In Western ideology, China is no longer perceived as a socialist country, although traces of its revolutionary legacy remain. According to this perspective, the objective of modernization in China has replaced that of revolution, which has in turn played an important role in stabilizing the global capitalist system. In other words, China’s integration into global capitalism has helped to solidify the process of capitalist globalization. Consequently, modernization and revolution, as well as globalization and revolution, are presented as dichotomies, similar to that of democracy versus authoritarianism, freedom versus autocracy, and state versus society. These dichotomies can be viewed as the extension of Cold War ideology into the politics of the 1990s, subtly embedded within the theories of “globalization” and “modernity.” Today, the world remains confined by dichotomous thinking, which is the foundation for the intellectual and ideological continuity in the so-called “New Cold War,” to a large extent also serving as the boundary between the Global South and Global North. This thinking, however, does a disservice to understanding China’s path of development toward socialist modernization and national sovereignty since the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was formed in 1949.
Looking back at the twentieth century, the weakness of the Soviet agricultural model is one of the chief causes of the structural crisis experienced by Soviet socialism. Conversely, the agribusiness system that developed in the United States played a crucial role in allowing it to triumph in the Cold War. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the United States gradually attained global hegemony. One of the means it utilized in consolidating this hegemony was the weaponization of food. This approach systematically dismantled the peasant economies of the Global South and exacerbated the polarization within the global economy.
Beginning in 1929, with the onset of the Great Depression in the United States, there was a sharp decline in global food prices. The Soviet Union was then at a crucial stage of industrialization, and heavily reliant on agricultural exports. The USSR had to pay double in the planned quantities of raw materials and agricultural products to obtain machinery. Adding to these woes, overall agricultural output was also declining. Economist Evgeny Preobrazhensky had argued in The New Economics (1926) that industrialization would come at the cost of a brutal period of so-called socialist primitive accumulation (original expropriation), the most challenging period for a socialist developing country, involving the expropriation of the peasantry. Some, like Nikolai Bukharin, argued for a more gradual approach. Nevertheless, as an underdeveloped country opposed by powerful enemies in the West, the Soviet Union, all analysts agreed, had no choice but to expropriate the peasants to some degree in the process of industrialization, leading to inevitable fierce state-peasant conflicts.
In his 1929 speech “A Year of Great Change,” Joseph Stalin expounded that without developing heavy industry, no industrialization could occur. The history of industrially backward countries indicated that without substantial long-term loans, they could not progress in development: “It is precisely for this reason that the capitalists of all countries refuse us loans and credits, for they assume that we cannot by our own efforts cope with the problem of accumulation, that we shall suffer shipwreck in the task of reconstructing our heavy industry, and be compelled to come to them cap in hand, for enslavement.”1 The answer was to develop in the same way that capitalism had originally, through a kind of “primitive accumulation” by appropriating the agricultural surplus of the peasantry. But in the case of capitalism, such “original expropriation,” as Karl Marx called it, had occurred over a longer period of time, and had been facilitated by a system of global plunder via colonialism.
The Soviet Union had adopted high rates of capital accumulation, but low consumption, and focused on the development of heavy industry in its industrialization process. As a result, it quickly established an industrial system dominated by the defense industry. This foreign capital-dependent, agricultural country successfully transformed itself into a major industrial world power.2 During the First World War, Tsarist Russia, with its backward industry, was defeated by industrialized Prussian Germany. During the Second World War, the Soviet Union achieved a massive victory against fascism, though at the cost of twenty million lives on the Soviet side. This victory was directly related to the prewar strategy of developing heavy industry and military industry at all costs.
Nevertheless, the development of industry at the expense of agriculture had its costs. After succeeding Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev carried out a series of agricultural reforms that decentralized political power and its economic interests. But just as Khrushchev was implementing these reforms, the Soviet Union experienced another grain shortage in 1963. The shortage was so severe that the country had to reinstate the ration card, which had been abolished after the war. During Khrushchev’s ten years in power, the grain that collective farm members received diminished as their remuneration decreased year by year. The farm income was lower than the agricultural inputs and rising prices, while the quantity of grain procurement kept increasing. Agricultural conditions were deteriorating. Collective farms received less than half as much grain remuneration in 1963 as they did before the war, ultimately leading to the failure of agricultural reform.3
When Leonid Brezhnev came into power, the Soviet Union’s agricultural problems had become very serious. To deal with the problem of shortage, Brezhnev vigorously reformed the New Economic System to further expand the autonomy of farms, raised the price of grain procurement, and improved the collective contract system. In addition, the state also substantially increased investment and financial subsidies to agriculture. However, the value of the agricultural production of the Soviet Union fell sharply, bringing a serious chain reaction to the entire national economy. The ongoing decline in grain production forced a reliance on imports.
In 1972, the USSR spent 860 tons of gold reserves importing 28 million tons of cereals from the world market, including 18 million tons from the United States. This helped the United States solve its longstanding food surplus crisis after the Second World War, and gave a strong boost to U.S. agriculture, giving rise to paradox after paradox.4 The Soviet Union became a net importer of grain for the first time in 1973. Prior to large-scale industrialization, Russia had always been a major grain exporter.
