside of urbanization.
In an explicit response to extended urbanization debates, Gillen et al. (2022b) theorized ‘geographies of ruralization’ as the spatialities of interrelated practices that maintain or redefine rural livelihoods amidst urbanization. These include, for instance, the persistence of peasant lives amidst pushes of agrarian capitalism (‘in-situ ruralization’), the extension of peasant family ties through migration networks (‘extended ruralization’) and the nostalgic impulse to return to and remake the rural home (‘rural returns’). Some scholars have pointed out that ruralization necessitates the reintroduction of the urban–rural taxonomy (Baird, 2022); others that it turns the rural into a subjective category of meanings in contrast to the objective nature of the urban (Parsons and Lawreniuk, 2022). Arnisson Ortega (2022: 226) encouraged viewing ruralization as an ‘ecosystem of possibilities’ defined through the meanings that diverse social actors attach to rurality. In all cases, ruralization perspectives maintain the importance of multiple spatial and conceptual categories to analyze sociospatial changes. They remind us that understanding the boundaries of the urban and the rural, and what exists outside of them, is a key aspect of geographical analysis (Gillen et al., 2022b).
My proposal to think through state-led ruralization explicitly takes on a call to understand the institutional dimension of ruralization. Some scholars have problematized the exclusively bottom-up framing of ruralization by urging an exploration of the effects of state-led agrarian capitalism (Ghosh, 2022), the legacies of colonialism embedded in plantation models (Williams, 2023), and the emergence of state-sponsored rural revitalization projects, especially in China (Chen and Kong, 2022). State-led ruralization highlights how, in many places around the world, state agencies see the rural as a strategic terrain for ensuring control over food supplies, natural resources, energy production and other key aspects of governance. Rural sociospatial restructurings necessitate explicit governmental determinations regarding what it means to be rural, including the definition of the relations between people and the land, the associated forms of agricultural or non-agricultural labor, the subjectivity and aspirations of rural dwellers and the physical forms of their environments. This perspective sees the rural (and the urban) as a ‘category of government’ (Roy, 2016: 816; Ortega, 2022: 225) rather than a physical space. While maintaining that the remaking of the rural is related to state projects of urbanization, this perspective also surpasses the urbanormative view of cities as the only nodes of political-economic power.
China's state-led ruralization
My account of state-led ruralization emerges from a situated analysis of ‘rural revitalization’ campaigns in present-day China, although similar institutional efforts can be found in other contexts in East Asia and around the world. In the last two decades, ‘rural revitalization’ has risen to the forefront of the Central Communist Party's (CCP) agenda in China. The massive growth that cities experienced after the 1980s relied on the systematic extraction of land and capital from rural areas (Lin and Ho, 2005; Chuang, 2015). While land classified as ‘urban’ belongs to local governments and can be leased to real estate developers, rural land primarily belongs to village collectives and cannot be transferred to entities other than village residents (Ho, 2001; Sargeson, 2004). Studies on land governance in China's peri-urban areas have revealed that this ‘dual-track urbanization’ (Shen et al., 2006: 690) enables local governments to acquire rural land cheaply from village collectives and lease it to real estate developers at inflated prices (Tao et al., 2010; Chuang, 2015). Under fiscal decentralization (Lin et al., 2015), local officials operate as both regulators and players in these land markets (‘state entrepreneurialism’) (He and Wu, 2009: 285), redeploying the profits to cover the rising costs of localized development (Tao et al., 2010). Collective land expropriations for urbanization and, more recently, for ecological conservation (Rodenbiker, 2020), have become a strategy for local governments to consolidate their power in peri-urban space (Hsing, 2010). Villagers also exploit these land markets by advancing quasi-formal real estate projects (‘village corporatism’) (ibid.S:122; Kan and Chen, 2021; Wu et al., 2022). Scholars refer to this mode of accumulation as the ‘land revenue regime’ (Zhan, 2015: 413).
