The peasant family and rural development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988 /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Huang, Philip C., 1940-
Imprint:	Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1990.
Description:	1 online resource (xiii, 421 pages) : maps
Language:	English
Subject:	Rural development -- China -- Yangtze River Delta. Rural families -- China -- Yangtze River Delta. Economic history. Rural development. Rural families. Yangtze River Delta (China) -- Economic conditions. China -- Yangtze River Delta.
Format:	E-Resource Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11110169

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	0585107491 9780585107493 9780804717878 0804717877 9780804717885 0804717885 0804717877 0804717885
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references (pages 361-388) and index. Print version record.
Summary:	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.
Other form:	Print version: Huang, Philip C., 1940- Peasant family and rural development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1990 0804717877

Table of Contents:

Preface
Chapter 1. Introduction
1. to 1949
Chapter 2. the Yangzi Delta Ecosystem
Chapter 3. Commercialization and Family Production
Chapter 4. Commercialization and Managerial Agriculture
Chapter 5. Commercialization and Involutionary Growth
Chapter 6. Peasants and Markets
Chapter 7. Imperialism, Urban Development, and Rural Involution
Chapter 8. Two Kinds of Village Communities
2. After 1949
Chapter 9. Restructuring the Old Political Economy
Chapter 10. Collective, Family, and Sideline Production
Chapter 11. Growth Versus Development in Agriculture
Chapter 12. Rural Industrialization
Chapter 13. Capitalism Versus Socialism in Rural Development
Chapter 14. Peasant-Worker Villages
3. Conclusion
Chapter 15. a Summing Up
Chapter 16. Some Speculations
Appendixes
References
Character List
Index

The peasant family and rural development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988 /

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