Agricultural technical and vocational education and training in China: a critical policy analysis

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Over the past decades, the Chinese central government has implemented significant reforms to the agricultural training system, making farmers’ upskilling a crucial public commitment. This paper examines how the central government’s policies have shaped and restructured the Chinese agricultural training system since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (1949–present). Based on an analysis of six flagship policy documents from 1949 until the present, this study identifies rounds of progressive reforms within China’s agricultural training system, illustrating the central government’s ambition increasingly oriented towards the marketisation of agro-technology. Employing the triangulation method, we connect policy documents to secondary data, illustrating their impact. These are not basically propaganda documents but brought about significant changes at the ground level; that is, the market-oriented shift can deskill farmers. Drawing on deskilling theory, this paper suggests that deskilling in the agricultural sector centres on issues of power, authority, and control. On the one hand, farmers have gradually lost the power to participate in decisions concerning agro-technological change. On the other hand, the notion of the ‘peasant class’ has, under China’s waves of reform, come to denote a declining and precarious group marked by an ‘unfinished proletarianisation’.