Over the decades, state entrepreneurialism expanded from primarily pushing speculative urbanization to restructuring agricultural production in rural space. The occupation of peri-urban farmlands caused by the land revenue regime has reduced China's total food output and pushed many rural dwellers to relocate. In response, since the early 2000s the CCP has mounted numerous campaigns for agrarian development, including urban–rural coordination (tongchou) and the creation of ‘farmland contracting rights’ (Wang and Zhang, 2017), a policy that enabled the consolidation of small-scale family farms into larger-scale operations (Nie, 2021; Rogers et al., 2021). I call this logic of government the ‘food security regime’. Both the land revenue and the food security regime follow the practices of state entrepreneurialism. The same could be said for similar rural land development strategies that I do not examine in this article, such as the conservation of biodiversity, the generation of renewable energy, the protection of water reservoirs, or campaigns for rural poverty alleviation. Despite an emphasis on rurality and the peasantry in the CCP's official ideology, agricultural development policies have historically reproduced an urban-centered mentality. Scholars have shown that Mao's creation of the hukou system (Andreas and Zhan, 2016) and the promotion of scientific farming (Schmalzer, 2016), Deng's Household Responsibility System (White, 1992), as well as more recent rural revitalization efforts (Wang et al., 2023) came with the primary preoccupation of feeding the urban population.
Given this direct relationship between agricultural development and urban growth, a substantial body of geographical studies in China has focused on urban–rural land relations. Some scholars in urban studies have characterized rural redevelopment as ‘planetary urbanization’ (Xu et al., 2009) and a form of state entrepreneurialism not solely focused on economic growth (Wu et al., 2022). An Chen (2014) described the 2005 ‘Socialist New Countryside’ campaign (shehuì zhuyi xin nongcun) as yet another means of consolidating local governments' control over collective village land. David Bray (2013) highlighted the emergence of a rural planning thinking that reproduced the rationales of the Chicago School of Urban Planning. Kristen Looney (2015) illustrated the unintended consequences of the Socialist New Countryside campaign, particularly its mechanisms for the systematic demolition of rural dwellings and their consolidation into modern new rural towns. Nick Smith (2021: 14) characterized urban–rural coordination as a mode of urbanization that led to ‘the end of the village as a meaningful form of social organization, collective action, and economic survival in contemporary China’. These and many other studies brought rural processes to the forefront of China's spatial development. Yet they also often assimilated them to a linear urbanization trajectory.
In this article, I seek to complicate this linear interpretation of China's rural change based on the urbanization paradigm by highlighting the reciprocity between the making of the urban and the remaking of the rural. I focus on one rural revitalization policy: the creation of ‘land contracting rights’. This policy enables corporations to contract small family-led farms and use them to upscale production (Gong and Zhang, 2017; Hu et al., 2024). I refrain from describing this mode of development via agribusiness as extended urbanization. Such framing would downplay the governmental logic driving these farmland ownership changes. In line with Wu et al.'s (2022) concept of ‘politics beyond the growth machine’ in China, farmland transfers are driven by central government's pressure to increase domestic food yields rather than by local governments’ necessity to profit from land development (as in the case of urbanization). The economic sustainability of agribusiness models largely relies on subsidies provided by the central state (Zhang et al., 2020), especially away from coastal regions. Unlike the land revenue regime, the expansion of agribusiness in rural China configures a food security regime that combines profiting from land with maximizing food supply. This rationale is consistent with Xi Jinping's ‘New Era’ ideology (Peters, 2017), where official agendas do not pursue economic development at all costs, but only insofar as they secure control over strategic sectors of the economy, such as food production. The food security regime reflects the central state's deliberate will to reshape rural life according to principles of corporate efficiency and yield maximization, a process consistent with state-led ruralization.
A body of knowledge available outside of urban theory can help conceptualize this agribusiness transition. I draw on scholarship on ‘the agrarian question’ (Byres, 1986; Mommen, 2011) that examines the modalities and effects of agrarian capitalism in China. For this purpose, the category of the rural should not be conflated with that of the agrarian. I consider agrarian change to be only one of the many possible iterations of state-led ruralization. In its original meaning, ruralization describes a wide ensemble of major and minor processes that reproduce rural social forms (and meanings) amidst planetary urbanization. While this includes changes in land and agriculture, it also incorporates many socio-spatialities that are not necessarily related to agricultural economies.