From 1981 to 1982, world markets were shocked again by the Soviet Union’s massive wheat purchase. Grains became the second-largest import in the Soviet Union’s foreign trade (next to machinery and equipment), causing foreign exchange constraints. Limited foreign exchange could not provide sufficient support for the development of other sectors of the economy, and thus restricted the restructuring of the economy as a whole. Since raw materials for both light industry and the food industry come from agriculture, the agricultural crisis prevented the expansion of industrial production. The lack of supply in the market for manufactured goods kept people’s lives from improving. Consumer demand could not be satisfied, resulting in higher savings. The mismatch between savings and retail turnover rates foreshadowed subsequent inflation.5
Under the harsh containment policy of the United States and the necessities imposed by the military arms race, the Soviet Union’s economic model took the form of a relative neglect of agriculture and light industry, with the priority given to heavy industry and military industry. Economic reforms from Khrushchev to Mikhail Gorbachev failed to solve the problem of stagnant agricultural development or reignite the economy. Hence, failures in the agricultural sector were to play a large role in the economic stagnation of these years, which contributed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
China faced many of the same problems as the Soviet Union, but has followed a different path, reflecting China’s entire history. Crucial to Chinese-style modernization has been a different dynamic between agriculture and industry.
Revisiting the Worker-Peasant Alliance and Chinese-Style Modernization
Behind the frequent criticisms of China as an authoritarian state lies the fundamental question of whether agrarian societies, burdened by the pressures of imperialism and colonialism, can achieve industrialization through a socialist path. This question, in fact, constituted the most significant theoretical debate and ideological struggle early on within the Communist International. How to deal with rural issues became pivotal in determining the trajectory of industrialization and modernization in the third world, with agricultural land reform emerging as the ultimate key. Among China’s economic reforms since 1978, agricultural land reform stands out as the most intricate issue, provoking profound transformations in urban and rural landscapes. Today, this reform remains ongoing and will ultimately shape China’s future trajectory.
For late-developing countries, it is essential to carefully balance the relationship between industrialization and agriculture. One of the most crucial experiences from the Chinese and Russian Revolutions is the significance of a “worker-peasant alliance” as the foundation of a successful socialist path. This insight comes from hard-earned historical lessons, which have shown that any deviation from the worker-peasant alliance has led to social and political crises. China in particular has been compelled continuously to find new ways of navigating these challenges. Over the past few decades, China’s development strategy has oscillated between left-leaning and right-leaning approaches, with the fulcrum of this oscillation being the “worker-peasant alliance.”
So-called “Chinese-style modernization” has its roots in the 1950s, initially formulated in 1954 during the First Session of the First National People’s Congress, where modernization based on a worker-peasant alliance was proposed. This session ratified the first constitution of socialist China, declaring the PRC a working-class-led people’s democratic state based on the worker-peasant alliance. At the same time, in the Government Work Report, Premier Zhou Enlai named four priority areas: “modernized industry, agriculture, transportation, and national defense.”
Building on this foundation from the 1950s under Mao Zedong, the idea of Chinese-style modernization further developed in the subsequent decades. The Third Session of the First National People’s Congress, held in late 1964, formally introduced the “Four Modernizations” objective to transform China into a socialist power with modernized agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology. This vision was reiterated in the 1975 Fourth National People’s Congress Session’s Government Work Report, which also introduced a two-phase approach—establishing an independent and relatively comprehensive industrial and economic system by 1980 and achieving the “Four Modernizations” by the end of the twentieth century.
By 1978, the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) Eleventh Central Committee Third Plenum had shifted its focus toward addressing economic structural imbalances. At this pivotal plenum, the decision was made to initiate rural reform, implementing the Household Responsibility System, redistributing land to households, and introducing independent accounting and responsibility for profits and losses, marking the commencement of China’s economic reform. This is widely believed to have liberated the vitality of economic production in rural areas, meaning that China’s development of industrialization had moved out of the wartime economic model and no longer relied on agricultural expropriation. Subsequently, China adopted an export-oriented industrialization strategy that facilitated rapid economic growth.
At the core of these changes was the establishment of the Household Responsibility System during the economic reforms of the 1980s. This granted rural households the right to contract land and operate it without dissolving collective ownership of the land. This system emphasized that land was owned collectively by the village. If someone left the village or withdrew from the collective, their land operating rights would revert to the collective, to be redistributed among other village members based on demographic change. Within this framework, the village collective could independently determine the scale and mode of land cultivation to achieve maximum efficiency.
The introduction of the Household Responsibility System can be seen as a form of transformation, involving seven hundred million rural inhabitants—equivalent to 70 percent of the population—transitioning from collective to household-based production. It swiftly increased grain output and yielded benefits for both the rural and urban sectors.
Nevertheless, it is important to note that the reforms were only made possible by, and were built upon, the achievements of Mao-era agricultural modernization. For example, following U.S. President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, the country seized the opportunity to import four kinds of chemical fibers and thirteen pieces of fertilizer production equipment. The adoption of synthetic textiles over traditional cotton textiles allowed for more land to be allocated to cereals. Simultaneously, widespread fertilizer use rapidly escalated grain production.
