RURAL-URBAN MIGRATION AND AGRO-TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE IN POST-REFORM CHINA
Rebekka Sutter, Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich, Switzerland
The initial encounter that kindled Lena Kaufmann’s interest in everyday life of migrating rice farmers in southern China did not take place in a paddy field, but in a noodle soup shop in Shanghai. While living there in 2006, she came to know the owner of the lunch spot, Mr. Wu. He and his family – originally from rural Anhui Province – stand as an exemplar of massive rural-urban migration in China. Since the 1980s, a third of Chinese farmers, about 280 million individuals, have left their homes to work in cities. They leave behind not only their paddy fields, but frequently also their children and parents, returning home only once a year. Kaufmann’s research centres around the predicament that each of these households has to face: How to deal with the enormous pressures of migrating into metropoles as well as staying at home to preserve the familial fields? The book aims at showing that the critical factor in the decision-making process was in most cases the family’s “major asset”: their paddy fields. The material the author builds her argument on, is multifaceted: Kaufmann conducted field research in China over nineteen months in 2007–2008 and 2010–2011. She collected data from rural Hunan Province and additionally draws on data from Anhui migrants working in Shanghai as well as farmers living in rural Anhui Province. Additionally, she draws on historical resources such as Chinese oral vernacular literature and local gazetteers.
Contrary to Kaufmann’s previous research that focused on the urban part of migrating farmers (Kaufmann 2011), this monograph not only depicts the rural side of migration, but offers an in-depth perspective of migrants’ everyday lives, framed with a theoretical approach that reaches beyond a simplistic rural-urban spatial dichotomy. Through conceptualizing these farming households as “communities of practice” (p. 28 ff.), the author shows how both staying and migrating household members together actively deal with their immovable assets, the rice fields. She points out that the Chinese term for people who “stay back” nicely reflects this: the expression liushou (lit. liu = stay, remain / shou = guard, take care, conserve, protect) strongly expresses the care aspect and denotes that those migrating might return.
The strength of the book unfolded for me the moment I realized that it is a meticulously researched account on rural-urban migration in contemporary China, but also a stunning ethnographic account of smallholder wet rice farming. Kaufmann demonstrates that two aspects of this particular cultivation technique – that stands in sharp contrast to (non-irrigated) swidden rice cultivation as practised by most of Chinese minorities populating the highlands – particularly influence household decision strategies. Firstly, working on wet rice fields remains extremely labour-intensive, even in times of mechanization, and secondly, the fields need continuous cultivation to maintain their soil quality. Both aspects have direct implications regarding migration: They make it seemingly impossible.
In the first chapter, the reader is introduced to the above-mentioned predicament and the main field site of the study – a rice farming village of around 1,400 inhabitants living in 370 households. The choice of research area was deliberate: Hunan Province has one of the longest histories of wet rice cultivation in the world, maintains a rice-based local economy, and is today the “national centre of hybrid rice development and, along with the Philippines, the global centre” (p. 65). The chapter outlines a dazzling trajectory of Chinese agriculture from 1949 to the present, recalling the simple fact that, “For most of China’s history, most of its people have worked as farmers” (p. 63).
In chapter two Kaufmann explains what rice knowledge (transmission) systems entail, how such knowledge is transmitted, and how both content as well as media of transmission have changed during the radical transformations that have shaped rural China since 1949. She thereby distinguishes three time periods. The multifaceted knowledge of “pre-collectivization” (before 1949) rice knowledge systems, characterized as “embodied” and “contextualized”, were rooted in households structured along patrilineal groups. Gendered norms were strong and local officials’ influence decisive; hence farmers’ bodies were the primary media of knowledge formation and transmission. During the “collective” phase (1950s to early 1980s), when households were merged into communes, knowledge was scientized and subsequently turned into one-sided rice farming knowledge. Individual farmer’s bodies as locus for skilled-informed agricultural practices were replaced by technical institutions: state-owned experimentation farms and model fields – Green Revolution technologies being at the heart of this period. During the third “post-Reform period” (mid-1980s to today) Kaufmann describes a return to individual bodies. In this, farmers’ households and individuals encompass ways of knowing that span beyond pure rice knowledge: conventional and scientific knowledge go hand and hand, and farmers have extensive knowledge about wider economic issues including – notably – migration. While the first two phases were typified by a continuous will to enlarge and refine agrarian (rice) knowledge, the third, current phase entails a general agricultural deskilling of young migrants.
