Class Differentiation in RuralChina: Dynamics of Accumulation, Commodification and State Intervention

This paper develops a classification of the emerging agrarian class positions in C hina today. Using an instrument based on rural households' combination of market positions in four markets – land, labour, means of production and product – I identify five agrarian classes: the capitalist employer class, the petty‐bourgeois class of commercial farmers, two labouring classes of dual‐employment households and wage workers, and subsistence peasants. This classification is then used as a heuristic device to organize the empirical analysis that examines how dynamics of agrarian change drive class differentiation in rural C hina. For the capitalist employer class, the analysis focuses on their diverse paths of accumulation; for the petty‐bourgeois commercial farmers, their contingent resilience and tendencies of differentiation; and for the two classes of labour, the commodification of their subsistence. The state plays important but varying roles in all these processes.