The decade-long inquiry into agrarian change in China studies has been characterized by a debate on the continuity-versus-change of the peasant class. Philip Huang and colleagues argued that China's rural society is an exception to global trajectories of depeasantization, with peasant families resisting land dispossession (Huang, 1990; Huang et al., 2012). Conversely, Qian Zhang and John Donaldson argued that China's rural society is undergoing varying degrees of change through gradual land dispossession (Zhang and Donaldson, 2010; 2013). They identified the economic factors, including the dual-track land system and the rising power of agrarian corporations, forcing farmers to adjust production plans to accommodate corporate capitalism (Zhang and Donaldson, 2013). Recent studies in agrarian political economy support this argument, revealing how China's peasants are not immune to global trajectories of land dispossession (Trappel, 2015; Ye, 2015; Chen et al., 2017). My findings align with these studies recognizing dispossession and social stratification as the major trajectory of change in China's rural society. Yet they also reveal how these changes build on transformations previously brought by urbanization. I find that farmers’ capacity to hold on to their land and rural life largely depends on their wealth and power accumulated in cities during previous decades of urban economic expansion.
Methods: urban studies ‘from the rural’
Bringing ruralization debates into urban studies entails expanding the methodological vocabulary of the field. This study draws on methods developed outside of urban studies, particularly the analysis of the relations between the peasantry and the state, to understand the entanglement of urbanization and ruralization. Following the emergent approach in agrarian studies to examine corporate land deals (Cotula, 2013), I trace the negotiations between village officials and residents around the transfer of land management rights. This localized analysis of land transfers shows how the village government sought to gain access to farmers’ land use rights and then transfer them to an external agribusiness corporation. For their part, residents sought to maximize their agency and reach the best possible outcome from the land negotiation. To highlight the logics through which farmers accepted, rejected or renegotiated their adherence to the land deal, this article draws on an eleven-month fieldwork that I conducted in rural Hunan between 2018 and 2019. It combines archival research of design documents with ethnographic documentation of local experiences in corporate rural spaces.
I collected both official documents and informal oral narratives on the ground. I began by asking architects and planners from a Local Design Institute (LDI) to observe their daily practices as part of my research on rural design and development. These experts are key actors in governing social transformations (Santi, 2017). I was originally introduced to this company by my academic hosts in the architecture and planning department of a major university in Changsha. For four months I followed the LDI team and conducted participatory observations of their daily practices, both in the office and in several villages, including Sangshan. During field trips with the planning team, I attended meetings with local government officials, village residents, farm managers and urban tourists. Through these interactions, I established connections with Sangshan party officials and some residents. This allowed me to live in the village for one month, hosted in a reception facility operated by the village government, and interview village residents to gain their perspective on the land deals. I also visited the village several times during the six months that followed my initial stay. After the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020 limited physical presence (Woodworth et al., 2022), virtual ethnography methods and the WeChat app facilitated continued engagement until summer 2023 (Boellstorff et al., 2012). I used virtual interviews to triangulate the findings on site and gather additional perspectives.
The article draws on 34 semi-structured interviews with farmers, six with government officials, and 21 with planners, company representatives and higher-level government officials. These formal interviews are supported by several informal conversations happening during participatory observations of village life. My own positionality and visibility as a foreigner inevitably influenced data collection. During my initial visits to rural sites, I was never alone. Local leaders would set the stage by giving me a tour of the village exhibition space and directing me to talk to other leaders or company managers that would reinforce the official narrative. This lasted until I developed a solid connection with local authorities to establish a sense of trust and allow me to proceed on my own to interview village residents.
State-led ruralization in Sangshan village: the land transfer
In this article I examine the transfer of land management rights from village families to agribusiness corporations with the local state serving as broker. Since Mao Zedong's era, farmland ownership rights (suoyou quan) have belonged to village collectives and cannot be traded. After 1979 communal farms were parceled, and their contracting rights (chengbao quan) were assigned to village families under the Household Responsibility System (White, 1992). Yet farmland trades to entities external to the village collective remained forbidden (Smith, 2019). Scholars have shown, however, that land trades have been happening informally since the 1980s (Zhang et al., 2020). In an effort to formalize and control farmland transfers (Wang and Zhang, 2017), the Ministry of Agriculture introduced a third level of ownership, land management rights (jingying quan). This additional property right, first tested in the early 2000s and then expanded in 2014, could be transferred to third-party agribusiness investors. Through this policy the Ministry intended to stabilize farmers’ possession of farmlands while also encouraging their use by specialized companies. This ‘three rights separation’ must be formalized through the ‘land circulation’ (tudi liuzhuan), a document that requires the signatures of all involved village residents that agree to make their land available (Gong and Zhang, 2017).
