How can we account for the durability of subsistence farming in China
despite six centuries of vigorous commercialization from 1350 to 1950
and three decades of collectivization between 1950 to 1980? Why did the
Chinese rural economy not undergo the transformation predicted by the
classical models of Adam Smith and Karl Marx? In attempting to answer
this question, scholars have generally treated commercialization and
collectivization as distinct from population increase, the other great
rural change of the past six centuries. This book breaks new ground in
arguing that in the Yangzi delta, China's most advanced agricultural
region, population increase was what drove commercialization and
collectivization, even as it was made possible by them. The processes at
work, which the author terms involutionary commercialization and
involutionary growth, entailed ever-increasing labor input per unit of
land, resulting in expanded total output but diminishing marginal
returns per workday. In the Ming-Qing period, involution usually meant a
switch to more labor-intensive cash crops and low-return household
sidelines. In post-revolutionary China, it typically meant greatly
intensified crop production. Stagnant or declining returns per workday
were absorbed first by the family production unit and then by the
collective. The true significance of the 1980's reforms, the author
argues, lies in the diversion of labour from farming to rural industries
and profitable sidelines and the first increases for centuries in
productivity and income per workday. With these changes have come a
measure of rural prosperity and the genuine possibility of
transformative rural development. By reconstructing Ming-Qing
agricultural history and drawing on twentieth-century ethnographic data
and his own field investigations, the author brings his large themes
down to the level of individual peasant households. Like his acclaimed
The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (1985), this study
is noteworthy for both its empirical richness and its theoretical sweep,
but it goes well beyond the earlier work in its inter-regional
comparisons and its use of the pre- and post-1949 periods to illuminate
each other.
