China's New Land Reform and Two Modes of Rural Transformations

Monday, May 20, 2019
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Haines Hall 279
 

Lecture by Shaohua Zhan, Nanyang Technological University

In November 2013, the Chinese government declared its intention to reform the rural land system and turn villagers’ lands（both farmland and construction land）into marketable assets. The decision is dubbed the “new land reform,” which has led to a flurry of measures to modify rural land institutions so as to facilitate land transfers. However, fierce debates on how far the government should push villagers to transfer land rights have followed, and the recent trend again shows ambiguities and uncertainties. This talk will attempt to clear some confusions around China’s land issues by theorizing two modes of rural transformations：land-intensive agrarian capitalism and labour-intensive industrious revolution. As a contrast to agrarian capitalism, the latter originated from the East Asian context and is characterized by the absorption of large populations into the rural economy. The interactions and contradictions between the two modes have shaped the land system in the past 40 years, but the outcome of the contention does not depend only on rural interest groups, but more importantly, on the prospect of urban expansion as well as the actions of local governments and urban investors. The economic slowdown in recent years has heightened the contradictions and motivated the central government to develop the rural areas, which is against the interests of local governments and large urban capital.

Shaohua Zhan received his doctoral degree in sociology from Johns Hopkins University and is currently assistant professor of sociology at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He was a research fellow of the Center for a Livable Future, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health（2011-2012）and a Henry Luce/ACLS postdoctoral fellow in China Studies（2014-2015）. He studies land politics, food security, migration, and economic development. His works have appeared in The Journal of Peasant Studies, World Development, Journal of Rural Studies, Journal of Agrarian Change, Studies in Comparative International Development, Geoforum, Globalizations, The China Journal, Modern China, and so on. He is the author of The Land Question in China：Agrarian Capitalism, Industrious Revolution, and East Asian Development （Routledge, 2019）, which examines the development dynamics of industrious revolution and agrarian capitalism in rural China.

Sponsored by the Center for Chinese Studies, Asia Pacific Center and Sociology department

Tiananmen Protest 30 Years On

Thursday, May 23, 2019

2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Charles E. Young Research Library Presentation Room（11348）

Film Screening and panel discussion

In spring 1989, millions of Chinese citizens took on to street across the country in a months long pro-democracy movement, the center of which was uBeijing's Tiananmen Square. Military crackdown on June 3-4 brought the peaceful demonstration to a bloody end, killing hundreds, if not thousands, ordinary citizens. A few months later, the Berlin Wall fell. World history turned to a new page. What happened in Beijing that year? What is its historical significance, 30 years on? This event brings audience a chronological-based documentary, edited out of footages from 1989, followed by panel discussion with Tiananmen survivors and scholars to explore the many questions the Tiananmen protests and the Beijing massacre have left unanswered in our recent history. 

Screening：Unofficial Record：Tiananmen 1989
Director：LIU Shixian 
Length：60 min
Warning：Scenes of bloodshed violence at beginning and ending parts. 

Mr. LIU Shixian, a veteran activist from the Democracy Wall（1979）in Beijing, taught himself footage editing in his retirement and combed through huge amount of archive footages stored by a Hong Kong pro-democracy organization, spending years on the project. The result is this chronological documentary of the 1989 people's revolt in Beijing. This is for academic research and exchange only. No commercial release is allowed; no social media reposting is permitted. 

Panelists: 

Ms. CHENG Zhen, a college student in 1989, Ms. Cheng became a leader of the hunger-striking group occupying Tiananmen Square in mid May. She appears in the students dialogue with then Premier, Li Peng, in the Great Hall of People; and she was among the last group of students leaving the square in early June 4th. Her image in both occasions appears in today's documentary. She now resides in east Los Angeles. 

Mr. Terril Yue Jones spent 30+ years as a foreign and business correspondent and editor for Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, Forbes magazine and The Associated Press. His assignments included 18 years overseas in Beijing, Paris and Tokyo covering politics, business, bilateral and regional relations, and all manner of domestic issues. He has had reporting assignments in South Korea, Taiwan, north Africa（Algeria, Morocco, Western Sahara）, west Africa（Ivory Coast, Liberia）and around western Europe. 
He was AP's photo journalist in Beijing in 1989. He is now Visiting Lecturer on government at Claremont-McKenna College. 

WANG Chaohua was one of the 21 Most-wanted students by the Chinese government after the Beijing massacre in June 1989. She subsequently earned her Ph.D. from UCLA, majoring in modern Chinese literature and culture. She has been Adjunct Assistant Professor in Dept ALC at UCLA and an independent scholar, writing and publishing in both English and Chinese on modern China's politics, intellectual history and literature. 

Sponsored by the Center for Chinese Studies