The shift to “petroleum agriculture” relied on the substantial development of the petroleum industry during the Mao era in the 1960s. This included developing the Daqing Oilfield, which helped ensure petroleum self-sufficiency and surplus. Additionally, superior crop varieties such as Yuan Longping’s 1975 hybrid rice, initially developed during the Mao period, significantly increased crop yields per acre. As a result, the longstanding tension between inadequate arable land and a large population in China was considerably alleviated, leading to the resolution of challenges related to food and clothing. Furthermore, this marked a successful shift away from the “socialist primitive accumulation” of capital in China, as it departed from the era of agricultural extraction known as the “scissors gap” after the economic crisis of the widening gap between industrial and agricultural prices triggered by the Soviet New Economic Policy in the 1920s.6
However, it is important not to overlook the detrimental implications of these reforms. The Household Responsibility System and export-oriented industrialization led to agriculture’s decoupling from industrial development. Additionally, the withdrawal of state support for the agricultural sector resulted in a rapid urban-rural divide and an eastern-western regional development imbalance. While coastal cities flourished, the rural economy deteriorated, leading to societal disintegration. Chinese agriculture modernization witnessed prolonged stagnation and even regression, leading to a crisis in the peasant economy after a brief resurgence. In 1984, despite bountiful harvests, China encountered challenges in the sale of grains produced by household farmers, marking the decline of food self-sufficiency, rural desolation, farmland abandonment, and a huge wave of rural-to-urban migration.
Following the economic reforms, the CPC’s understanding of the relationship between industry and agriculture underwent continuous changes, evident through adjustments in national policies. The Central Committee of the CPC issued a series, Central Documents No. 1 (zhongyang yihao wenjian), focusing on agriculture, rural areas, and farmers for five consecutive years from 1982 to 1986. During this period, as the fifteen-year land contracting program was implemented, the longstanding unified state purchases and state quotas (tonggou tongxiao) of grains and other major agricultural products, which had been in place for three decades, were abolished. This marked the end of the Mao-era practice of extracting surplus from agriculture to fuel industrialization and promote a heavy-industry oriented economic structure. At the time, the peasant’s motto was: “Give enough to the country, keep enough for the collective, and the rest is all our own.”
Another pivotal change in this era was China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, which involved significant concessions in agricultural trade and had far-reaching consequences that can still be seen today. The resulting trade dynamics ultimately led to the widespread bankruptcy of small-scale farmers, sparking severe social and ecological crises. The urban-rural divide exacerbated regional disparities between eastern and western provinces, and environmental and ecological challenges emerged. It was clear that the crises that China was facing could not be effectively addressed solely through Western developmental theories.
This is precisely why, in 2003, under the leadership of Hu Jintao, the CPC introduced the “Scientific Outlook on Development” titled “The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China’s Decision on Several Major Issues Concerning the Improvement of the Socialist Market Economic System.” This outlook emphasized the need for “coordinated urban-rural development, coordinated regional development, coordinated economic and social development, coordinated harmonious development between humanity and nature, and coordinated domestic development and external openness.” Furthermore, in 2007, the CPC officially incorporated the “Scientific Outlook on Development” into the party constitution.
In 2004, the “Three Rural Issues” plan—concerning agriculture, rural areas, and farmers—was the focus of China’s “No. 1 Central Policy Document,” which outlines the key tasks for the country. In fact, for twenty consecutive years, work on agriculture and rural areas has been the main policy priority for China. Each No. 1 Central Document, issued annually encompasses a wide range of specifics, including raising farmers’ incomes, strengthening rural infrastructure and water conservancy, and consistently increasing total investment in rural areas, among other measures.
In 2005, a significant milestone was achieved when the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress passed the document abolishing the Agricultural Tax Regulation, easing the economic burdens on farmers and dramatically improving the social welfare of rural residents. The end of the agricultural tax, which had endured for thousands of years, marked a pivotal point in China’s history, and bid farewell to this age-old financial burden for the country’s nine hundred million household farmers. However, these efforts have not fully reversed the crisis. Rural areas, in which China’s food self-sufficiency rate continues to decline, are often desolate, land is abandoned, and the tide of migrant workers is surging, necessitating that China identify the most suitable development path among various alternatives.
In 2017, the CPC’s Nineteenth National Congress reaffirmed the tasks of the New Era (beginning in 2012), focusing on addressing the prominent issues of “unbalanced and inadequate development.” It elevated the Rural Revitalization Strategy and the Regional Coordinated Development Strategy to national strategies. The nationwide efforts in “targeted poverty alleviation” in rural areas saw the successful eradication of extreme poverty in the country in 2022. However, this historic achievement was only a stepping stone to the next phase in rural development. In 2022, the concept of “Chinese-style modernization,” which aims to revitalize rural areas and bridge regional development disparities, was introduced by the CPC against the backdrop of increased international pressures, the simultaneous presence of development opportunities and risks, and a growing level of unpredictability. This path to modernization aims to establish a “dual circulation” development pattern led by the domestic economic cycle, with the international economic cycle playing a supplementary role. In May 2020, dual circulation had been announced by the Chinese government as a strategy to spur domestic demand and innovation and promote greater self-reliance in terms of technology and resources while remaining open to international trade and investment.
