From Commune to Capitalism: How China’s Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty
154 pp, $25 pbk, ISBN 978-1-58367-698-1
By Zhun Xu
Reviewed by Chris Meulbroek
“What is remarkable about China’s agrarian reforms is that, despite their pivotal role in ending socialist production, some on the left have offered quite positive evaluations. No less a critical scholar than Giovanni Arrighi, for instance, claimed that China’s agricultural reform and the subsequent formation of township and village enterprises constituted a paradigmatic instance of ‘accumulation without dispossession’, and that this approach harbors the seeds for China’s other-than-capitalist future. ¶ Zhun Xu is a skeptic of these accounts….”
Read the review at Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
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