TIAN LIU: Agrarian Capitalism & Uneven Development in Rural China

Today’s China is often viewed as a development success. However, its post-reform political economy has simultaneously been characterized by a backward agricultural sector and a vast, relatively poor rural population. Seeking to reduce rural poverty and spatial uneven development, the Chinese state has made aggressive efforts to modernize its agriculture in the past 15 years, by concentrating land from peasant households to large commercial farms (official term is “land transfer”).

In this talk, I will draw on 19 months of comparative ethnography, over 150 interviews, and extensive archival research, to examine the macro-historical origins, diverse local trajectories, and distributional outcomes of this reform. My findings show that, while “land transfer” as a bottom-up experiment led to commercial success in coastal, early-industrialized regions, its top-down emulation in the inland rural regions has created widespread agribusiness failures, which have deepened an ongoing rural social reproduction crisis.

These findings contribute to theories of spatial fix by explaining the institutional, political dynamics that may lead to its failures. They further challenge scholarships about the political economy of development by revealing the limits of experiment-based policymaking in reducing spatial inequality.

Dr Tian Liu is a lecturer in Global Political Economy at the University of Manchester. He received his doctoral degree in Sociology from the Johns Hopkins University, and a BA in Political Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research uses comparative-historical and ethnographic methods to examine the uneven development of capitalism across space and time, as well as its multifold crises. Some of his specific research interests include the political economy of development, food and land governance, state capacity, institutional change, and social reproduction.

promotes multidisciplinary research, teaching and programming with impact beyond academia, seeking to remedy class, racial, gender, and other inequalities, and to improve mutual understanding in UK-China relations. The MCI is based at the University of Manchester.

The venue is equipped with a platform lift and accessible toilets. More details can be found here.

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Host or Publisher The Manchester China Institute