China's prolonged economic boom has long depended on the extraction of cheap migrant labor from the countryside and increasingly relies on the expropriation of cheap rural land for urbanization. Julia Chuang's Beneath the China Boom is a superb ethnographic account of these processes, their intersections, and their contradictions. Based on a comparative study of two villages pulled into the vortex of China's boom in distinct ways, Chuang provides an ethnographically detailed and analytically sharp look into the underbelly of the China boom from the perspective of rural people.
Beneath the China Boom deploys a classic two-village comparison. Faming, located in a remote part of Sichuan Province, prospered from mining and rural industrialization in the 1980s, but rural decline in the 1990s made it heavily dependent on migrant construction labor. Labor recruitment is organized primarily by local brokers who bring teams of mostly male workers to construction sites across the country, where room and board is deducted from wages that—because of the speculative nature of the construction industry—typically are not paid until the end of a year's labor. Laboring for low and delayed pay is only possible in combination with small-scale commercial and subsistence agriculture and the reproductive labor of women, all tied together by strong kinship networks whose maintenance is a defining feature of village life.
Landing, by contrast, never enjoyed rural prosperity. Located on arid and mountainous land on the periphery of Chongqing, Landing's agriculture was purely subsistence oriented; off-farm jobs were few and far between in the 1980s, and many Landing farmers became dependent on migrant labor earlier. Nevertheless, Landing's peri-urban location, combined with the compulsion of a stagnant rural economy, led more Landing residents to invest in small-scale business and properties in the nearby township or peripheries of Chongqing, or to become early labor brokers. This urbanization served to fray kinship ties. Landing's location also made it an attractive site for tourism-oriented real estate development; while Chuang was doing fieldwork there, it was slated for expropriation and demolition for the desolate-sounding “New Land Township.”
Chuang's comparison illustrates how villages with distinct agrarian social structures have been subsumed in different ways by capitalist development in China. In Chuang's analysis, the villages are emblematic of two distinct “mechanisms” or “trajectories” of capital accumulation in contemporary China. The first is the extraction of low-wage labor from the countryside, which depends on rural production and kinship networks for subsidization. The second is the expropriation and commodification of land for urbanization, driven by a speculative land boom and the incentive that fiscal devolution has given local governments to cash in on land transfer fees. The two processes are interdependent because cheap construction labor props up urbanization (p. 52). They are also in tension because rural land dispossession—as the case of Landing shows—undermines the basis of this subsidization.
The greatest strength of the book is its detailed—and often wrenching—illustration of how these macro forces of capitalist development play out in the micro processes of village life. In chapters 3 and 4, for instance, Chuang provides a remarkable account of how the construction labor market has transformed not only the economy and class structure of Faming, but also its gender relationships, kinship structures, and social norms. Low pay and delayed wages—combined with high barriers to urban citizenship—have given risen to dual households requiring both migrant labor and agrarian social reproduction. The maintenance of such households, in turn, places strong pressure on marriage choices (finding wives willing to stay in the village), generational kinship ties (the elderly depend on remittances from children), and village ties (which ensure trust between laborers and their brokers and discourage family desertion). Some of the most interesting and poignant sections of the book are those in which Chuang shows what happens to people when these break down.
Chapters 5 and 6, in turn, provide us with one of the best existing ethnographic accounts of a village being dispossessed. A unique aspect of Chuang's fieldwork was that she was already researching Landing when its demolition was announced, allowing her to observe the reactions of villagers in real time. The local government initially tried to generate voluntary compliance through promises of urban hukou and compensation, which enticed some villagers. Initial excitement, however, was based on misinformation and misunderstanding, and quickly turned to disappointment. Ultimately, villagers were forced to relinquish their land for relatively paltry compensation, faced significant barriers to urban housing and welfare, and were denied employment—beyond demolishing their own homes—in the New Land Township. While dispossession had relatively little effect on the village's diversified entrepreneurs, it was disastrous for those who depended on the combination of migrant labor and farming. Construction labor was almost impossible without land and housing in the countryside, and the dissolution of the village undermined local labor recruitment networks, forcing migrants to work for less trustworthy nonlocals. Landing's frayed kinship bonds provided no fallback option for some of the dispossessed, leading to the most heartbreaking stories of the book, and underscoring just how emotionally demanding Chuang's fieldwork must have been.
The foregoing does not exhaust the empirical and analytical riches of Beneath the China Boom. Along the way, Chuang offers many sharp observations about China's political economy, including its labor market, hukou policies, and urban governance. If I have two modest reservations, the first is that there is some ambiguity in how Chuang sees the relationship between what she variously describes as the two “mechanisms,” “modalities,” or “trajectories” of capitalist development in China. Are the commodifications of labor and land simply uneven across space and time, given the contingent geographies of capitalist development; are they coordinated by remarkably far-sighted state policies; or are they reproduced behind the back of agents by the “function” one performs for the other?
My second reservation is that some processes that Chuang sees as specific to Chinese capitalism—such as state governments competing to broker land or employers’ preferences for nonlocals in development projects—are more general. What seems more specific to China is its relatively labor-intensive growth (which absorbs far more rural villagers than is the case elsewhere in Asia), its high capacity to generate compliance to dispossession (many protests notwithstanding), and a land tenure system that is both relatively egalitarian—especially in comparison with South Asia—and makes expropriation the only way to transfer land for urbanization.
Beneath the China Boom is a remarkable sociological accomplishment and a must-read not only for students of China's political economy but for anyone interested in urbanization, migrant labor, land grabbing, and agrarian change.
