How to view the current debate on China's agricultural path
The 2015 issue No. 5 of the journal Open Times ran a special feature on "China's Agricultural Development Path." Of the seven articles under this feature (including Yan Hairong's "Introduction to the Special Feature on 'China's Agricultural Development Path'"), two are restatements of views long since formed by the so-called "small peasant economy school," He Xuefeng and Huang Zongzhi (the small peasant economy school is a label He Xuefeng applies to his own views, whereas Huang Zongzhi has not positioned himself in this way. Grouping Huang Zongzhi under the "small peasant economy school" here is merely for convenience of exposition), while the remaining five are critiques of the views of the "small peasant economy school." The core of the debate between the two sides is whether the small peasant economy is functionally and axiologically rational, and the current degree of capitalization of Chinese agriculture. A similar debate in fact appeared in Europe as early as the end of the 19th century and continued into the second half of the 20th century.
I. The history of the debate over whether family farms or capitalist wage-labor farms are superior
At the end of the 19th century, within the German Social Democratic Party the view was put forward that Marx's theory did not apply to the agricultural sphere, holding that the small peasant economy has its own distinct economic laws and that the phenomenon of large production displacing small production does not exist. Kautsky refuted this view, ultimately producing the book The Agrarian Question. At the same time, in Russia the debate between Lenin and Chayanov was taking place; the latter denied the tendency of family farms to inevitably be replaced by capitalist wage-labor farms in the countryside, while Lenin offered a Marxist response. Lenin's views are concentrated in his book The Development of Capitalism in Russia. Yet the debate did not end there; Chayanov's views spread widely and were even accepted by many Marxists. And within the camp affirming family farms, there also emerged the so-called substantivist school (mainly inheriting Chayanov's views, represented by Karl Polanyi, author of The Great Transformation), the rational peasant school (Schultz), and many other mutually divergent viewpoints. In the 1970s, around the rise of modern capitalism there appeared the so-called "Brenner Debate," whose core was still the question of whether family farms (the concepts of family farm and small peasant economy cannot be equated; see below for details) or capitalist wage-labor farms are superior.
The protracted nature of the debate itself is enough to show the complexity of this issue. Judging from statistical data alone, many countries in history have experienced both periods in which capitalist wage-labor farms displaced the small peasant economy and periods in which small-scale land management revived. And as far as the current global situation is concerned, family management is the mainstream. In fact, Kautsky and Lenin in the original debate also largely acknowledged that in the agricultural sphere the tendency of large production to displace small production is not as rapid and fierce as in the industrial sphere.
II. Clarification of several concepts
To understand the history of the debate on this issue, it is necessary to clarify certain concepts, mainly the relationship among the small peasant economy, the family farm, and the capitalist wage-labor farm. First, the small peasant economy is necessarily family-managed, but family management is not necessarily a small peasant economy. The scale a family can manage is highly correlated with production technology and the human-land relationship. In 1970, the average area cultivated per male laborer in the United States was 165 hectares, in England 34 hectares, and in Denmark 16 hectares; whereas at the same time Japan and India had only 2 hectares, and China only 0.7 hectares. American family farming is highly capital-intensive and industrialized family farming, by no means a small peasant economy, but rather closer to capitalist management aimed at pursuing profit. In countries such as Europe and the United States, family farms (or cooperatives) in fact compete fiercely with one another, and the result of this competition is a dwindling number of farms and a continuously expanding scale of operation. Second, the fact that American family farms are closer to capitalist management itself also shows that the capitalist agricultural economy does not necessarily take the form of large-scale wage labor, and that capitalist agriculture is not equal to the capitalist wage-labor farm. One of Yan Hairong's criticisms of the "small peasant economy school" is profound: she says the capitalist agricultural economy should be viewed as a system, and that even a small peasant economy like China's, with an average of 10 mu per household, is in fact to a large extent subordinate to commercial capital and exploited by middlemen.
III. How to understand China's "small peasant economy school"
What Huang Zongzhi advocates is the path he calls the "small but refined" historical experience of East Asian modernization, and the typical example of the historical experience of East Asian modernization is the cooperative path of "state leadership + peasant autonomy" adopted by Japan after World War II. Huang Zongzhi basically inherits Chayanov's theory, holding that because the small peasant economy can fully utilize the auxiliary labor force within the family, it is superior in production efficiency (mainly referring to output per unit of land and returns) to large-scale farms using wage labor. On the basis of this theory and a series of empirical analyses, he advocates that China's small peasant economy should achieve vertical integration of production, supply, and marketing through cooperatives, so as to connect with the market, and opposes horizontal expansion of the scale of land management and capitalist-style operation.
He Xuefeng advocates a model of "half-work half-farming based on the intergenerational division of labor." He does not emphasize the managerial advantages of the small peasant economy much; rather, he defends the rationality of the small peasant economy more from the perspective of being conducive to social stability. He Xuefeng fully acknowledges that against the backdrop of urbanization, the decline of rural areas is inevitable. He does not regard maintaining the small peasant economy as a means of raising peasant incomes or even promoting rural prosperity; what he wants to preserve is merely a baseline, ensuring that China has a relatively stable social structure in the course of urbanization and industrial upgrading.
However, it should be known that neither He Xuefeng nor Huang Zongzhi holds views that are currently mainstream, nor can they dominate China's agricultural policy. They are not unaware of the reality that capitalist agriculture has already developed greatly in China. In their articles, both devote considerable space to criticizing past and even current agricultural policies, pointing out that these policies in fact favor capital and large rural households and are unfavorable to small peasants. For example, on the issue of resolving the fragmentation of rural land, He Xuefeng advocates readjusting rural land contracting relations based on the property rights form of collective ownership of land, but the current policy is to promote land rights confirmation, solidify land contracting relations, and achieve the concentration of land toward so-called new-type operating entities through land transfer. In Huang Zongzhi's article, there is likewise a great deal of analysis of so-called "fake" cooperatives.
On the issue of agricultural modernization, He Xuefeng once pointed out that there are mainly three schools of thought. One is the free market school, which advocates capital going to the countryside and the privatization of land under various names; the second is the mainstream policy school, which advocates restricting capital going to the countryside and promoting moderate-scale operation based mainly on family farms and large households; the third is the "small peasant economy school." The "small peasant economy school" does not dominate current agricultural policy. As He Xuefeng himself says, the "small peasant economy school" currently exists only as a balancing force against the free market school, hoping to weaken to a certain extent the impact of the free market school on the mainstream policy school.
In dealing with China's small peasant economy school, we must avoid two extreme tendencies. We must neither blindly support the small peasant economy and retreat to a conservative standpoint, nor understand classical theory dogmatically without making a concrete analysis of concrete situations.
When the debate over the land question arose within the Social Democratic Party at that time, Kautsky correctly pointed out the opportunist stance of the Vollmar faction and did important theoretical work in The Agrarian Question. But on the other hand, he denied the necessity at that time of putting forward a concrete program on the peasant and land question, so that the German Social Democratic Party was almost inactive on this issue. Not long afterward, Kautsky moved to a revisionist standpoint. This period of history is worth pondering!