Paddy field bound: Chinese rice farmers’ strategies for protecting their farmland resources in rural-urban migration, 1980s to 2010s

My dissertation explores the everyday strategies used by rice farmers in the People’s

Republic of China in the context of massive rural-urban migration and rapid agrotechnological

transformation, in the post-reform era between the 1980s and 2010s.

China’s rural policy, including the promotion of modern Chinese farming

technologies that have increasingly replaced human labour, has set free over a sixth of

the Chinese population from full-time agricultural labour, pushing them to undertake

rural-urban migration, whilst still retaining their ties to the land. Due to regional

disparities and specific policies towards rural Chinese people, farmers are caught in

the predicament of conflicting pressures to both migrate into cities and preserve their

resources in the countryside in the long term. This study draws on an ensemble of

qualitative ethnographic, quantitative, and historical data. Through analysing one

major capital asset, paddy rice land, it investigates how farmers are strategically

responding to this predicament by drawing on resources such as their repertoire of

knowledge and the available farming technologies, skills, labour or financial

resources.

The project is located at the intersection of migration studies, agro-anthropology, and

the anthropology of skilled practice, and its thesis is within a knowledge-strategic,

socio-material and agent-centred theoretical framework. It aims to contribute to the

under-developed field of materialities of migration – in particular through the lens of

skill. It highlights the point that socio-technical resources are, in fact, key factors in

understanding migration flows and the characteristics of migrant-home relations.