Dr Tian Liu on Agrarian Capitalism and Uneven Development in Rural China [MCI Talk] скачать в хорошем качестве

Dr Tian Liu on Agrarian Capitalism and Uneven Development in Rural China [MCI Talk]

Despite China’s modernization push, top-down land reforms have led to agribusiness failures and deepened rural struggles. In this recorded talk, Dr Tian Liu uncovers the hidden crisis in the nation's development story. The event, organised by the Manchester China Institute (MCI), took place on Tuesday, 11 March 2025 at Oddfellows Hall. NOTE: The University of Manchester is committed to academic independence and the freedom of speech. The views speakers present are entirely their own, and do not represent those of the University of Manchester or the Manchester China Institute. 00:00 Introduction 00:28 Empirical Focus: Agrarian Capitalism 02:23 Research Questions and Methods 03:17 Main Findings 05:07 Theoretical Framework 07:36 Macro-Historical Origins 08:56 Trajectory 1 12:20 Trajectory 2 15:06 After the Land-Transfer Campaign 16:58 Implications 18:42 From Production to Realisation 25:51 Peasant Rent Protests 31:57 Distributional Impacts 41:52 Diverging Livelihood Dynamics ____________ 𝗘𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘀 Today’s China is often viewed as a development success. However, its post-reform political economy has simultaneously been characterized by a backward agricultural sector and a vast, relatively poor rural population. Seeking to reduce rural poverty and spatial uneven development, the Chinese state has made aggressive efforts to modernize its agriculture in the past 15 years, by concentrating land from peasant households to large commercial farms (official term is “land transfer”). In this talk, I will draw on 19 months of comparative ethnography, over 150 interviews, and extensive archival research, to examine the macro-historical origins, diverse local trajectories, and distributional outcomes of this reform. My findings show that, while “land transfer” as a bottom-up experiment led to commercial success in coastal, early-industrialized regions, its top-down emulation in the inland rural regions has created widespread agribusiness failures, which have deepened an ongoing rural social reproduction crisis. These findings contribute to theories of spatial fix by explaining the institutional, political dynamics that may lead to its failures. They further challenge scholarships about the political economy of development by revealing the limits of experiment-based policymaking in reducing spatial inequality. ____________ 𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Dr Tian Liu is a lecturer in Global Political Economy at the University of Manchester. He received his doctoral degree in Sociology from the Johns Hopkins University, and a BA in Political Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research uses comparative-historical and ethnographic methods to examine the uneven development of capitalism across space and time, as well as its multifold crises. ____________ 𝗠𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗵𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗖𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗮 𝗜𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗶𝘁𝘂𝘁𝗲 | 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘀 • Website: https://www.mci.manchester.ac.uk/ • Email: mci@manchester.ac.uk • Linktree: https://linktr.ee/uomchina • Twitter:   / uomchina   • Instagram:   / uomchina   • Facebook:   / uomchina   • LinkedIn:   / 80008827   #china #agrarian #capitalism #economy #politics #agriculture #environment #sustainability #development #urban #rural #transformation #land #rights #production #business #academic #talk