Sangshan village was directly impacted by this gradual creation of a formal market for agricultural land. Located in the productive Dongting Valley, Sangshan was only one of the many villages in the region contracting their land to agribusiness companies. Official data show that, by 2019, 30% of China's total farmlands had already been contracted to large-scale operations (Rogers et al., 2021), with a higher concentration in productive agricultural nodes such as the Dongting Valley. Before the village government began offering land transfer deals in 2015, around 4200 residents farmed 374 hectares of land, mostly with hybrid rice. Dwellings were grouped in 22 lineage-based clusters scattered throughout the official jurisdiction, with abundant flat lands in-between.2 A water stream tributary to the Dongting Lake crossed the village land, creating a water adjacency that lowered the cost of irrigation and strengthened the economic value of agricultural land.
Conversation with the village leader, whom I will call Zhang Yang, and agribusiness company managers, outlined the company's project. After earning wealth through urban real estate, Mr. Zhang had moved back to his native village to initiate an agriculture-related business. In 2013, he ran for office as village mayor and was elected. He then drafted a plan to transfer the land administered by the villagers to an agribusiness company, which he had cofounded together with a business partner. The company focused on hybrid super-rice, a genetically modified variety that promises to deliver six times the output of conventional rice. Given the strategic importance of rice yields in the food security regime, the company qualified to receive subsidies from the central government. In 2019, the village reported having received 1.1 million RMB in public funding in support of the project. Together with the income expected from tourism, subsidies were key to the economic sustainability of the agribusiness firm. An LED screen placed outside of the village government building displayed the current amount of public funds received by the project. The screen was part of Zhang Yang's narrative framing agribusiness as a tool for localized economic and social revitalization: ‘China's countryside is in a situation of emergency’, he said. ‘Young people have left their hometowns to find a better life and higher income in cities. The rural population is mostly composed of children and elderly. There is a scarcity of talents in the countryside’ (Interview with Zhang Yang, Sangshan, June 2018).
Soon after his election as mayor, Zhang Yang and the cadres carried out more than 900 one-on-one meetings with village residents to define the terms of each land transfer. Each family received a different deal that was negotiated individually and behind closed doors, according to the divide and rule mantra (ibid.). In general, the rental fee that farmers would receive from the transfer would be largely below their previous income (in Sangshan, in 2018, each farmer was to receive 300 RMB per mu per year, with an average income of 12,000 RMB per family per year).3 For farmers, signing the deal meant looking for waged nonagricultural employment, often brokered by village leaders and located outside of the village. Each village jurisdiction was assigned to a local government cadre, a resident who knew each family's personal and financial situation. This knowledge allowed cadres to craft personalized offers to each family. During these private meetings, villagers advanced counteroffers to keep at least part of their land, or swap their plots with others in different locations, while completely rethinking their household production system.
For their part, villagers sought to maximize their leverage and closed on very different deals. I refer to locals as ‘peasant farmers’, to identify a diversified rural class in which agrarian capitalism has shaped a variety of nonpeasant agricultural production (Zhang, 2012). In fact, the negotiations led to differentiated patterns of land transfer and distinct trajectories of change in rural social life. First, some families signed the deal and completely lost access to their land. This pattern is consistent with studies of agrarian change that theorize depeasantization by dispossession (Araghi, 1995). Second, some other families, particularly those with higher leverage and wealth, refused to sign the lease. I call this change ‘resistance’ Third, and more commonly, some families renegotiated the terms of the deal and asked to receive a different plot in exchange for ceding the land needed for the agribusiness operation. Once they succeeded, they were able to retain access to farming land, although in more marginal and less productive locations, while allowing the corporate farm to operate. I call this transition ‘compromise’. These diverse outcomes built on the cultural and economic capital that local families had previously accumulated through migrations and engagement with urban economies. This reveals an important, if seemingly paradoxical, component of state-led ruralization: generally speaking, farmers’ capacity to hold on to their rural lives increased when they had previously ‘urbanized’.
