1st Edition

China's Peasant Agriculture and Rural Society Changing paradigms of farming

Edited By Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, Jingzhong Ye Copyright 2016
290 Pages 79 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

300 Pages 79 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

300 Pages 79 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

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... Read more

1. The Conundrum of Chinese Agriculture

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg and Ye Jingzhong

2. The Circularity of Town-countryside Relations and Multiple Job-holding

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg and Ye Jingzhong

3. Man and the Land: The Social Organization of Farming

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, Ye Jingzhong and Pan Lu

4. Peasant-managed Agricultural Growth

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, Ye Jingzhong, Wu Huifang and Wang Chunyu

5. Entrepreneurial Trajectories?

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, Ye Jingzhong, Zhao Yong and Pan Lu

6. The Rise of Capitalist Modes of Farming

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg and Ye Jingzhong

7. Reinventing Peasant Farming

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, Ye Jingzhong and Wu Huifang

8. Rural Women: Glimpses of Empowerment?

Xiandang Meng , Sabine de Rooij and Jan Douwe van der Ploeg

9. The Young and the Rural

Sabine de Rooij, Wu Huifang and Jan Douwe van der Ploeg

10. Markets

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, Wu Huifang and He Congzhi

11. The Relevance of the Chinese Experience

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg

12. Putting the Jigsaw Together: A Return to Paradigmatic Issues

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg and Ye Jingzhong

Biography

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg is Professor of 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.

"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)