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More Than "Peasants Without Land": Individualisation and Identity Formation of Landless Peasants in the Process of China's State-Led Rural Urbanisation
[journal article]
Abstract In the course of state-led rural urbanisation over the past few decades, millions of Chinese peasants have been expropriated and relocated. After establishing a definition of these "landless peasants" as a heterogeneous social group connected mainly by the fact that its members had to give up their ... view more
In the course of state-led rural urbanisation over the past few decades, millions of Chinese peasants have been expropriated and relocated. After establishing a definition of these "landless peasants" as a heterogeneous social group connected mainly by the fact that its members had to give up their land-use rights, this article sets out to examine subsequent processes of identity formation - a topic that has been largely neglected in existing research. Drawing on Beck's individualisation thesis, I suggest that structural and institutional changes in the process of rural modernisation have initiated a further thrust of individualisation in people's lives which manifests not only in the objective domain of life situations but also in the subjective domain of identity. This hypothesis is substantiated through an ethnographic case study based on seven months of fieldwork (2016–2018) in Huaming Model Town in the Dongli District of Tianjin. As a first step towards conceptualising what landless peasants are becoming, I will propose to start focusing on recombinant identities and class differentiations evolving among the people.... view less
Classification
Area Development Planning, Regional Research
Population Studies, Sociology of Population
Free Keywords
Landless peasants; compressed modernisation; individualisation; recombinant identities
Document language
English
Publication Year
2020
Page/Pages
p. 332-356
Journal
Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 49 (2020) 3
ISSN
1868-4874
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed
Licence
Creative Commons - Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0