Michael Webber's excellent study of the diverse ways in which the market and state have impacted upon rural China is based on a decade and a half of annual research visits to far-flung areas of the Chinese countryside. Webber writes well, and he is able to convey a good sense of the stresses to which villagers were subjected in the locales he studied.
As an example, in chapter three, Webber examines what happened to publicly owned rural township and village industrial enterprises (TVEs) during the 1990s in an area near Lake Taihu in Jiangsu province. Until the mid-1990s, profits were not the only goal of these enterprises; other important goals included the provision of employment for local people at decent wages and conditions. As Webber notes, “[t]his is not a weakness of communal enterprises – it is what they are for” (p. 67). But in the latter half of the 1990s, the local officials' premises changed and they became focused on profitability driven by cheaper labour. Encouraged by the central government, they privatized the great bulk of the TVEs, often into the hands of the plants' managers, who dismissed local workers and hired poor migrants, reducing local employment opportunities in the process.
Chapter four examines the evictions and relocations of villagers due to the Three Gorges dam, based on a year's fieldwork in two adjacent counties in Hubei province. In one of the counties, “[t]he proportion of people who live in absolute poverty increased” (p. 81). Villagers protested, but they had no way to organize beyond their immediate locale, and local authorities “could contain protests within individual villages and towns” (p. 110).
Webber turns next to the clearance of herders from pasturelands in Inner Mongolia, ostensibly for ecological reasons. He presents evidence of the process of clearance and the aftermath, and concludes that “it is actually a form of dispossession, eviction and forced migration. It is a story that highlights how environmental change, the modernizing goals of the state and the politics of science confront culture and identity to produce ethnic conflict and disputes over history” (p. 126). The government's enclosure and restrictions of access to pastureland deprived herders of their traditional capacity to move animals to fresh pastures in different seasons. Webber questions whether the removal of open pasturelands can deliver environmental improvements. He observes that the clearance was not so much a solution to overstocking but rather an enforcement of the state's preference for a more structured, controlled form of land administration and a permanently settled population. The programme was underpinned by the authorities' “desire to bring minority populations within the purview of the nation-state and its ‘normal’ systems of land use and agricultural production” (p. 254).
Chapter six examines the government's diversion of water away from farmers and towards urban residents and industry, and the administrative restrictions and water-use fees that increasingly have been imposed in allocations of irrigation water in the grain heartlands of the North China Plain. Webber notes that farmers are cast as culprits for inefficiently using water, but suggests that the problem actually lies with rigid, ill-advised water-administration bureaucracies. He argues that farmers already have incentives to use water efficiently, since they face a high fuel cost to pump water into fields. Given this, he concludes that the move to impose higher water-use charges (which, I should add, has been urged by Western specialists) really represents an onerous tax on farmers.
In chapter seven, Webber examines scenic tourism in Yunnan and explains how a few spots get designated as showpieces by government planners and travel agencies. Tourists are herded into those small areas, ignoring the rest of the province, which results in markedly uneven development.
Webber investigates work migration in Xinjiang in chapter eight and shows how in the city of Urumqi rural Uyghurs are shunted into worse jobs than rural Han migrants. He concludes that “this forms the core of the conflict between the two groups: competition in a labour market in which neither performs well but one performs worse than the other” (p. 244).
Webber found one area in which the intrusion of capitalist forces may not, overall, have had a deleterious effect – the dairy industry – which he covers in chapter two. He examines a Han district in Inner Mongolia near Hohhot city where most of the milk is produced by small farmers who own a few cows, alongside substantial farms funded largely by urban investors. Milk production needs to be closely aligned to milk processing, which is controlled near-monopolistically in each region by large corporations. But thus far the prices for raw milk offered by the processors have been sufficient to keep the small farmers afloat. As Webber notes, “the technology of dairy farming and milking was disseminated from the government and capitalist processors, but became integrated into a pre-existing social system of producing grain and running small household enterprises. Here peasants are not being dispossessed” (p. 39). However, the small dairy farmers are less efficient producers and know less about how to control milk quality than the large invested farms, and thus their future is uncertain. Milk prices had been rising but more recently levelled off; the melamine scandals encourage processors to be more concerned about milk quality controls and to favour the larger farms. Both trends spell trouble for small dairy farmers. Wherever Webber has conducted research, the ordinary small rural resident has stood at risk of being squeezed out by market forces and/or state policy.