Whether China can successfully address the agricultural issues that have persisted since the 1980s and reverse the deterioration of agricultural production becomes key in the strategic goal of narrowing the urban-rural divide and achieving “common prosperity.” How China resolves the agrarian question today plays a key role in countering the containment efforts of the New Cold War initiated by the United States and protecting China’s national sovereignty. In this sense, Chinese-style modernization presents itself as a possible alternative developmental path to the Western capitalist model, especially important for Global South countries that are seeking to break free from the shackles of colonialism and imperialism.
China’s emphasis on internal circulation implies the need to reconstruct the reciprocal relationship between industry and agriculture and establish a favorable urban-rural mobility structure. The worker-peasant alliance faced significant challenges in the 1990s when the reform of state-owned enterprises led to the unemployment of millions of workers, while hundreds of millions of farmers flocked to cities seeking employment. Today, to restore a robust worker-peasant alliance, it is essential to rebuild the political, economic, and cultural foundations unique to rural areas.
The rural revolution led by Mao successfully embedded the CPC among the peasant majority through the “mass line” approach. This integrated the progressively disintegrating rural society, transforming the countryside into an inexhaustible source of revolutionary strength. Mao’s rural revolution accomplished the historical tasks of resisting imperialist aggression from abroad and consolidating national power within. After 1949, socialist China enshrined the worker-peasant alliance in its constitution and greatly accelerated industrialization by establishing new urban-rural relations. These relations compelled the absorption of agricultural surplus to support industrialization while providing feedback to agriculture, farmers, and rural areas through top-down state initiatives. For instance, movements like sending medical services to rural areas and deploying educated youth to the countryside aimed to narrow the “three major disparities” in socialist China—between manual and mental labor, industry and agriculture, and workers and peasants.
However, post-1980s economic reforms dramatically widened these disparities. Resources became concentrated rapidly in urban areas, intensifying the urban-rural divide and jeopardizing the viability of the worker-peasant alliance, which risked becoming mere rhetoric. In the 1980s, rural society gradually disintegrated, and the phenomenon of the state’s failure to reach rural areas resurfaced. During the Mao era, despite the existence of the “price scissors” and the irrational disparity between industrial and agricultural products, emotional and material ties between urban and rural areas persisted. Sun Liping termed this the “administratively led dual structure” under Mao.7 Today, a fracture between urban and rural areas has arisen due to market economics, referred to by Sun as the “market-led dual structure.” In his view, under market relations, the connection between Chinese urban and rural areas, agriculture and industry, has been severed, and this trend is likely to be irreversible. While the “administratively led dual structure” during Mao aimed to eliminate the three disparities, this objective has fallen aside within the “market-led dual structure” framework.
To address critical rural issues, it is imperative to reshape the urban-rural mutual alliance relationship in the process of urbanization. Since the 1980s, China’s rapid urbanization has been predicated on the public ownership of urban land and the collective ownership of rural land. First, it was local governments’ capitalization of public land that was a significant driver of urbanization, and that served as a primary funding source for urban public construction. Second, the Household Responsibility System did not abolish collective rural land ownership. Land distribution in villages is still adjusted based on per capita equality, which has provided a social safety net for rural residents. Migrant workers who become unemployed in cities can still return to the countryside and rely on their land for sustenance, thus avoiding the widespread slum issues commonly seen in some other developing countries in their process of urbanization. If land privatization were implemented, rural land would quickly fall under capital control outside villages, leaving migrant workers with no place to return and leading to rapid disintegration of rural society. Therefore, for China’s market economy to operate well, collective land ownership needs to be maintained, not abolished.
China’s collective rural land ownership warrants reevaluation for its market-oriented development contribution. Within this system, rural areas serve as a vast labor reservoir for the urbanization process, with labor flowing between urban and rural areas as needed. Moreover, the small-farmer economy sustains the largest population group—the farmers themselves—allowing China to avoid depending on the global food market to feed its 1.4 billion people. In China’s “socialist market economy,” collective rural land ownership stands as a key “socialist” element. Today’s challenge lies in whether the retaining of this socialist element can provide conditions for China’s agricultural modernization beyond the world capitalist market economy.
Rural and urban issues are interconnected. Major Chinese cities like Shanghai and Beijing have resident populations exceeding twenty million, surpassing many European countries’ total populations. In 2017, Beijing witnessed controversial eviction incidents involving “low-end people” (diduan renkou)—a very discriminatory term—sparking significant criticism. Following a fire in a low-income area, the Beijing municipal government conducted a special operation to remove safety hazards, and many low-income migrant workers were expelled from the city. Addressing safety issues in areas with large migrant populations cannot be achieved solely by micromanagement. Macro-level urban-rural relations coordination is necessary, or else urban problems will continue to erupt in different ways and prove difficult to resolve. The distinctiveness of China’s socialist path compared to other Global South countries lies in collective land ownership and the rural revitalization strategy built upon it.