The third chapter focuses on one specific form of “media” of knowledge acquisition and transmission: farming proverbs. Kaufmann has selected and translated 150 proverbs that contain encoded knowledge about rice farming – stressing that this is only a tiny percentage (less than 0.4 percent!) of all the sayings collected in the 1980s for a local anthology that served as her main source. Evidently, sayings such as “Don’t transplant late rice seedlings after the autumn, if the grain encounters frost, the milk stage [fruit development] will be difficult” (p. 247) are condensed forms of (rice) farming technology and ways of knowing. Kaufmann demonstrates that such strictly rhyming and therefore seemingly unchangeable proverbs are in fact very flexible “platforms of knowledge” (p. 145) which act as key media in which knowledge is negotiated between farmers and the state: Proverbs not only served the state (who assumingly crafted some of the proverbs) as means of propaganda and education; the farmers themselves used the rhymes also as a subtle means of resistance by reciting them “in a sarcastic or joking manner” (p. 163).
Chapter 4 analyses the agro-technological choices households take in order to deal with the above-mentioned predicament. Drawing on ethnographic data, the analysis focuses on rice harvesting techniques and lists the broad repertoire of tools and techniques applied. Kaufmann shows how families simultaneously rely on old and new technologies and resources, far from embodying a linear, historical process in which sickles are replaced by combine harvesters.
The fifth chapter brings together all the book’s strands by looking at which social and technical land-use strategies rural households follow today. To illustrate how complex, continuously adapting, and – surprisingly – in many cases counter to state expectations these are, Kaufmann identifies twelve land use strategies. This final chapter pinpoints the strength of the study. Where existing research on Chinese wet rice farming and migration provides data on how family members remaining in villages and those who migrate to cities maintain their fields, mostly only investigating particular strategies at a very general level – the two main ones being risk reduction and income generation – Kaufmann’s approach is more nuanced. She does not focus on migration strategies or push factors for migration, but instead examines “the strategies used to protect land resources despite migration. These involve the land-use and land-arrangement strategies of both migrants and those left behind” (p. 27).
Overall, the book argues against a linear perspective of technological development by showing “why it makes sense for farmers to simultaneously draw on a repertoire of old and new technologies, rather than simply opting for mechanization in order to compensate for the migrated labour” (p. 167). Such an understanding of Chinese agro-technological change contrasts not only with Chinese traditional narratives in local gazetteers and common-sense models of progress (p. 169) but has serious implications reaching beyond the discipline of social anthropology. As Graeber and Wengrow assert in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), in-depth accounts of communities of practice such as the migrating and staying-behind individuals portrayed by Kaufmann are urgently needed, because they refreshingly complicate our view on processes of rural-urban migration, the differentiation between skilled and unskilled migrants, and the role of paddy fields in China. In this book, Kaufmann has definitely achieved her stated goal: “to challenge prevailing narratives about backwardness and progress. I wish to contribute to a better understanding of the particularities of Chinese modernity, disputing the notion of linear technological progress. Challenging public discourse which portrays Chinese peasants as passive and backward […], I want to show that farmers are, in fact, forward-looking decision-making agents who are actively shaping China’s modernity” (p. 24).
In sum, I consider this book as an immensely crucial contribution in the field of anthropology of Chinese agriculture as well in the field of migration studies since it decentres the classical depiction of Chinese smallholders: Instead of picturing these families as passive victims of the unparalleled economic development that has been shaping China for the last decades, Lena Kaufmann shows that these rural communities actively make choices built on a repertoire of skilled practices that are rooted in the socio-technical ground of wet rice cultivation. Even though densely written theoretical and historical backgrounds form substantial parts of the book, it is very accessible and the abstracts at the beginning of each chapter even allow for a non-linear reading of the book.