Depeasantization
‘I had a job in a factory in Ningbo for eight years, then I moved back to Sangshan to take care of the land. Now that there is no land, I'm just a mother’. Liu Jihan, a woman in her thirties and mother of a three-year-old daughter told me this while sitting in her kitchen. I had approached her the same day in the street at Sangshan asking about her adherence to the land circulation. She invited me to her home saying that she preferred not to speak in public. Once we had sat down on wooden chairs, she explained that village government officials had visited her home multiple times during the past few years. At first, they asked about the household's interest in the land transfer. Later, they started making offers in exchange for her husband's signature on the land transfer form. She explained that cadres had promised to help her husband find a waged job in a nearby town. They had pointed out that a monthly wage would be higher than their current income from farming and would require less strenuous work than growing rice. As both she herself and her husband had experienced being urban migrant workers in the past, they thought they could adapt to a life marked by daily commutes for higher pay. Her husband ultimately accepted the deal, transferring the land use rights of their land back to the government in full. When I interviewed Liu Jihan, her husband was not home as he was working as a cook in the nearby county-level town. Liu Jihan pointed out that their income had increased by one thousand RMB that year, including the salary and the income from the land transfer.4 But she also noted that her husband's job as a cook was far from stable, and that, once her daughter had started school, she might look for jobs herself (Interview with Liu Jihan, Sangshan, July 2018).
Like Liu Jihan, Chen Xiaoyu and her husband had recently transferred their land use rights to the village government. However, they were having regrets. For decades, they had made a living by growing rice on their half-acre of farmland. ‘There is no way we can go back to farming’, Chen Xiaoyu said angrily. ‘When they came with the bulldozer to destroy the paddies, I knew there was no way back. Now I only care about getting the rent money. I don't care about getting the land back after ten years’. ‘Why is there no way back?’ I asked. ‘Because we don't know how to remake our rice paddies as they used to be. It's impossible to locate them’. Chen Xiaoyu pointed out the strategy of the local government to secure their possession over the land. While the land circulation deal delineated a land transfer valid for a period of ten years, local officials had quickly erased the previous division of land plots and replaced it with an orthogonal grid of large-scale paddies. This grid layout, justified as a more efficient and machine-friendly land design, had the inevitable effect of solidifying the new land possession. Even after the expiration of the ten-year period, reallocating the land plots to the original families would be so expensive and inconvenient that residents would be greatly incentivized to renew the lease (Interview with Chen Xiaoyu, Sangshan, December 2019). Chen Xiaoyu's husband told me that he was now a part-time gardener in the nearby town. When I visited their living room, however, on a weekday afternoon in December, he was at home with his wife. Our conversation lasted about half an hour. I then asked whether she would be available to meet again. Chen Xiaoyu declined, saying that she was afraid that the neighbors would find out about her complaints (ibid.).
Liu Jihan and Chen Xiaoyu exemplify the many and various reasons why farmers ended up signing the land circulation, at times against their direct interest. Some other villagers explained that a major factor in their decision was that they feared they would suffer in competition with the forthcoming agribusiness, as it would produce grains at a much cheaper price. Other villagers had long given up farming and were already renting their land out to residents or kept their land unused. For them, the land circulation was an opportunity to formalize a long-term lease and cash in on the rental fee and dividends. Whether because of convenience or lack of better options, many families lost formal access to their farmlands. By doing so, they abandoned peasant life to become waged laborers, while never in fact leaving their home village. This depeasantization without urban migration (Sargeson, 2016) is a characteristic pattern of transition of the food security regime. Yet it is not the only one.
Resistance
Some farmers found their way out of the land deal. This option, however, was mostly available to farmers with greater leverage, typically because of their wealth. During my first day in Sangshan, village leader Zhang Yang disclosed that twelve village families had opted out of the land deal, thus retaining the rights to use their land. He also emphasized that this was a very small number of people compared to similar projects being implemented in surrounding villages (Interview with Zhang Yang, Sangshan, June 2018). A few days later I had a meeting with one of these families. The Yuan family lived in a brand-new home located at the center of their rice paddies. Like many other homes that farmers had built through remittance cash accumulated in cities, the Yuan family's house displayed wealth through curated details, such as two Corinthian columns flanking the entrance door and colorful tiles covering the facade. In the increasingly stratified class system of rural China, remaking the ancestral home was a symbolic act that raised the family up the village social ladder (Sargeson, 2002). A new home was both a sign of acquired wealth and an investment in the future, as it enabled the younger generations to marry into an equally wealthy family, thus expanding the lineage's economic power (Interview with He Jinan, Changsha, September 2019). Li Xiaojie, the wife of Yuan Minghao, explained that her father-in-law had founded a construction company operating in the surrounding rural and urban areas. Her husband, Yuan Minghao, was an architect and a graduate from a major university in Changsha. At the time, he was living in the city to run the construction business and visited the family during weekends. Li Xiaojie meanwhile lived in their luxurious new home in Sangshan with her retired parents-in-law and her child who had just started elementary school (Interview with Li Xiaojie, Sangshan, June 2018).