China’s neoliberal proponents are eager to promote rural land privatization for two main reasons. First, land privatization facilitates rapid urban expansion and large-scale land capitalization. Second, it paves the way for capitalist agriculture. U.S.-style capitalist agriculture is the desired yet unrealized goal of the Chinese neoliberals who presuppose that privatization would concentrate rural land in the hands of a few large landowners, making rural residents either agricultural workers or migrants in urban centers. However, such neoliberal concepts would ultimately harm China’s agriculture and rural areas.
The Doha Development Round has demonstrated developed countries’ unwillingness to relinquish protectionist policies for their agriculture, including high subsidies, various non-tariff barriers, and market access thresholds. Even if China privatized its land, its agriculture would still struggle and go bankrupt in trying to compete with developed capitalist nations. Chinese capital’s purchase of rural land only motivation is urban expansion appreciation expectations, not agricultural production. Thus, in a developing country like China, land privatization would not benefit agricultural modernization.
The measures taken since the Eighteenth National Congress of the CPC, when Xi Jinping assumed leadership, have included attempts to re-establish the “mass line” approach and strengthen the worker-peasant alliance. This is highlighted by the targeted poverty alleviation program, which sent three million CPC cadre to live and work in the countryside, and mobilized thousands of state and private enterprises, students and professors, medical professionals, and other sectors of society to ensure that the remaining nearly one hundred million people exited extreme poverty.
To address the issue of the rural-urban dichotomy, China made efforts to eliminate the three major disparities dating back to the Mao era. In contemporary times, China responds to this challenge through the concept of “urban-rural integrated development” (chengxiang ronghe fazhan), seeking solutions that prevent urbanization from exacerbating the urban-rural gap and instead promote their convergence. Establishing a new type of urban-rural relationship forms the basis for finding these solutions, with the reorganization of rural areas playing a pivotal role in this process.
The primary concern of the contemporary collective rural economy lies in cultivating endogenous vitality within it. The CPC’s Targeted Poverty Alleviation and Rural Revitalization programs represent two distinct strategic approaches in this direction. The former involves infusing rural areas with resources akin to a blood transfusion, enabling rural residents to overcome poverty. Rural Revitalization seeks to nurture endogenous economic growth within rural areas, making them self-sustaining, or, in other words, capable of generating their own “blood.”
Food Security, Urban-Rural Relations, and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
China’s export-oriented economy has led to industrial overproduction, on the one hand, and insufficient agricultural production, on the other. In 2006, China introduced the concept of the “1.8 Billion mu Farmland Preservation Red Line,” signifying the implementation of a rigorous farmland protection system to ensure that the total arable land area in the country remains above 1.8 billion mu (120 million hectares). China still faces this historic predicament today, with less than 10 percent of the world’s arable land, but one-fifth of the world’s population to feed. Whether or not to maintain this “red line” has been contentious, with many Chinese liberals arguing that arable land should be made available for real estate and urbanization due to the expanding urban population. They believe the red line measure hinders industrialization, urbanization, and economic growth. Influenced by this thinking, China reduced its arable land by over ten million hectares during urbanization.8 Opposing views point out that the global annual grain trade volume is over four hundred million tons, while China’s annual grain demand exceeds six hundred million tons, indicating that China cannot simply rely on the global grain market to meet its food needs. The reason that China has been able to maintain low food prices despite high demand is due to the self-sufficiency of small-scale farmers and the existence of nonmarket institutions like the grain reserve system, which requires provinces to stockpile minimum quantities of strategic commodities, and the Provincial Governor Responsibility System for Food Security, created in 2015 to accurately assess the food security work of each province.
In many countries of the Global North and Global South, the grain supply relies on the capitalist global market, thereby ceding pricing power over global grain and oil to Wall Street. Following China’s accession to the WTO in 2001, the country effectively became a dumping ground for genetically modified agricultural products from the United States. A prime example is the transformation of the soybean market in China. Prior to joining the WTO, China was a net exporter of soybeans. However, in 2004, China faced a severe soybean shortage, with many crushing enterprises that produce soybean meal and oil shutting down, dealing a substantial blow to the domestic industry. Transnational agribusiness giants such as ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus exported genetically modified soybeans to China, dismantling the domestic supply chain. The influx of foreign capital caused China to lose control over soybean prices, making it heavily reliant on the world market for supply and rendering soybeans the most vulnerable component of China’s food security. Over the past decade, China’s self-sufficiency rate for soybeans has remained around 15 percent, with imports accounting for over 60 percent of global soybean exports.
In fact, China’s soybean predicament is not an isolated case. Since the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, developing countries have progressively opened their agricultural markets under various coercive measures by the United States. This has led to widespread bankruptcy and hunger among peasant populations in these countries. Meanwhile, export-oriented capitalist megafarms in developed nations have extensively exported food, reaping substantial profits. The capitalist shift in agriculture across the developing world has continually undermined the welfare of domestic populations.
