Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2012. x, 324 pp. (Maps, illus.) £90.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-85793-409-3.
While we have seen numerous books on rural China, this one is by far one of the easiest to follow. This is not to say that the subject the book attempts to deal with is easy, absolutely on the contrary. It tackles a difficult task that interests all of us in the field of China study: how, why, and for what rural China has transformed. Using numerous empirical cases investigated through a lengthy period of field work, the book tells a two-sided story about the nature of development in China by linking various forms of development to the everyday lives of rural peasants in various localities where they happen to live with a long history of subsistence farming. It also explains how powerful forces of market production or capitalist production are altering the mode of traditional subsistence agriculture that has been embedded in historical China for centuries.
Chapter 2 is about the relations between urban dairy corporations and two systems of producing milk: independent commodity producers and capitalist farms in Beidaolaban near Hohhot in Inner Mongolia. These emerging production systems are competing in the same market. He argues that little separates corporatized state owned enterprises and private/foreign companies in the city. Webber emphasizes the role of governments in promoting dairy production to meet rising urban consumption. Policy settings interact with local social and environmental conditions to produce different models of rural development. Milk production in Inner Mongolia demonstrates a particular regional model of commodity production: this is a case where capitalist production is emerging through state subsidies.
Chapter 3 analyzes the reasons why the control of enterprises and land has changed and assesses the effects of such change on rural peasants who are increasingly participating as wage labour in capitalist production. He argues that economic development in Sunan creates a new elite class and alters the distribution of power. As he indicates, “the group of managers and cadres … who had guided the communal enterprises saw an opportunity and were sufficiently confident to take advantage of the new ideas about private enterprise” (62). It is this new elite class who led the process of Township and Village Enterprises (TVE) privatization. He challenges the mainstream explanation that TVEs became less efficient with declining profit in the middle of the 1990s, and he disagrees that TVEs’ collective ownership was the cause of them lacking economic efficiency.
In chapter 4, Webber discusses in detail the dispossession and capital formation in the process of Three Gorges Dam development. While the construction of the dam has structural as well as happenstance reasons, its effects on the structure of political power are significant. His case study demonstrates that development brings the dispossession that deteriorates villagers’ life: increasing poverty and debt, reducing income, land, and work opportunities. At the same time, the state-led Three Gorges Dam project stimulates the expansion of some capitalist corporations in the construction and power generation sectors. Development becomes a process of introducing capitalist forms of production, not the improvement of the material well-being of rural peasants.
In chapter 5, Webber discusses how the relationship between environmental management and ecological displacement shapes people’s lives in Inner Mongolia. He argues the “Chinese state’s model of sustainable development on the grasslands has apparently been designed to expand capitalist methods of production; improvement in people’s lives is secondary”(126). The policy of forced ecological migration may be in line with government attempts to constrain the mobility of pastoralists and intensifies market production on the grasslands. In particular, he argues that it is not Mongol pastoralists who should be responsible for the deterioration of grasslands, but the migration of Han Chinese and subsequent intensive cultivation that have aggravated the environmental degradation of the steppe. Webber points out that the unified implementation of the household production responsibility system also contributes to grassland degradation as it works against the ecology of grazing on the grasslands. In rural China, development appears always first in its material form, disregarding cultural and historical elements. It is more about the process of creating a capitalist mode of production rather than focusing on improved development outcome.
Water use extraction rates are unsustainable in northern China, and a rapidly rising economy is exacerbating the water scarcity problem. While the market-based approach is often favored by many neo-liberal international agencies such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, Webber in chapter 6 attempts to argue the adverse implications of water pricing for peasants and explain why such a proposal does not fit the circumstances of contemporary northern China. In China, water rights are not clear, not legally defined. If the rights are defined, water may be used more efficiently and a market to transfer water rights is unnecessary. He argues that the inefficiencies in water use are largely rooted in water-administration bureaucracies. Increasing water price may drive more peasants out of agriculture to become wage labor in the cities as city users pay way more for water than peasants. The consequences for increasing the price for water is the diversion of water to urban and industrial uses.
Chapter 7 demonstrates how tourism picks out places for development and remakes them in particular ways. The geometry of tourist activities is fractal-like: the pattern of tourist activities is replicated at each scale of observation. Importantly, the places are selectively represented as well. Such a process of representation and place-making is channeled from the state government using various networks. It is invested by the state (SOEs) and FDI. New demands for tourism from increasing urban wealth has prompted the remaking of places: selected places, selected people in an ordered and hierarchical way. It creates uneven development.
In chapter 8, Webber indicates that economic change has social consequences that extend beyond the economy and development of capitalist forms of production. Webber argues that rural-urban migration drives inter-regional differences wider and perpetuates uneven development. His case study of Urumqi generates important insights into how ethnicity plays out in urban migrant labor markets. In particular, how ethnic segregation contributes to a sector-based labor market segmentation: leading to the persistence of social distance between Uyghur and Han in Urumqi, which contributes to their resentment to and conflicts with the Han, and is potentially responsible for social unrest. This has to do with relative poverty in the capitalist forms of labor allocation. In a sense, the political struggles in minority region need an economic solution.
In conclusion, Webber argues that capitalist organizations in rural China are strengthening, while not determining, but exerting more and more influence over social life. This indeterminacy, however, allows different trajectories of social changes in China’s regions. This surely means that capitalist forms of production in rural China become consistent with local forms of social life. He refutes the notion of transition. By this, he also negates the idea of varieties of capitalism: “this is not a matter of varieties of capitalism, but of capitalism in varieties of society” (266).
Wei Xu
University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Canada
pp. 131-133