A Study On Landless Famers' Re-employment And Occupational Differentiation

Following China's post-reform rapid economic growth, land requisition has arisen as a controversial issue, as the practice has engendered a number of discontents regarding the landless farmers' prospects for re-employment and changes in occupation. For this reason, land requisition has recently come under the scrutiny of scholars from a variety of fields. Mainstream scholarly opinion conceives of the employment process of landless farmers as an urbanization process, involving three main stages: displaced farmers first gain access to the labor market, then begin to increase their employment specialization, and then raise their occupational skill level.From July to August, 2009, the author conducted on-site interviews with 248 farmers from six different areas of Shenyang City whose land had been requisitioned, and obtained 245 valid questionnaires. Employing this novel dataset, this paper examines the farmers' process of finding new employment in the aftermath of land requisition, and then explores two common pathways for career advancement.In Chapter 2, this paper analyses the importance of savings to landless farmers' livelihood in the wake of land requisition. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 then evaluate the three-step re-employment process along the "Entry-Differentiation-Upgrade" framework. Chapter 3 employs factor analysis and logistic regression analytic tools to explore the factors behind landless farmers' re-employment. Chapter 4 then describes the re-employment process of the displace farmers, including the changes in farmers' earliest jobs, present jobs and the career expectations, and then analyses the factors of these changes using an additional logistic regression model. Finally, in Chapter 5, the author discusses two possible pathways through which farmers strengthen their skill level and job training, including via social networks, and evaluates these possibilities using another logistic regression.The results show that the re-employment behavior of the farmers after land requisition varies widely amongst the three stages outlined above, and depend upon separate factors as well. In the reentering the labor market stage, significant factors include the amount of money received as compensation in the land requisition process, the quality of the estate given as a replacement, effort put forward towards re-employment , previous job-related skills, and social capital. In the employment specialization stage, the structure of the displaced farmers' career becomes more stable and defined still occurs. The farmers can make use of job skills training or social networks to improve their employment marketability and attain a higher-paying job. Job training appears to be more effective for younger, ambitious, and motivated individuals with relatively strong educational backgrounds, while the value of social networks towards increasing employment opportunities is related to both the scale and density of the net, as well as the quality of the resource.