Since the China-U.S. trade war began in 2019, Brazil has replaced the United States as China’s primary supplier of soybeans, which benefits the large agribusiness at the expense of peasant producers. China’s agricultural trade with Global South countries such as Brazil has sparked criticism from the Left, including João Pedro Stedile, the national leader of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST), who expressed confusion and dissatisfaction with China’s extensive soybean trade with Brazil. He argues that Brazil’s soybean producers are essentially large landowners who often reside in Miami. These large landowners monopolize land, public funding, and technical assistance for agro-export production. While these capitalist farms and agribusiness in Brazil profit enormously from trade with China, they fail to benefit the Brazilian people. In pursuing profits, vast tracts of arable land for growing food, including lands of Indigenous peoples, are converted to soybean cultivation, plunging the Brazilian people into hunger due to monocropping, in turn creating a need for importing food, despite the country’s abundant land for food production. In fact, during the years of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency, which was backed by agribusiness interests, thirty million Brazilians fell back into hunger in a country that is one of the largest agricultural producers in the world. These issues stem from an unjust land tenure system that excludes most small and landless farmers in developing countries from the modernized agricultural system. Consequently, large-scale urban slums and recurring peasant resistance movements have emerged in developing nations, such as MST and the 2020 farmers’ protests in India.
Since the turn of the century, global agribusiness has intensified its control over the world food supply chain, commanding 80 percent of the trade volume in grain. These corporations wield influence over the grain markets of major producing countries such as the United States, Brazil, and Argentina, as well as dominate global grain transportation and storage facilities. They have also extended their reach into various segments of China’s food market, posing a threat to the food sovereignty and food security of China.
China, since 2012, has been actively working to address the issue of multinational corporations controlling seed supplies. Xi has elevated seed security to a strategic priority closely linked to national security. Furthermore, Xi has emphasized soybeans in particular, expressing a desire to expedite additional biotechnology research projects related to soybean breeding.9 This push aims to establish China’s independent research capabilities and control over soybean seeds, a crucial agricultural product, thereby preventing other nations from manipulating China’s supply.
Chinese-style modernization can only be achieved through the comprehensive resolution of agricultural, rural, and farmer-related issues. The current Chinese leadership seems to have realized this. In 2022, Xi’s compilation of writings, titled “On ‘Three Rural’ Work,” was published. This collection includes sixty-one articles and speeches he has authored since the Eighteenth National Congress. Some writings explicitly portray the current period as a “historical juncture for addressing the relationship between industry and agriculture, as well as rural and urban areas.” The 2018 speech, “Effectively Implementing the Rural Revitalization Strategy,” provides a comprehensive discussion on these matters. Below are some excerpts from the text:
During the process of modernization, how to handle the relationship between industry and agriculture, as well as the relationship between urban and rural areas, to a certain extent determines the success or failure of modernization. As a socialist country led by the CPC, our nation should possess the capability and conditions to manage the relationship between industry and agriculture, as well as the relationship between urban and rural areas, in order to smoothly advance the process of socialist modernization in our country.
Since the 18th National Congress of the CPC, we have been determined to adjust the relationship between industry and agriculture, as well as urban and rural areas. We have taken a series of measures to promote the principle of “industry supporting agriculture and cities supporting the countryside.” The 19th National Congress of the Party introduced the implementation of the rural revitalization strategy precisely to comprehensively grasp and address the relationship between industry and agriculture, as well as urban and rural areas, from a global and strategic perspective.
The coexistence of prosperous cities alongside struggling rural areas contradicts the governing purpose of our Party and fails to align with the essential requirements of socialism. Such a form of modernization is destined to fall short of success. Forty years ago, we embarked on the path of reform and opening up through rural reforms. Today, after four decades, we should revitalize the countryside, initiating a new phase of integrated urban-rural development and modernization.10
Reshaping the urban-rural relationship and the relationship between industry and agriculture necessitates deep reflection on and adjustment of the development patterns since the 1980s. This represents a new challenge for socialist China.
Collective land ownership in rural China differs from the land tenure systems in socialist countries like the Soviet Union, which may have played a crucial role in determining the success of Chinese-style modernization. The nationalization of urban land and the collectivization of rural land form the foundation of the Chinese worker-peasant alliance. When viewed through a Marxist lens, the urban-rural dichotomy is considered an inevitable outcome of capitalist development and a challenge commonly faced by Global South countries during their developmental processes.
China’s collective land ownership through the Household Responsibility System is essentially rural communal land ownership. However, the current collective land ownership system could potentially be undermined due to the solidification of land contract management rights. These rights enable community members to use and profit from the land through contracts while limiting its use to agricultural production. Community members can transfer management rights, enabling large-scale agricultural operations and addressing the issue of idle land. However, a potential issue that arises is that the village collective no longer holds priority in handling land, leading to an inability of internal capital to effectively manage investment and control over the land. In this scenario, collective ownership would exist only on paper.
China’s current land system is undergoing significant transformations, with a central issue being whether collective land ownership in rural areas can be sustained and whether it is necessary to persist with this model. If collective land ownership becomes difficult to maintain, it could lead to the introduction of a significant number of absentee landowners. This implies the need to establish an entirely new rural entity that not only plays a vital role politically, but also assumes a critical economic function to curb external capital’s encroachment on rural areas.