The Yuan family's wealth is not a minor detail in the context of Sangshan's land politics. As further conversations with family members clarified, their social status provided them with substantial leverage to avoid signing the land circulation. When I saw Li Xiaojie's father-in-law spreading fertilizer in the paddies in front of their home, I asked him whether they had kept the land use rights for themselves. He confirmed. ‘Why did you not sign?’ I asked. ‘We have no interest in that. There is no need. We just prefer to manage the land ourselves’. He told me that their business was simple: they were growing hybrid rice, a staple grain subsidized by a central government's incentive program. They were then selling the grain to a distributor company located nearby. He added that, as a retired man, he had enough time to keep farming the land himself. He explained that both his wife and daughter-in-law were often helping him with farming, and that he would hire some workers during the weeks of intense labor, such as the harvest (Interview with Yuan Pengfei, Sangshan, June 2018). The Yuan family's story reveals an important aspect: refusing to sign the land deal was much easier for households that did not rely on land for survival. For them, it was not about money: the yearly fee that they would receive from the rental was around 2200 RMB—not a large sum for a wealthy family. For them, the land represented an asset that had belonged to the family for generations and was too important to be given away.
Overall, families relying on sources of income additional to farming, typically remittances from family members working in cities, retained higher leverage in negotiations with the local government and had an easier way out of the land circulation. For people relying exclusively on farmland for a living, the government's proposal to rent out their land and find employment elsewhere represented a more appealing option. Some farmers pointed out that the land location was an important variable, too. If a family's land plot was in a prime spot, such as in the village's central flatlands, then the local government was willing to invest in higher compensations to gain access to that land. The rationale behind this choice was that contracting agribusiness firms were interested in consolidated plots to run their large-scale operations. Obstacles such as a building or a different property enclosure within the boundaries of a consolidated farm would reduce its commercial value. As a result, families whose land lay in prime locations were more likely to receive higher compensation but also had a harder time opting out of the land deal completely. On the other hand, land plots in marginal locations offered their farmers an easier way out of the deal to continue farming.
Compromise
The negotiations between the state and the village society around the land transfer did not generally resolve in either dispossession or resistance. In most cases, this binary was superseded by a ‘third way’ deal that generated a distinct trajectory of agrarian transition: the compromise or land swap. In this type of agreement, farmers would still transfer their land use rights to the government and sign the land deal. However, instead of cash compensation, they would receive a plot of the same size located elsewhere, usually in an area of the village no longer used. These marginal plots were often located on the hill, where the dry soil and the sloping terrain made it impossible to run large-scale mechanized farming operations. Wei Ling, for example, an elderly man living from subsistence farming and cash crops, had successfully reached this agreement. On a rainy afternoon in November, I approached him while he was walking on the hilly road under a large black umbrella. ‘I am going to check how the chickens are doing’, he said. I joined him on a fifteen-minute walk uphill, along a narrow concrete road passing by several small family farms that remained on the hill terraces. ‘Many families are keeping the land here’, he said. ‘The government is not interested in hilly plots’. He stopped at a small field, about one third of an acre in size, where a few chickens were browsing through corn stover on the ground. When I asked if I could further interview him, Wei Ling invited me to his house, a traditional red brick building located downhill, close to the village main road. After we entered the living room, he invited me to sit on a chair in front of an electric heater. I asked him why he had not signed the land circulation. ‘I did’, he replied. ‘You just saw my new land’ (Interview with Wei Ling, Sangshan, November 2019). One of the characteristics of villages in Hunan is the proximity of families’ homes to their assigned land. Walking 20 minutes uphill to reach the farm was a new way of organizing production for families in Sangshan.
