Chinese agrarian capitalism in the Russian Far East

Chinese actors have been actively engaged in agriculture in the Russian Far East since border liberalisation, from agriculture labourers, independent farmers with small- and medium-sized plots, to capital-rich agribusinesses that cultivate farmland on a much larger scale. With the use of wage labour and other capitalised production inputs, the occurrence of economic differentiation among producers and strong profit-seeking drivers, this stands in contrast to the situation within China itself – where institutional and structural constraints still limit the development of full-blown capitalist agriculture. This article presents the first case study of this phenomenon, in comparative perspective.