China's Peasant Agriculture and Rural Society: Changing Paradigms of Farming

ISBN-13: 9781138187177 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 290 str.

Jan Douwe Van Der Ploeg; Jingzhong Ye

Opis

China's agriculture and rural society has undergone rapid changes in recent years. Many poorer farmers and younger people have moved to cities, and yet China has an immense challenge to feed a growing and more affluent population. This book provides a bottom-up view of China s agriculture, showing how the many millions of Chinese peasants make a living. It presents a vivid description of the mechanisms used by rural households to defend and sustain their livelihoods, increase their agricultural production and improve the quality of their lives.

The authors examine the newly emerging trajectories of entrepreneurial and capitalist farming and assess whether such alternatives will be able to meet the enormous social, economic and environmental challenges that China faces. The book also explores the paradigm that has underpinned the organisation and development of China s agriculture from ancient times to the present day. This shows the importance of "balancing" in the Chinese model as compared to the one-sided imposition of continual modernization in the western model. It is argued that such balancing is at the core of the current "Sannong" policy, referring to the three ruralities of food sovereignty, wellbeing for peasant households and an attractive countryside."

Recenzje

"This book’s most distinguishing feature lies in pounding home the opposition between an agroindustrial Western paradigm and a peasant-centered Chinese paradigm ... there is a need for accounts of promising agrarian lifeways that are critical and self-reflexive but forcefully open up avenues of action, a need this book helps to address." - John Aloysius Zinda, Cornell University, USA, in Journal of Peasant Studies (2017)

O autorze

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg is Professorof Transition Studies at Wageningen University, the Netherlands,and Adjunct Professor of Rural Sociology at the College of Humanities and Development Studies, China Agricultural University, Beijing. He is the author of the influential book The New Peasantries (Earthscan, 2008). Jingzhong Ye is Professor of Development Sociology and Dean of the College of Humanities and Development Studies, China Agricultural University, Beijing.