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The Autumn Harvest: Peasants and Markets in Post-Collective Rural China*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2012

Xueguang Zhou
Xueguang Zhou
Affiliation:
Stanford University. Email: xgzhou@stanford.edu
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Abstract

For the peasants in rural China, the harvest season is the occasion when several different worlds – the business world of large companies, the entrepreneurial world of middlemen, local elites and peasant households – are compressed into the same social space, thereby inducing intensive economic and social interactions and crystallizing social relations among villagers, local elites and markets. Based on ethnographic research on the autumn harvest in a township in northern China, this study sheds light on distinctive modes of market transactions across produces, and diverse interactions between markets and local institutions involving different co-ordination mechanisms, rhythms and social relationships. A more nuanced image of market transactions emerges from these observations, calling for a more refined conceptualization of markets and further research on their implications for institutional changes.

Keywords

peasantsrural marketcapitalmarket chainrural China
Type
Articles
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 208 , December 2011 , pp. 913 - 931
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2011

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10 Between 2004 and 2010 I travelled to FS township many times each year, including three harvest seasons, to conduct participatory observations of rural life. Unless otherwise indicated, the quotations and descriptions in the text are drawn from my fieldnotes.

11 Outflow of migrant workers in FS township varies greatly across villages. In grape-growing villages, labour-intensive fieldwork keeps a large proportion of labourers at home; in corn-growing villages, the majority of the young villagers left for jobs in urban areas.

12 1 mu ≈ 0.165 acre.

13 1 jin ≈ 1.102 pound.

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