There is a prevailing consensus that the household economy must undergo a process of reorganization, and the debate centers on the methodology for this restructuring. First, there is a neoliberal solution that advocates for the transfer of land to leading enterprises or urban capital for large-scale agricultural operations in a market-oriented manner, aiming to achieve agricultural modernization. While this perspective enjoys prominence among mainstream economists, it also faces criticism. Once operational rights for the land are transferred, reclaiming them becomes exceedingly challenging. In the end, village members may find themselves transformed into landless individuals overnight, forfeiting both their land and their jobs. The potential scale of this issue could present significant political challenges to the legitimacy and stability of the CPC’s rule. This constitutes one of the politically sensitive consequences that the Chinese socialist system may find itself ill-equipped to withstand.
Second, there is a socialist solution, which entails a return to the model of collective ownership as a comprehensive solution to a range of issues. In this approach, grassroots party organizations will assume a leadership role, and collective land ownership will serve as the cornerstone for rural reorganization. The village collective will serve as the implementing body for economies of scale, superseding individual farmers in this role. Operational rights will be confined within the village and allocated through bidding processes conducted by the village collective. This approach does not exclude the market economy, but rather designates the village collective as the primary participant in the market economy. By bolstering the negotiation capabilities of the village collective, this model seeks to address agricultural challenges and unite small households to collectively confront market obstacles. The ultimate objective is to achieve an organic integration of economic efficiency and social equity, thereby offering a promising socialist path for the development of rural China. In this process of forging a new synergy between grassroots party organizations and rural development in China, it is essential to combine top-down institutional support with bottom-up social practices to provide effective solutions. This approach hinges on the grassroots organizations of the CPC to facilitate the reorganization of rural areas. China’s socialist system furnishes rural areas with organizational resources that extend beyond the typical scope of the market economy. Rural residents are relieved from shouldering the associated organizational costs, and the CPC’s grassroots organizations can assist them in harmonizing endogenous development with exogenous development.
Such transformations may attract criticism as a regression to a “ultraleftist line,” because this transformation requires a strong and effective CPC party leadership. Indeed, my concept of a “neo-collective rural China” as an emerging collective development model continues to evolve through diverse social practices across various regions in China. Each case is deeply rooted in local political, economic, and cultural contexts, bringing forth unique and valuable insights. These practical examples have amassed significant experiences that warrant systematic documentation and broader dissemination. What unifies these diverse cases is their ability to harness the strengths of the collective economy to attract voluntary participation from rural residents, thereby rediscovering pathways for the development of a socialist market economy in which rural inhabitants effectively leverage their collective power to confront market risks, bolstering their competitiveness. Simultaneously, they help counteract rural social fragmentation and mitigate the potential deterioration of urban-rural relations. Through these efforts, the noble goal of achieving common prosperity can genuinely come to fruition. In fact, there are different experiments going on all over China to find suitable developmental approaches for a socialist rural China.
How can urbanization be a driver of urban-rural integrated development rather than exacerbating urban-rural disparities? How can a mutually beneficial urban-rural relationship be cultivated? Today, China is actively promoting a dual circulation development pattern, which takes the domestic market as the mainstay while letting domestic and foreign markets reinforce each other. What new urban-rural dynamics will this novel development model bring about? As intellectuals, we must exercise patience in awaiting answers to these questions or engage directly in practical efforts to address them.
Conclusion: From A Global South Perspective
The trials, tribulations, and vicissitudes experienced during the journey of Chinese-style modernization are, in fact, a microcosm of the various crises in the process of modernization in the Global South. China’s ascent serves as an exemplary case of the Global South’s emergence, breaking through the unequal global order that had long been sealed and suppressed. China’s development trajectory is intricately intertwined with the history of the twentieth-century Chinese and Russian Revolutions, Leninism, and the fate of the Soviet Union. This stands as an essential historical fact, and the challenge lies in how to interpret this history. To accomplish this, it becomes imperative to address the critiques, particularly from Western Marxism, concerning “populism” within the Chinese Revolution. Concurrently, it necessitates a response to the criticisms and denials of the Chinese and Russian Revolutions originating from right-wing liberalism. These critiques and denials, echoing the “end of history” narrative in the post-Cold War era, attempt to pave the way for a New Cold War by challenging the legitimacy of Leninism and the Chinese and Russian Revolutions. Western Marxism and right-wing liberalism, though fundamentally opposing political standpoints, find common ground in their discussion of agrarian issues within the Chinese and Russian Revolutions. They resurrect clichés about “Oriental Despotism” and the “Asiatic mode of production,” collectively striving to obscure the significance of Chinese-style modernization as an exploration of a socialist path in world history.