Wei Ling told me that his family used to own four mu of land in the central flatlands, where he farmed rice, sweet potatoes and tobacco. At that time, his farming business yielded around 14,000 RMB per year. The land plots were located very close to his house, and he used to check the status of crops through the window. When the government approached him with the offer to sign the land circulation, he did not agree to it. He said that he did not intend to find a different job and was happy with his farmlands being so close to his home. After a few meetings, the local government persuaded him to transfer all the four mu to the village government. In exchange, he received two shares in the co-op (worth around 600 RMB per year) and the two mu of land on the hill I had just seen. The uphill land was classified as farmland, although it had long been unused due to a lack of labor in the village. He told me that he decided to start with this arrangement, but that he could later decide to amend the contract and get two more land units on the hill. Yet this arrangement had affected Wei Ling's life. Besides walking uphill to reach his land, now Wei Ling had to deal with a reduced soil quality. Hilly soil is much drier and not suitable to grow all types of crops. After receiving the land uphill, he decided to grow corn. He would not sell the corn but use it to feed two pigs and several chickens. ‘You need one mu of corn to feed one pig for one year', he explained to me. He told me that he planned to sell the pigs at the local market for 4000 RMB each. In addition, he raises chickens for extra cash. At the time of our conversation in 2018, his expected income was around 10,000 RMB per year (ibid.).
For their part, government officials accommodated land swaps because they allowed them to get what they wanted, especially access to land in valuable locations, without disrupting the livelihoods of village farmers too much. This compromise would also minimize discontent and dissent among village residents, an outcome that would have alarmed higher-level government bodies. Overall, land swaps were the main resolution for the conflicts around land use rights that would emerge in the negotiation. Substituting the land could lead to a variety of economic consequences for farmers, most of which depended upon the location, quality and accessibility of the reassigned land. Once they received the new plot, farmers proceeded to redesign their food production system based on the characteristics of the peripheral land. Land swaps represent the only instance in which farmers managed to retain a form of peasant life. As the previous section has highlighted, farmers who completely opted out of the land circulation often already relied on sources of income external to a peasant economy, such as urban remittances. Instead, land swaps enabled residents to keep farming, although on marginal land assets. This direction of agrarian change complicates a linear understanding of agrarian corporatization via land dispossession, depeasantization and urbanization. Farmers’ marginalization entailed a complexity of responses including resistance, renegotiations, accommodation and surrender to the corporate future offered by the local state.
Distinct yet entangled
The stories of how Liu Jihan, Chen Xiaoyu, Li Xiaojie and Wei Ling differently mediated the land transfer offer a glimpse into the functioning of state-led ruralization. I have argued that this set of processes is distinct from, yet entangled with, urbanization.
First, I characterize urbanization and ruralization as separate sociospatial processes. Following Gillen et al. (2022a), I describe ruralization as the perpetuation of modes of rural life amidst urbanization. Specifically, I examine ruralization as state entrepreneurialism, occurring when government bodies strive to reinvent rural space according to predetermined ideas, or ideologies, of what rural life should be. Once it lands on the ground, state-led ruralization splinters rural society into winners and losers. It reshapes multiple state–society relations that further differentiate rural social organization. I have examined the government's will to restructure agricultural production by enabling the transfer of land use rights to specialized agribusiness firms. I agree with Wu et al.'s argument (2022) that this transfer of agricultural land to agricultural corporations reproduces the practice of local state entrepreneurialism that has been driving speculative urbanization (Shin and Kim, 2016), particularly as a descendant of the governmental logic that I called the food security regime. Rather than focusing on local economic growth, the central government now prioritizes maximizing grain yields to securitize the country against food scarcity and associated geopolitical vulnerability. To this way of thinking, rural land serves the goal of increasing food yield through subsidies placed by the Ministry of Agriculture, rather than profit through conversion and transfer to real estate developers. Based on this interpretation, I identify a structural difference between the land revenue regime, as a mode of urbanization, and the food security regime, as a mode of ruralization.
Urbanization and ruralization are distinct at the local level, as well. I have outlined three different forms that state-led ruralization took in Sangshan village: depeasantization, resistance and compromise. In all these cases, the conflict between the state and the village residents regarded diverging visions of rural social life. For both the central and the local state, villagers should engage in nonagricultural businesses while still inhabiting the village and contributing to its functioning. In contrast, rural residents showed strong interest in retaining control over farming land as a form of economic security and a perpetuation of ancestral values. Both local government officials and villagers see this as the remaking of a way of life that is other than the urban. For these reasons, I argue that urbanization and ruralization, although both produced by state agencies and planetary capitalism, cannot be reduced to the single theoretical umbrella of extended urbanization. This view also complicates a binary framework that positions urbanization as a product of top-down forces and ruralization as localized resistance (Gillen et al., 2022b), a perspective already problematized by Chen and Kong (2022), Ghosh (2022), Ortega (2022) and Williams (2023).
