Guest Editor's Words

• Author: Shouying Liu
• Date: 01 January 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/cwe.12225
• Published date: 01 January 2018

©2018 Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

China & World Economy / 1–3, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2018

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*Shouying Liu, Professor, School of Economics, Renmin University of China, China. Email: liusy18@126.com.

Guest Editor’s Words

Shouying Liu*

It is an incontrovertible fact that over the past 40 years there has been a tremendous

change in China’s economy. Various hot words, such as New Era, Great Rejuvenation,

Economic Miracle, Rise of China and Great Transition, have been used to depict this

phenomenon. From our point of view, the recent transformation of China’s economy

is revolutionary by nature. An important foundation of this conclusion is China’s

transformation from an agrestic phase to an urban–rural phase.

According to Xiaotong Fei’ famous work From the Soil: The Foundations of

Chinese Society, the typical characteristics of agrestic China all lie in the rural land.

Peasants used to consider land as their means of livelihood, agriculture as a source of

business and village as a lifetime shelter. Therefore, Chinese peasants’ lives are deeply

rooted in the soil and they are fettered by the land, resulting in a sedentary life-style.

The growth of agricultural output mainly relied on increasing land yields with low labor

productivity.

China’s transition from an agricultural country to an industrial country started

with the Communist Party of China gaining leadership. However, the elimination of

agrestic characteristics of China resulted in hardship. Industrialization promoted the

transformation of China’s economic structure, but the agricultural collectivization tied

peasants more rmly to the land. During the rural industrialization in China after the

mid-1980s, peasants participated in the process of industrialization. However, they

only worked in local industries. Some peasants stopped farming but did not leave their

native land. From the 1990s, the acceleration of export-oriented industrialization in

China resulted in Chinese peasants being involved in the ow of trans-regional labor.

Hundreds of millions of peasants have left their villages to extricate themselves from the

agrestic environment described by Fei. However, due to the urban–rural dual system and

the economic and social behaviors of the “rst generation of peasants,” the rst ock

of peasants who had rushed out of their villages nally returned after making a living

in urban areas for a decade or two. The shift of agrestic China started with the so-called

second generation of rural migrants after the 1980s. These “post-80s” peasants left rural

areas without going back to their home village. Consequently, the rural order supported