Tilling another's land: Migrant farming under rural industrialization and urbanization in China

Studies of labour migration in China usually focus on rural residents seeking wage employment the urban industrial or service sector. This article provides an account migrant farmers who have moved from impoverished countryside to peri-urban villages more developed areas engage substitute agricultural production. They took over fields abandoned by local villagers and lived worked among them as tenants. situates analysis farming within changing regimes accumulation post-socialist China. It shows how subsidized industrialization providing low-cost labour, which facilitated incorporation into workforce semi-proletarianized workers. Into 2000s, transition towards land-based incorporated proprietorship while dispossessing farmers. The amplification inequalities reveals shifting constitute important source differentiation Chinese today.