Second, I argue that, while distinct, ruralization and urbanization are entangled. In present-day China, the Party's impulse to restructure rural space came as an explicit response to four decades of urban expansion based on often violent expropriations and occupations of rural land (Chuang, 2015). Central and local state bureaus saw rural revitalization as a tool to govern and contain urban expansion by retaining potential migrants to rural areas. The growing concern for food security emerged in response to the farmland shrinkage caused by urban growth. In this context, state-led ruralization in China is only understandable in the broader context of the country's growth of urban population and political economy of speculative real estate development centered on cities.
At the local level, the findings further detail this entanglement. In Sangshan villagers who had increased their wealth and social power through urban migrations had higher chances of retaining their land and opting out of the deal offered by the local government. In turn, families who based their income exclusively on their farmland often had no other choice than to surrender to cadres and lease out their land. In most cases, farmers were able to negotiate a compromise deal that would allow them to take ownership of land in marginal locations, while giving up some or all their previously assigned plots. The redesign of their food production space enabled them to maximize their agency to keep farming while accommodating the will of the state (Piazzoni et al., 2024). Counterintuitively, previous involvement in political economies of urbanization granted villagers the power to ‘ruralize’ according to their own vision, and differently from what envisioned by the state. This dynamic is aligned with Gillen et al.'s initial idea of ‘rural returns’ (2022b), a type of ruralization that considers the wish of rural people to reconstruct their rural life and identity after experiencing urbanization. What these findings reveal is that precisely this involvement with urbanization—the establishment of a business in a city, the accumulation of wealth through real estate investments, or other forms of economic emancipation—is often what enables these rural returns.
Conclusion: multiple ruralizations and their urban entanglements
Seeking to complicate the extended urbanization paradigm, I have examined some of the reciprocal exchanges between the making of the urban and the remaking of the rural. I have treated urbanization and ruralization as co-constituted, non-oppositional state projects. My analysis is specific to the context of present-day China, particularly to the ongoing transfer of land rights from village families to agribusiness companies. Since the empirical realm that I encountered had to do with changes in the structures of agrarian production, I borrowed methods and questions from literature on the agrarian question to delineate this process, particularly studies of corporate land deals. What I have described is, of course, only one form of ruralization. More research is needed to understand the nature of these processes in different contexts. Ruralizations unfold differently depending on the type of land economies in place, whether they involve hunting, forestry, fishing or resource extraction. Geological features like mountains, valleys or flatlands, create distinct rural social spaces.
The theoretical framework of ‘geographies of ruralization’, as it is currently taking shape in human geography, seeks to capture precisely this multiplicity. Geographers have long emphasized the pluralism of socio-economic and environmental conditions characterizing rural space. Paul Cloke, for example, has argued that rurality can only be conceptualized through a constellation of minor theories, in Deleuzian fashion, more than a comprehensive conceptual description (Cloke et al., 2006). Feminist scholars have used the ‘constellation’ metaphor to describe the geography of rural places (Healey, 2024). This approach marks a distinction from urban studies, which have sometimes found themselves invested in searching for the universal characteristics that define the urban. Perhaps, this is the greatest contribution that a rural perspective can offer to urban theory: thinking of worldmaking under planetary capitalism as a plethora of diverse and interconnected processes understandable through multiple theoretical categories. This approach complicates efforts to capture diverse sociospatial dynamics under the unitary umbrella of urbanization. Calling processes by names other than urbanization does not deny these processes’ involvement with the making of cities. If nothing else, it centers theories and methodologies built on specific ecologies and environments located outside of cities. Thinking of worldmaking through a multitude of distinct yet entangled processes and associated theories, I believe, can bring us closer to the ‘engaged pluralism’ (Brenner, 2018) that urban theorists have been proposing.
Endnotes
Biography
Ettore Santi, Northeastern University, 152 Meserve Hall, 35 Leon Street, Boston, MA, 02115 USA, [email protected]