This development represents the aspirations of the Global South to break free from worldwide Western hegemony. It also echoes the expectations that Samir Amin held for China in his later years. Amin saw an independent and socialist-oriented “delinking” path as the hope for the Global South’s development. He called for the formation of a new united front to address and resist capitalism’s increasingly severe systemic crisis. Amin believed a united and powerful China should take a leading role in tackling this global systemic crisis, which is crucial for world development. In a 2015 interview in Beijing, Amin again elaborated on the “delinking” concept:
In my view, “delinking” should be considered a strategic principle encompassing several aspects. Firstly, it greatly emphasizes sovereign nations’ development, placing them in a priority position. Secondly, it advocates openness, urging countries to engage the outside world and participate in global competition. It can be seen as sovereign nations utilizing globalization to meet their development needs, seizing developmental opportunities, and gradually achieving progressive social transformation. Thus, when discussing “delinking,” we are harnessing globalization. On the one hand, monopoly capitalism utilizes globalization to accumulate capital and expand dominance. On the other hand, we can also utilize globalization to prioritize meeting national development needs. We should place utmost importance on this growth-oriented internal transformation, which involves continuous, ongoing changes.11
Amin’s viewpoints, in which sovereign nations utilize globalization and successfully “delink” through internal transformation, resonate closely with China’s development path. As early as 1997, in his book Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, Amin expressed hope for China and foresaw changes in Sino-U.S. relations. He first described how the U.S.-led capitalist globalization process led to a polarized world, leaving globalization in an extremely fragile and precarious state. Simultaneously, right-wing neoliberal politics took power (often with the support of the putative left) within the United States and the European Union, blocking all hope of a “humanitarian” globalization. Therefore, much like V. I. Lenin before and after the First World War, Amin shifted his focus to Asia and prophesied, “It goes almost without saying that the future development of China threatens all global equilibria. And that is why the United States will feel threatened by her development. In my opinion, the United States and China will be the major antagonists in any future global conflict.”12
In a 2018 interview, Amin repeatedly cautioned China that even if it seeks to become a capitalist country, the triad of major capitalist powers—the United States, Japan, and Europe—would not accept or allow China’s rise. The aspiration to surpass developed capitalist countries within the capitalist system is naïve. If China were to wholeheartedly embrace the system, ideology, and globalization of capitalism, and even willingly become a part of it, then capitalist powers under U.S. leadership, could swiftly move to dismantle China. If this happens, China would again become a subordinate nation providing raw materials to the imperialist camp.13 In fact, Amin’s warning serves as both a cautionary tale for China’s future and a description of the experiences of the now-defunct Soviet Union.
Amin’s other fundamental viewpoint is that “the Global South must achieve political solidarity, with China playing the most central role in seeking this solidarity. We must not allow a lack of effective communication to harm our common interests in this process.” In this regard, the current urgent task is promoting solidarity and communication among the countries of the Global South, aiming to establish the “New International Economic Order” and “New World Information and Communication Order.” These new international orders are prerequisites for socialist development, worldwide communication, and genuine economic advance. To resist the alliance between the Global South’s comprador bourgeoisie and the Global North’s imperialism, we must seek international consensus akin to the twentieth century’s Non-Aligned Movement and socialist movements. Furthermore, we must reevaluate, from a theoretical perspective, all the successes and failures occurring during the Soviet Union and China’s industrialization processes over the past century.
While socialism originated in Europe, “Chinese-style modernization” represents its successful implementation in China. It explores how to break free from the grip of capitalist globalization and seeks a new path for human development. “Chinese-style modernization” does not solely belong to China; it holds profound implications for global peace and development. This exploration remains far from complete and encompasses both challenges and crises, along with a glimmer of hope.
Notes
- ↩ Joseph Stalin, Sidalin Quanji (Collected Works), vol.12 (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1955), 112–20.
- ↩ Lu Nanquan, Jiang Changbin, Xu Kui, and Li Jingjie, Sulian Xingwang Shilun (Theoretical Analyses on Rise and Fall of Soviet Union) (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 2002), 406–9; Sun Zhenyuan, Sulian Sige Shiqi de Nongye Tizhi Gaige (Four Periods of Agricultural System Reform in the Soviet Union) (Shenyang: Liaoning People’s Publishing House, 1985), 119.
- ↩ Lu, Jiang, Xu, and Li, Sulian Xingwang Shilun, 562–63.
- ↩ Lyle P. Schertz et al., Meiguo Nongye de Youyici Geming (Another Revolution in US Farming?), trans. Wang Qimo (Beijing: Agriculture Press, 1984), 35.
- ↩ Lu, Jiang, Xu, and Li, Sulian Xingwang Shilun, 634–37.
- ↩ Chen Jinhua, Guoshi Yishu (Memoirs of National Affairs) (Beijing: History of Chinese Communist Party Publishing House, 2005), 1–32; Wang Shaoguang et al., “China in the 1970s,” Open Times, no.1 (2013): 70–73.
- ↩ Sun Liping, “Duanlie: Zhongguo Shehui de Xinbianhua (Rupture: The Urban-Rural Divide in Changing Chinese Society),” Southern Weekly, May 16, 2002, A11.
- ↩ Xi Jinping, Lun “Sannong” Gongzuo (Xi Jinping’s Discourse on “Three Rural” Work) (Beijing: Central Party Literature Press, 2022), 332.
- ↩ Xi, Lun “Sannong” Gongzuo, 8–10.
- ↩ Xi, Lun “Sannong” Gongzuo, 247–46.
- ↩ Samir Amin interviewed by Zhang Xiaomeng, “The Systemic Crisis of Capitalism and the Way Forward: An Interview with Egyptian Economist Professor Samir Amin,” Studies on Marxist Theory 2, no.1 (2016): 8.
- ↩ Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, trans. Ding Kaijie (Beijing: China Renmin University Press, 2005), 8–9.
- ↩ Amin and Zhang, “The Systemic Crisis of Capitalism and the Way Forward,” 18.
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