State of the Peasantry The Agrarian Question in Contemporary China

The historical trajectory of the Chinese state since 1978 has been determined by China's agrarian nature. Against conventional accounts which view the peasant as having no place in the modern world, I seek to reveal the centrality of the 'peasant', as a political category, to projects of modernization. Taking an 'internationalization of the state' perspective, I locate contemporary Chinese debates on the 'peasant question' in a long international history of debates on the agrarian question, showing how struggles over the strategies of power seizure and state-building have turned on competing conceptions of the peasant's nature as a political, social and economic subject. I seek to dislodge the stereotype of the 'backward' peasant by highlighting alternative conceptions of the peasant subject---including those which envisage the peasant as a progressive, modernizing force. Developing the common trope of the peasant as possessing an essentially dual nature, I argue that conceptions of the peasantry can be divided, crudely, into three categories: feudal, socialist and capitalist. I demonstrate how each of these categories operates centrally within debates about the organization of labor, land and production---questions which themselves underly the form of the state itself and the nature of state-building. For example, I show how debates on rural land organization under Mao pivoted on whether the peasant was viewed as essentially feudal, socialist, or capitalist. I argue that Deng Xiaoping's triumph over Hua Guofeng in the late '70s hinged on his conviction that the peasant was more individualist entrepreneur than lover of egalitarian community. I examine how the peasant of the rural boom in the early '80s was hailed as the embodiment of modernization, while during the '90s, as the countryside was increasingly utilized as a source of cheap labor extraction, state discourse increasingly portrayed the peasant as feudal---exposure to the international market seen as its salvation. This dissertation is a contribution to contemporary efforts to make sense of China's reform politics, in particular the role of ideas in explaining state policy, and the implications of reform for the nature of the Chinese state.