Land Use in China: The Impact of the Economic Revolution

By Arjun Subrahmanyan

In Chinese history, the peasantry's role as agricultural providers for a vast country and growing population has always been one of the foundations on which any social or political movement has had to depend. In the early years of the PRC, the communist party fulfilled its promise to rebuild rural economies on the basis of equitable distributions of land and alleviation of the crushing tax and rent burdens that left most of rural China in poverty. Enfranchising rural China was a key platform of the party's vision for society and the major outcome of the revolution.

Over the past 20 years, China has been experiencing another revolution. The new revolution is in the rural economy, the growth of capitalism and the transformation of urban space. All of the dramatic social and economic changes that have evolved in the past 20 years, and which continue taking the country into unexplored territory, are founded on transformations brought to bear on the use of China's scarcest commodity, arable land, and its use by China's 800+ million peasants.